A number of Service projects take place within the environment of the school itself. A few of them are listed as follows:
Environment
The Environment Project is concerned with finding practical ways of making Sevenoaks School a more environmentally friendly place and to get the whole school community involved.
Projects have included most recently a comprehensive recycling scheme throughout the school (of glass, paper, cans, plastic bottles and plastic bags), planning pages for the Energy Matters website and designing and creating a Green Information Board as part of an awareness raising campaign. Students collect glass and cardboard each week from departments to be recycled. Scrap paper boxes are also being distributed throughout the school in a bid to halve paper consumption. The Environment Service is about serving the school community and its environment, right here in our own back yard.
Environment has taught me many skills, most importantly creativity and team work - imagine 15 people with 15 (or more) different ideas meeting each week to decide how to improve and generate more interest about the environment in the school. Now I am also more conscious about the effects of energy and resource wastage - you’d be shocked to see the amount of energy the Sennocke Centre alone soaks up! It teaches us to be more aware about the welfare of our environment and how to preserve it as well as we can. Overall, I honestly can’t think of a better way to spend my Thursday afternoon. —Tasha Chan L6
Park Grange Crèche
PG crèche is a weekly facility for staff children to learn and play with a group of Lower Sixth students. Each week activities are organised to encourage creativity and teach basic skills. When the weather allows, students take the children outside for nature walks and sports on the lawn. The students are able to build good relationships with the children during the year and acquire all kinds of teaching and leadership skills to work with this age group. Essential to these are a sense of patience and the importance of an imagination!
PG crèche is a really good way of giving back to the community while enjoying yourself at the same time. Through out the year you really get to know and interact with the children with the fun and diverse activities that you think up each week, like baking, painting or arts and crafts, or just playing with the children, which they love. —Jess Evans L6
Charity Action Group
The Charity Action Group is responsible for overseeing the Charity fundraising in the school. Students research charities, present assemblies and then help organise and motivate events during the three charity weeks in the school. The skills the students acquire during the year range from public speaking, researching on the Internet, creating posters and banners to event management. The terms come to an end with counting money and sending letters to the chosen charities.
Last year the school raised a total of £19,000 for various charities and the events we have helped organise over the years include three fashion shows, a dance show, dodge ball games, staff bleep tests, Climbing wall marathons and sleep-outs as well as food sales.
We are a group of creative, compassionate and co-operative students who strive to raise as much money as possible to help others. We are also key players in organising school events such as the fashion show, dance show and smaller events such as home clothes day. This year we took part in Big Yellow Friday and raised a large amount for CLDF (the Child Liver Disease Foundation). Every Thursday afternoon we meet up for about an hour and research different charities as well as prepare assemblies to show the rest of the school. We have learnt a lot about different charities and the issues that surround our community. It’s a great way to work with and get to know different people, who you would not necessarily see around school.—CAG L6
Design
Students involved in Design work on a variety of projects that benefit the school and the local community. These have recently included signage for local shops; displays for the Parents Association; props for Drama productions; resources for the DT and Science departments; breeding boxes and bird boxes for Bough Beech wildlife conservation group and outdoor furniture for the DT department. Students learn manual and computer-based design skills as well as how to use hand tools and machines. Apart from learning important technical skills, they also learn how to work safely in a workshop environment as well as the importance of teamwork and collaboration. The students themselves produce all publicity and promotion material.
Every Thursday afternoon, the team members don their trademark bright orange boiler suits in order to create and develop a wide variety of products to help improve Sevenoaks - both as a school and town. The team has helped out with various ‘odd-jobs’ around the school over the year such as: refurbishing benches; making signs for the second hand clothing shop and creating a floating duck house for one of the boarding houses. A major job that the whole team worked on was the production of scenery for the widely awaited production of ‘Gulliver’s Travel’s, to go on show late 2009. Our final project of the year was to create learning aids for the current and future Year 9s. This entailed making model ‘bazookas’ from scratch in order to demonstrate the explosive power of compressed air for the IB Activity day on 25th June. —By Michael Newton & Charlie Lindsay-Bailey L6
Gamelan
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