We are sad that this is going to be our final post for this academic year, but we are very excited that we can reveal to you that last weeks Year 9 activity week Restaurant Challenge 2022 went AMAZINGLY

All students thoroughly enjoyed their time completing each task, it was so difficult for us to select a winning team.

These are our winners:

WINNERS OF RESTAURANT CHALLENGE DAY 1-2022: ‘Downtown Dinner’

WINNERS OF RESTAURANT CHALLENGE DAY 2-2022: ‘Rapid a Chic’

Here are some images from the two days events!

Here is a summary of DAY 1 competitors:

This is the DAY 2 summary:

Before we leave you,

here is a selection of final roof garden photographs!

We are sad to say goodbye, but only until next term!

HAVE A GREAT SUMMER BREAK EVERYONE! SEE YOU ALL IN SEPTEMBER!

We thought we would try and get one last cheeky grow in from the Urban Cultivator before the end of term.

This time we kept it simple and went for an easy Cress and an intermediate Pea Shoot. Below is our progress since last Friday! The Cress has gone wild already!

All of the produce that is grown this week will be used for our year 9 activities week ‘Restaurant Challenge’ competition as garnish.

Another exciting update to share with you is that our peas on the roof garden are finally ready for picking!

The Apples have come a long way too!

All of the produce we have collected over this week and last week will be used as ingredients in the year 9 Restaurant challenge and we are so excited about that.

We cannot wait to share with you next week how the activity week went for us!

I always look forward to seeing what the Carrots look like as we pull them from the ground! So far we haven’t had a single straight and long Carrot. It truly makes you wonder how much the supermarkets are disposing of when we haven’t had one single ‘normal’ Carrot yet?!

Stay tuned next week for our second-to-last Growing Green blog update.

We are excited to say that after two crazy years of COVID-19 lockdowns and disrupted teaching, the D& T department finally managed to complete our in-depth all-inclusive Design & Technology Product Design Health and Safety Specialist Course which we started back in 2020 and kept getting pushed back!

Here are a few highlights from the day!

We brushed up on some existing knowledge skills on some bits of kit that both staff and students regularly use, but also learnt some new information and got some training and practice on some tools and equipment that we do not currently use and we are excited to take these new skills into our classes from hereon.

Stay tuned next week for some further growing updates on the roof and hopefully some exciting new harvests!

year 7 pizza

year 10 focaccia with fresh herbs

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As promised, the DT department spent our Tuesday after school tending to the roof garden crops and pot up our final window ledge plants from the food room.

We harvested some broad beans and some baby carrots to make room for the remaining carrots to spread into the soil!

As you can see, we had some humorous carrot characters!

STAY TUNED NEXT WEEK FOR MORE UPDATES FROM THE DT DEPARTMENT!

We hope you had a great relaxing half term break and got to spend some time soaking up the sun.

The DT Department are getting ready for another harvest of produce tomorrow during our weekly gardening club. I will fill you all in next Monday on how we got along, but for now, here’s a little filler post of some beautiful pieces of work completed last term by the Year 8 textiles students who worked on their own custom designed soft toys.

They worked on a range of industry standard skills to get to their final products including designing, adapting a pattern piece, pattern cutting, applique, embroidery, hand sewing and machine stitching. Some students went even further and designed and created clothing for their bears to wear.

These are some of my favourite designs.

As this is our last post before we go off on our Half term break and we haven’t got any new produce to harvest yet as most were newly planted last week.

here are some beautiful photographs of the roof garden as a whole.

We went up on the roof to check how our department offspring are getting along and had some quite surprising harvests since last weeks visit…

As you can see, we pulled some HUGE radish from the ground!

I think the size of them took us all by surprise considering the first lot that came out were the usual size that you would expect when you purchase them from the supermarket. I assume that the little heatwave we have had did them some good.

we only pulled up two carrots to see how they are progressing. They definitely need more time harvesting. We got one very small one and one long skinny spiralling shaped one. This just goes to show students how much process of elimination that supermarkets force farms to go thorough before fresh fruit and vegetables end up on shelves. I’m not confident that our spiral carrot would even make it into a ‘wonky veg’ bag.

Some more of our seedlings that we started off a few weeks ago in the food room have grown large enough to be transplanted up onto the roof.

Here is Head of D&T Mrs Barden & Mrs Spieler getting their hands dirty with some more planting on the roof.

We have some more tomatoes & Aubergine.

Again, Keep watch for more of next weeks progess!