St. Michael's Church of England High School

  Fairtrade 2014

On Thursday 6^th March we had the fantastic opportunity of welcoming Juliet Arku Mensah into school, who is a Fair-trade Banana producer from Ghana, she was able to deliver an hour long assembly to our year 7 & 8 students on Fair-trade and how important it is to the lives of many people around the world. She was also able to have a short chat with our year 8 “Make a difference” group who will become the steering group for Fair trade in our school. The hope is that we will be able to gain the three Fair-trade school awards over the coming year.

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Sheep at St Michael's! School Farm launched

We are delighted to announce the arrival of four little sheep in the grounds of school as the start of our new ‘School Farm’ initiative.

Their names are Nettle, Annabel, Dolly (the 'blonde') and Hope. Nettle is a Zwartable (slightly bigger with a white stripe on her nose), and the others are all North Ronaldsay sheep, all are rare breeds.

The sheep have come to stay with us a little earlier than planned! As they are no longer for breeding, they had been rehomed and put out to pasture. Last week their keeper rang me to say he could not keep them on his land and it was either back to me or a rather more unpleasant fate! As Mrs Moulton (Lead Practitioner for Science) has kept livestock before, we were able to get the necessary legal and official paperwork done last week and much to the delight of the pupils and staff were able to offer ‘the girls’ a safe home here!

As Lead Practitioner for the North West of England for the Rural Dimension (Environmental Science, Horticulture and Agriculture) Mrs Moulton was delighted to join the Senior Leadership Team at St Michaels as Lead Practitioner for Science in September and to help develop and deliver the Head teacher’s vision for fully using the grounds to create engaging and exciting learning for the young people in this school and others. In her previous school, she set up the first school farm in Merseyside a few years ago and have since helped many more schools in the region to introduce this amazing opportunity and resource.

We will be holding an information and Consultation Evening next term to discuss options and plans for a School Farm at St Michael’s and details of this will be shared with you in due course.

Exciting times at St Michael’s!

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Lori Jackson of St Michael’s C of E High School

has won third place in the FutureChef 2014 North West Final

Lori won first place at the School Heat Stage, beating twenty-four pupils in her year group by cooking a hot main course meal of ‘Baked cod in a smoky cheese sauce with duchess potatoes’ for two people within a budget of £5.

At the Local Heat Final, which took place at West Cheshire College in Ellesmere Port, she widened her repertoire by cooking ‘Pan fried sea bass with spring onion mash and sauce vierge’ followed by ‘Lemon tart with raspberry coulis and Chantilly cream’ which won her first place.

The Year 10 pupil then went on to reach 3rd place in the Regional Final at Manchester College on 24th February competing against several schools within the North West. She has received continued support from her mentor chef, Adam Franklin from the Yacht Club Liverpool, who kindly prepared Lori for this stage of the competition.

The FutureChef competition is a four-staged nationwide culinary competition, which helps young people, aged 12 to 16, to learn to cook. It also provides a unique insight into the world of professional cooking by capturing imagination, recognising talent and providing a potential platform to launch a fabulous career.

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Engineering Success

VEX Robotics Challenge hosted by MerseyStem

Year 10 pupils, Brogan Faulkner, Sam Hitchen, Jonathan Wu, Ryan McCarthy, Michael Gibson, Matthew Royle and Shaun Baker represented St Michael's.

The students had to design and build a VEX robot from scratch to battle against other Sefton schools in the robot challenge arena.

Challenge 1: Design and build their robot.

Three hours to construct insert wiring, motors and synchronise it all to a wireless controller

Challenge 2: Control of Robot

This was one for the cognitive mind (Good news we had Shaun Baker!)

Challenge 3: Robot Arena
In a competition structure similar to that of the Champions League and a game similar to that of Basketball, it was the team which put the most balls in the basket who would win. This made the design of the robot and skill of the driver extremely important.

With our fantastic team of engineers and driver we overcome some major obstacles to reach the final. After a long fought battle St Michael’s and St Ambrose could not be separated in regulation time. St Michael’s lost the decider by one point.

A moment of sadness for the students but the teacher and school were extremely proud. The school is still in with a chance of reaching the regional finals due to our high scoring tally.

So watch this space!