A panacea for end of term tiredness!  There were tears, there was laughter, there was a quiz, there were charades… the House Music Competition had it all.

This year saw a new format: a quiz, with rounds for Year 7-9 teams, for House Captains, and for teachers. Highlights included Vasco and Matt acting out the song ‘Hips Don’t Lie’ and the combined Morris House teachers’ depiction of ‘Staying Alive’; Vasco showing (worryingly) impressive knowledge of the Spice Girls; Archie and Clara romping home in the general knowledge round.

After the quiz (which Cooper House won by a mile) came the House Songs: Austin: ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’,  Cooper: ‘We Are The Champions’, Morris: ‘Mamma Mia’.  Each had its moment of magic. Who could have watched Austin without marvelling at George Rees’s dancing, or thrilled to the release of streamers at the song’s climax? Who there wasn’t moved to tears by teacher Stephen O’Keeffe’s fabulous solo at the start of ‘We Are The Champions’ or compelled to hold their hands in the air and just soak up the magic? The shower of sweets at the end was a great hit too (though rather transparently crowd-pleasing!) And during Morris’s song, there wasn’t a person there who didn’t enjoy Emmy and Agnes’s solos at the start or rock out to Ollie’s driving drum beat.

The overall winners were Cooper, with Austin narrowly ahead of Morris at the end. Yes Morris, you are indeed the champions! But, as Lianne reminded us before Cooper’s song, we are ALL champions simply by virtue of being at this wonderful school, d’Overbroeck’s. D‘OVERBROECK’S FOREVER!!!

Georgie, one of our Sixth Form A level Music students, kindly came down to judge the singing- thank you Georgie! – and huge thanks go also to Lianne, Rachel for all of their amazing team leadership (and for devising the brilliant quiz) and to all the staff who gamely took part in the quizzing and singing.

Festival of Strings and Percussion

Perhaps this recital should really have been called ‘Festival of Strings and Percussion-ist’, with Seth on drums providing the only percussion on this occasion. Our Sixth Form superstars came down to perform some wonderful Bartók and to accompany our amazing Year 10 student Thomas on violin in Vivaldi’s evergreen and entirely fitting Spring from ‘Le Quattro Stagioni’. We then heard more beautiful violin and viola playing, an Irish Reel from Oscar (in – wait for it.. Irish rugby top and leprechaun hat and beard), lovely guitar and cello pieces and Otis’s incredible one-man band, by virtue of his looping station and fearless singing/rapping. Seth closed the show with The Beatles ‘Come Together’- an invitation we did not need, having already come together over the course of a lovely 45 minutes in our appreciation of our excellent musicians. Well done to all of our performers, and thank you!

7-11 Spring Concert Review, Tuesday 19th March

Where to begin when describing something that took us on a musical trip around the world, through time, and through a universe of emotion? At the beginning- why not?  Students from across the whole school united to perform Prokofiev’s epic and doom-laden March of the Knights from ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (also known as the theme tune to The Apprentice) and, in doing so, set the theme for the entire concert: it was inclusive (we had beginners alongside seasoned old hands), played to everyone’s strengths, and whatever the individual ability level we aimed high in terms of performance. It was, in short, fantastic. We heard a capella singing, knock-out musical theatre from the Year 7s, wind and brass groups, a terrific tango (forgive the alliteration- sorry) from the strings with Latin percussion accompaniment, Bohemian Rhapsody (how’s that for ambitious?!) from the choir with Brain May (sorry, no- it was Archie Hull) on guitar, amazing jazz solo singing with full band accompaniment, two GCSE compositions (so different but so good!), all rounded off by the Year 10 supergroup Steamed Greens. Their composition Mar Vista is surely destined to become one of the hits of the summer. If you’re wondering what sort of music they play the drummer, Giuliano, tells me it’s “shiny rust”. No, I’m none the wiser either, but I can tell you that if it is shiny rust then I like shiny rust. A huge well done to all of our amazing performers!!

My very heartfelt thanks go also to Anne Marie Jones and Sarah Shekleton for looking after the students in the Music Room whenever they weren’t performing, to Joe Swarbrick for working his magic with sound and lighting, and to my colleagues in the Music Department Lianne and Rachel for their musical inspiration and hard work!

Richard Poyser – Director of Music

Last month, a few students from Years 7-10 took part in one of the more formidable competitions of the year: The Oxford Computing Challenge. Participation was by invitation only, based on qualifiers from the Bebras Computational Thinking Challenge, which took place in November. The rules are simple: solve as many problems as you can in an hour. However, to do so requires quick thinking under pressure, creativity, accuracy and a healthy dose of trying, trying, trying again until it works!

The problems ranged from coding mathematical functions to helping robots navigate mazes, and everything else in between (animation, finding bugs in code, binary addition and much, much more).

