Swimmingly Sucessful

Congratulations to Lucy (13P3), Olive (11C1) and Chris (13C1) who all qualified for the South East Winter Regionals Short Course Swimming Championships in Winchester recently. Lucy competed in the 50m backstroke and Olive in the 100m and 200m breaststroke with Olive achieving personal best times. They had only just returned from an intensive residential swim camp in Devon with their club, Newbury District, so this was a huge achievement. Well done to you both.

Chris who swims for Abingdon Vale Swimming Club qualified for eight events, 50m and 100m Freestyle, Back stroke and Breast stroke plus 50m Butterfly and the 100m Individual Medley. Following successful swims in the heats Chris qualified for the finals in both the 100m Back stroke and Individual Medley events, achieving PB’s across his other swims. Chris has his sights set on qualifying for English and British National Competitions next summer. Sounds very promising Chris. Well done and keep us posted!

Festival of Light 2024

The annual Festival of Light has become something of a spectacular Christmas tradition in Newbury. Many of you will have been there on Sunday to see the amazing procession of hundreds of twinkling lanterns travelling through Newbury town centre. In the build up to the event, many schools, community groups and members of the public were busy constructing structures to parade and, as you would expect, St Bart’s was no exception! It is becoming something of our own tradition for our Art Club to produce a St Bart’s lantern and, in recent years, we have had an elephant and a dragon! This year we love the tiger fish made by talented students, Elodie and Tilly (Year 9).

CCF Wishes You a Merry Christmas

This term, Year 10 Navy cadets have been learning about communication. On Friday last week they put their new skills to the test by using naval flags to spell out: MERY XMAS! (We only had one ‘R’ flag!)

Christmas Jumper Day

Last Thursday, it was great to see so many Christmas Jumpers around the school site. Staff and students donned their festive knitwear with pride in aid of Save the Children and, as a school, we raised a brilliant £1203. The fundraising will go towards helping to create lasting change for children in the UK and around the world. Thank you very much to all those who wore their jumpers and accessories, and to everyone who made a donation to Save the Children.

Whole School Dance Show

Last Wednesday students from across the school came together to perform for the whole school Dance show. The evening consisted of a range of dance works, mostly choreographed, costumed and rehearsed by the students themselves.

The highlight of the evening was the boys’ dance group who performed their ManMade Dance piece created through a series of workshops run by Zoielogic Dance Company. The audience were also treated to works by Year 7 Dance Club, Year 9 Dance students, Junior Dance Company, Year 12 and 13 BTEC Dance students and Year 11 GCSE Choreography.

The evening ended with the school Dance company performing their newest work, ‘Unknown’. It was a wonderful evening celebrating dance in the school, and the audience response was fantastic. Well done to everyone involved.

MFL Karaoke

Last week students competed in the annual MFL (Modern Foreign Languages) Department Karaoke Competition. Modern Foreign Languages at St Bart’s is not just about learning new languages but also about students developing Cultural Capital, broadening their knowledge of different countries and understanding more about other cultures, lifestyles and people. Students were challenged to submit a group or solo karaoke performance in a foreign language. Group Finalists were then invited to perform in the school hall to an audience. As always, it was a fun and joyous occasion, judged this year by Ms Maunders from the Music department.

Firstly Summer Wrzesinski was awarded her trophy as winner of the solo competition. Her winning recording was of her singing the traditional Christmas carol “Stille Nacht” in German.

Then the five groups that had made it through to the final performed as follows:

10C German singing was ist dein Lieblingsfach?

8S Gm singing Augen auf!

7C2 singing on écrit sur les murs

7P2 singing  Körperteil Blues

Y12 Meghan and Dilan singing Barbaras Rhababerbar

As Ms Maunders pointed out in her judgement remarks, the standard of the competition was very high and has moved on considerably from its early days. This year’s competition was closely fought but in the end the trophy was awarded to 7C2 for their very impressive rendition of “on écrit sur les murs“. The class were coached by Mrs Blakely and helped with choreography by Mrs Clare.

The five songs performed were all very different and much effort had gone into learning the words and thinking through the performances. Congratulations to 7C2 and thank you to all who entered the competition.

Christmas Carol Service

Thank you to all those in the St Bart’s community who joined us yesterday for our annual Christmas Carol Concert. As is tradition, the event was held in the beautiful setting of the historic St Nicolas Church. The Festival of Lessons and Carols service was first held on Christmas Eve in 1918, planned by the then Dean of King’s College, Cambridge, and it is still a blue print for many Anglican Christmas services all around the world. St Bart’s have annually hosted our own Lessons and Carols service for many years at St Nicolas Church, and it was wonderful to be back, marking the end of another Autumn Term with this wonderful musical celebration in such a beautiful setting.

Opening with Once in Royal David’s City, the service follows a programme of readings and joyful and uplifting performances by the talented School Orchestra, Senior Band and School Choir, as well as smaller ensembles. In particular we wish to thank our Year 13 student conductors, Tom Giles, Charlotte Robertson and Isaac Giaever-Enger, who lead the School Orchestra for the congregational carols, as well as Cole Bowers (Year 13), who led our Percussion Ensemble in ‘Carol of the Bells’, and Lawrence Mullally (Year 13), who led our Brass Ensemble in ‘Joy to the Word’ and ‘Deck the Halls’. Special mention should also go to our student readers Caleb Higgs (Year 7), Oliver Manton (Year 10), Favour Oke (Year 11) and Eve MacLeod (Sixth Form).

Thank you to all those who donated to the retiring collection which raised £314.08 for Naomi House and St Nicolas Church. Finally, thank you to our excellent Music Department for all their hard work, to our student musicians, to Mr Robbins, Mr Bastable, Mrs Hale, Charlie Warner (Governor) and to everyone who supported and attended the evening.

BartholoNews 18 December 2024

In a bumper end of term issue we celebrate the Carol Concert, MFL Karaoke and lots more in this week’s BartholoNews.

Year 9 & 10 Dodgeball Festival

8 St Bart’s students attended the Dodgeball Festival at Kennet School on Wednesday. The Festival was played in good spirts and St Bart’s played matches against Trinity A, Trinity B and Kennet School. Despite having two year 8 students playing, St Bart’s still managed to win 5 out of 6 matches, as we played each school twice. This meant that we were the winning school overall! Well done to all involved.

U13 Football

On Wednesday 4 December’ our U13 Girls’ Football team made history by playing in the 5th round of the English Schools Cup.

We played against a very strong team from Kennet School. The game was really exciting, played to a really good level and could have gone either way, with all players giving it there all.

Kennet had most of the possession in the first half but we managed to get a goal and take a 1-0 lead. In the second half, Kennet came back and scored quickly to make it 1-1 but then both teams went on to score a goal each to make the final score 2-2.  The game went to penalties and both teams scored some great penalties and it went past the first 3 that had to take penalties but we did unfortunately loose and get knocked out of the cup. All girls gave it their all and should be really proud of themselves.  Lots more football to look forward to. Well done to Lucia Biais Zambelli who was awarded player of the match by the opposition.

St Bartholomew’s School, Andover Road, Newbury, Berkshire, RG14 6JP

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