QE’s newest pupils attended a special afternoon as part of the School’s programme aimed at helping boys adjust to life at the School; all of Year 7 took part in the House competition activities.
The afternoon was part of QE’s transition programme, which has been established to enable boys to adjust to secondary school and QE’s House system, as well as to encourage bonding and friendships. It is spearheaded overall by Michael Taylor, who is Assistant Head with Responsibility for Extra-Curricular Activities & Transition and also Head of Year 7.
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Dr Taylor said that the objective of the programme is to ensure that QE handles the transition to secondary school as effectively as possible, so that all incoming pupils can start to ‘feel at home’ as soon as possible but are also appropriately challenged.
The boys were first organised into their House groups: Broughton; Harrisons’, Leicester, Pearce, Stapylton and Underne.
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They then took part in three competitive tasks:
- A word search;
- An anagram challenge similar to that on the Countdown TV show in which they had to find as many words as they could within a jumble of letters;
- A construction task involving drinking straws and sticky tape, to find out which team could build the highest free-standing structure in 20 minutes.
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The overall winners of the afternoon were Broughton House; they successfully assembled a tower that was nearly 6ft tall.
Extra-curricular Enrichment Tutor Matthew Dunston led the afternoon, while Dr Taylor and other Year 7 form tutors were in attendance. Mr Dunston said: “The boys really seemed to enjoy the afternoon, and you could see their House loyalty starting to develop as they tried their hardest to gain points for their Houses.