Departments: English Our English Department at Finham Park is a strong team. There's a great mix of youth and experience. We also work closely with the library staff, who provide excellent support and resources. Our Schemes of Work are generally topic based, allowing students to develop their speaking and listening, reading and writing skills alongside other valuable life skills. As you might imagine, literature is an important element of our studies, and every student will read at least one novel each year. We also make extensive use of the school's ICT resources. Classes are regularly taken to work in the cross-curricular IT rooms and the department uses a variety of media resources including video cameras and digital cameras.
The Department is currently working with the 'Reading Connects' project, in which we are working towards raising the profile of reading around the school. We encourage budding poets once a year in our whole school poetry competition, judged by the sixth form literature students. English runs numerous trips through the year giving students opportunities to watch plays they are studying being performed on stage. Trips this year have included going to watch 'Blood Brothers' in Birmingham and taking sixth formers to see the National Theatre's production of 'The History Boys'. We run many accredited courses. Almost all our students are entered at GCSE for both the English Language and the English Literature courses. Three courses are taught at A-level: English Language, English Language and Literature, and English Literature. We are also well established in teaching English as part of the IB diploma course. Click here to see details about the new Humanities programme. English Handbooks
Homework Projects As a department we feel strongly that students should be encouraged to become more independent learners and should have more freedom to chose what they study, ensuring the task and presentation format suits their needs. We have put the following homework projects together with this in mind. Please pick one of the projects to work on over the half term. You must submit the final piece to your English teacher in the last week of the half term. If you have any questions or any problems completing the projects please ask your teacher or an older student in your mentor group for help and advice. There are two types of project. Some give you a very specific series of activities to work through. We recommend these if you'd like a little more support when completing your work. Also, feel free to present your work in a slightly different way if you find that easier. The other type of project is much more open ended and is designed to challenge the higher achievers amongst you.There will be certificates and stickers for the best projects, so good luck!
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We run a number of Newspaper days on which students work in an environment as much like a real newsroom as possible and produce the 'Finham Eye' newspaper.
