We all really enjoyed our Comenius visit to Greece and would like once again to express our thanks to all of our fabulous Greek hosts, staff, students and families,  who went out of their way to be hospitable and to make us feel totally at home. All the very best to you all for 2011+.

It was an interesting 'experience' for our students, Natalie, Dan and Ryan, being with 'teeeechas' for such a long time, 5 days nearly 24/7, however they survived, lived to tell the tale, and even admitted that it was even enjoyable sometimes. The best bits they said were going to the host families, shopping in the Mall with their friends from all over Europe and playing 'footie'. They were amazed by how much we have in common with people from other European countries and felt it was a real achievement to form friendships with people in other parts of Europe.

They hope they were able to show that we are not all ignorant Brits. They are also proud to be from the North-East and wanted to show that England is not just London with Big Ben and the Monarchy. Here is a link ot the voicethread with their presentation. Please do add your voice, video and written comments. This is the link:

http://voicethread.com/#u551626.b1655122.i8742153

Dan felt that the culture was OK but we should go to fewer museums.

Natalie, who particularly enjoyed the shopping,  would recommend that next time  we include more out of school activities orientated around young peoples' lifestyles.

Dan, Natalie and Ryan are helping Alex and me with a Year 9 assembly this Wed, 19th January when we will tell all Year 9 about our fantastic visit to Greece and invite them to apply for our visit to Denmark. We hope to be able to take 6 or so students and will start to build up towards the visit and develop our side of the project looking at our use of energy and water in the UK and learning about our partners all over Europe.

best wishes from me, my colleagues and our students and families

Gerry O'Hanlon

Director of Learning

Academy 360

PART 2 - February 2011

So it has been a bit of a challenge to get our young people to volunteer.

I think they were frightened by the idea of staying in other peoiples' homes, by the questions on our competition about water and energy and, in particular, about having to stand up and speak in front of their fellow students. We will find a way of reporting back that they are comfortable with as we want to grow the numbers of students getting involved.

This time we will have 4 students, hopefully more applications for our Italian visit.

We are meeting every week on a Tuesday to work on and develop our enengy and water consumprion and how we could live more sustainability.

After half-term we will visit energy producers, Alex is workign hard to organise this for us.

Denise Green, our librarian, has been working hard organising flights etc and our colleague, Linzi Andrews, Mathmatician and Scientist, is also really looking forward to being involved and supporting our work across the academy.

More after our half-term break

best wishes

Gerry