Year 6 pupils spend the morning at Senior School

The Year 6 girls had a transition day on Wednesday 27 September. The transition and careers day occurs in Year 6 to start the students thought processes on where they might like to guide their future.

The girls arrived at the Senior School library in the morning where they were greeted the Careers Department. Initially, students were asked what they aspire to do when they grew up. Aspirations included astronauts, doctors, vets, others wanted to become dancers, chefs or professional sports players, some wanted to venture down the route of being authors, historians or headteachers; it was refreshing to see how high their aspirations were at such a young age.

The girls then split off into groups to take part in three senior school taster classes; astronomy and maths, history, and computer science and programming. Mr Clarke led the computer science and programming session. The girls had to use online software, Scratch, to build code, in the hope that they’d create some enchanting optical illusions; and it was a success!

In history, Dr Gundy split the girls up into 4 groups, giving each a folder containing photographs from a different era. Dr Gundy asked the girls to act as history detectives, analysing the photographs to figure out the era. Each team got a chance to look at the four eras in turn; Romans, Tudors, Victorian and the 80’s, with many quoting on the ‘weird clothes’ of the 80’s and the ‘strange bicycles’ of the Victorian age.

In the astronomy session, the girls learned that conversations about the planets, stars and galaxies are made much simpler through using the ‘standard form’. The girls worked out how many zeros were needed to write ‘150,000 million’ (distance from the earth to the sun in metres), ‘one trillion’ (the number of stars in the Andromeda galaxy) and ’10 billion’ (as a supernova shines with the brightness of 10 billion suns), and, working with up to 12 zeros per number, realised the need for standard form – for instance, one trillion (1,000,000,000,000) can be more easily represented with 10¹².

All of the girls thoroughly enjoyed the day in the Senior School and it gave them an insight into what school life will be like when they move.