A School Without Walls

As an international school, we encourage our students to look outside the School and connect their learning to the wider world. A part of this is fostering a connection to, and an understanding of, our host country and over the last few weeks, Southbank Kensington students have certainly been taking advantage of the wonderful opportunities that London offers for learning.

All the children from Kindergarten to Grade 5 have recently visited the Barbican to take part in school concerts offered by the London Symphony Orchestra. Grade 5 visited the Tate Modern, where they compared different artistic styles as part of their exploration of how identity can be expressed through the arts. Grade 4 (perhaps entrepreneurs in the making!), have moved from advertising in their last unit of inquiry to inventing. Visiting the laboratories at Southbank's Westminster campus has helped to prepare them for designing their own invention. Grade 3 took their Spanish out of the classroom and used it whilst shopping in a local Spanish supermarket. Grade 2 had an opportunity for hands-on exploration of forces to confirm or extend their emerging ideas in their current unit of inquiry. Grade 1 visited Pure Sports Medicine - a sports injury and exercise clinic in Kensington. Kindergarten had a visit from a Mad Scientist, who helped them learn about properties of materials and states of matter through a series of exciting experiments.

Principal, Judith Kingsbury, added: "We have also been looking at other opportunities to become more involved in events outside the school, including sport tournaments, and competitions such as the Daunt Books Short Story Competition and a Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea contest to illustrate a road safety calendar - for which four of our students' pictures were selected out of 1400 entries!"