Holiday Classes

2008 summer school outing to Greenwich Royal Observatory

There is a limit to what can be achieved in two or three hours, once a week. We therefore also run holiday schools. Mornings are given over to English language, literature and comprehension and arithmetic. Afternoons are taken up with a programme of cultural activities.

Our first holiday school took place over two weeks in summer 2005 under the direction of Irina Tyk, the author of the Butterfly Book. Afternoon visits included the British Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Tower of London, and London Zoo. The reading age of the children increased by an average of ten months.

In 2006 two summer schools were held, one in King's Cross and one in Whitechapel, teaching English and maths. The afternoon outings were based around the theme of the development of parliamentary democracy, and involved visits to the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace and the Banqueting House, Whitehall. The reading age of the children increased by an average of eleven months.

In 2007 the reading age of the children at the summer school increased by an average of one year and nine months! Outing included visits to the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood, Hackney City Farm, and the National Science Museum. The older children studied The Merchant of Venice in their English lessons and watched a performance at the Globe Theatre. The students gave a wonderful presentation of a scene from the play at the summer school prize-giving ceremony.

Left: Birmingham summer school outing to Blakesely Hall

Our fourth annual summer school took place from 4th to 15th August 2008.  52 children attended the morning classes at Gatehouse School . We arranged for coaches to pick up the children from various locations across London , with collection points at Hammersmith, Camberwell, Kilburn and King’s Cross. Bringing the children from different areas together allowed us to make the most of the facilities at Gatehouse School and enabled all the children to benefit from working with our most experienced and effective teachers.

During the first week we had an outing to Greenwich Observatory. The day started with a fascinating planetarium show. One six-year-old was so over-whelmed by the show that when we came out he immediately burst into tears and said he’d never seen anything so amazing! We looked around the astronomy galleries and had a questions and answer session with leading scientists. In the second week we visited the Tower of London. Very few of the children had even seen the outside of the Tower before, despite living within a few miles of it. The children were especially captivated by the graffiti of condemned prisoners in the White Tower and being able to get so close to the Crown Jewels.

We also held a one-week summer school in Birmingham specifically for the children who needed to work on phonics. The 16 children demonstrated a marked improvement by the final day of classes. They wrote and presented a summary of Jill Tomlinson’s The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark to their parents at the prize-giving assembly. One of the parents was quite emotional after seeing her daughter read and told us she couldn’t believe what an amazing improvement she had made. We took the children on outings to Blakesley Hall, a sixteenth century house, and a children’s farm in Warwickshire.