The 11 students who took part showed an impressive level of determination and skill; even qualifying was an achievement in itself. They have all received certificates, and I am delighted to include the results below:

Participation

Debby, Leonie, Tabby, Helena

Merit

Oscar, Magnus

Distinction

William, Tom, Laura, Scott, Jonah

Well done to all who took part, and thank you very much to Meghan for running lunchtime sessions throughout the year to help students prepare.

Stephen O’Keeffe – Teacher of Mathematics

On Wednesday, I accompanied seven Year 9 students to the annual “Girls’ Mathematical Conference”, held at the University of Oxford. The day consisted of a series of talks and workshops designed to get them thinking about studying Mathematics and Further Mathematics at A-Level.  Below is our collaborative journal of the day.

Stephen O’Keeffe – Teacher of Mathematics

Stephen @ 9:45am: We’ve just arrived at the Andrew Wiles building and registered. The warm up activity for the day is some Su-Doku puzzles to solve while the other schools arrive. We’ve all been given sticky labels to write our names on and I’m in a slight quandry as to whether I should write “Stephen” on my name sticker or opt for the more formal (and slightly more alien) “Mr O’Keeffe”, since we are around other schools. I go for the former. At 10am is our first activity: “F1 Vector Racing”

Emily and Emmie @ 10:35am: We are very pleased, as we have just completed a race using vectors (as a brilliant and victorious team!). We shall never forget this moment of glory (despite our accidental simplification of the task at hand). We will reign the throne of vector glory for evermore. Now we will complete another thrilling and addictive Su-Doku.

Laura and Tabby @ 12:51pm: Our group is now having lunch after coming out of a workshop on building bridges. It was interesting and quite complicated at times, as it involved lots of new concepts like calculating how many steel rods you need to reinforce a bridge of certain measurements. We also found about a dog who died when a bridge collapsed and it made us very sad #RIPTubbyTheDog. Right now, many are frantically trying to crack the hard Su-Doku from earlier.

Agnes @ 2:10pm: We are now drinking our second Capri-Sun of the day and STILL struggling with the Su-Doku and losing our minds. We’ve spent the last hour persevering through some difficult problems involving space-themed calculations, working out different football scores using logic and doing some jigsaw-type puzzles too. It really wears you out, but we had a good time though. Emily has just ripped up her Su-Doku in frustration #StillSeekingJusticeForTubby.

Ksenia and Amelia @ 15:43pm: We’ve just finished a helicopter activity where we put ourselves in the shoes of a statistical engineer. This was very interesting and made us think about similar practicals we have done in school. The final activity of the day is a talk about all the different careers that you can do if you have A-Level Maths or Further Maths, which is very inspiring. We miss you, Tubby!

The Rosenblatt Pool, Oxford – 25 March 2019

It was with great anticipation that Year 7 and 8 swimmers entered the pool for the first race of the 2019 Swimming Gala. Students from all the House teams stood expectantly waiting for the starter to release the competitors. The first race, Year 7 – 25m Front Crawl, was won by Aryn (Cooper House) in a time of 17.75 seconds. This was followed by A & B races for Year 7 & 8 in Front Crawl, Breast Stroke and Back Stroke. There were outstanding individual performances from Tom, Cassidy and Kayden, indeed, all swimmers performed magnificently and ensured highly competitive races throughout the gala.

The frantic pace of the relays guaranteed an entertaining end to the gala with all competitors producing wonderfully spirited performances with honours split between Cooper and Austin Houses. This left the last race on the event programme and probably the most entertaining. The ‘Cannon’ is a unique event where one male and one female competitor from each year group compete consecutively in an 8 x 25m relay. A very close ending to the gala saw Cooper House just pip Austin for the Trophy by 9 points, with Morris third.

The final scores were:

Cooper – 231 points – First Place
Austin – 223 points – Second Place
Morris – 165 points – Third Place.

Congratulations must go to Cooper House for winning the Swimming Gala Trophy, and thank you to all competitors, spectators and staff, without whom the highly entertaining event would not have been possible.

The race winners are listed below:

On Wednesday, we went to the Salter’s Festival of Chemistry, which took place at The University of Oxford. When we got there, we took part in two different challenges. The first challenge was The Salters’ Challenge where we had to solve a mystery doing two different experiments, figuring out who stole the missing element on the periodic table. To do this, we did chromatography and various different test tube challenges. We worked in pairs to figure these out and compared answers with each other. Both parts of the challenge were very enjoyable!

After lunch, we took part in The University Challenge. For this we had to dissolve magnesium using sulphuric acid, as close as we could to 2 minutes 30 seconds. We had to change the concentration of the acid until the time was as close as possible. We managed to do this in 2 minutes 36 seconds. We were all very pleased with this result.

At the end, we enjoyed watching lots of experiments in a Chemistry demonstration in one of the university lecture theatres. Our favourite was the last one when we watched lots of different explosions of hydrogen and helium. We had to put our fingers in our ears and open our mouths the bangs were so loud!  We all had a really fun day with lots of science.

Ella, Cassie, Ben and Sam – Year 8