Gifted and Talented Taster Day
This is an event aimed to challenge academically gifted students in Year 6 from other local primary schools.
Aims
This partnership enables Year 6 students from local primary schools to take part in academically challenging subjects, such as Mandarin. Other subjects include Science, which allows students to use specialist equipment in our Science laboratories, English, and Drama (in our professional working theatre).
Attendance from external schools is critical to make this event a success.
The immediate beneficiaries are the students from external schools. It also creates a strong partnership between Westholme School and other local primary schools, which increases our community links.
Background
The project was an idea from our Senior Leadership Team in conjunction with our school marketing department. We recognise and value the importance of creating partnerships within our local community and are pleased to be able to offer external students similar opportunities, albeit on a smaller scale to those of our current students.
Resources
To make this event a success, we require the external primary schools to take part.
Westholme teaching staff need to be available, off timetable, to teach the lessons. The lessons take place in existing classrooms throughout the school.
Non teaching staff are also involved - marketing (invite schools to take part and meet & greet on arrival/departure), catering (to provide refreshments and lunch) and estates (set up of classrooms).
This event takes minimal financial contribution to host - slight increase in numbers of children in for lunch, extra refreshments and perhaps a small amount of extra resources would be needed to host the lessons.
Impact
The benefits of hosting this event are that we are able to host a taster day for academically gifted students and provide them with the opportunity to challenge themselves by taking part in lessons they are not neccessarily able to do at their current school.
After each event, we meet to discuss if the event is worthwhile hosting. Each year, we always agree that it is.
Pupil Involvement
Our current Year 7 students assist with the welcome and goodbye at the start and end of the day.
Students in Year 6 from external schools attend this day, so we require the schools to register their names.
Frequency
This event runs once during each academic year.