May 2014

May 2014
May 2014 Children throughout St John’s have raised a tremendous £5,733.02 for local charity, Blue Smile since the Easter holidays and the total is still rising. Blue Smile is a Cambridgeshire children’s charity that provides counselling and therapy for pupils in schools between the ages of 3 and 13 during a critical window of opportunity for change. The donation was raised by the ‘Grow Your Money’ initiative. The project was started at St John’s last year by Deputy Head, Mrs Ruth O’Sullivan, and was designed to encourage each child in Years 5 to 8 to discover and develop their
May 2014
To live a creative life we must lose our fear of being wrong (Joseph Chilton Pearce) Using the above quote as inspiration, architects Mr Mariano Cavaleri and Mrs Abigail Shaw, both current St John’s parents, worked with Form 3 to design, build and construct a ‘city’ to scale, creating their own individual buildings and public spaces.  Having studied several famous architectural styles and methods of construction, the children thought about the function, form, context and structure of their building. They deliberated questions such as, ‘What are the surrounding buildings like?’, ‘How
May 2014
The Welding Institute, based in Cambridge, visited St John’s as part of Form 3’s ‘Wonder Afternoon’. The children discovered that welding with chocolate is an innovative and fun way of demonstrating welding and engineering principles. Bridges are made of all kinds of materials; stone, steel, concrete, wood and, in this workshop, chocolate! Each group had the challenge to see if they could engineer a chocolate bridge strong enough to withstand increasing amounts of weights. A simple bridge was made using one plank that spanned the distance to be crossed. The children worked