The Week Ahead

Saturday 10th January until Sunday 18th January

I trust that you managed to have an enjoyable festive season. Several pupils appeared disappointed after a snowless holiday to awake for the first  day of term with a carpet of snow. It has not helped the sporting start to the term but otherwise the school seems to have moved back into action very quickly, helped by the imminence of those important public exams in the next few weeks for the Upper School.

A big year for Wellington as it enters its 150th year. The first pupils arrived on 20th January 1859 and 20th January 2009 will be celebrated accordingly.

General Events

Sunday 11th January sees our first Sunday chapel service of the year with an 8:00 p.m. full school Eucharist at which the preacher is James Breen, Common Room. Parents of the Stanley are warmly invited to attend.

Shortly rehearsals begin with pupils, staff and Crowthorne Choral Society to work towards a performance on Sunday15th March of Purcell's Ode on St Cecilia's Day and Britten's Rejoice in the Lamb.  The concert will also feature Steph Tress (O) as cello soloist in Elgar's wonderful Cello Concerto. Parents (and friends) are warmly invited to join in with this Wellington Chorus.  No auditions!  Rehearsals are on Mondays beginning Monday January 12th at 8:00  p.m. in the Old Gym.  Copies are provided, no sight reading skills required.  It would be fantastic to welcome many parents to sing with the Chorus.  Please contact Simon Williamson if you would like to join in.

All  parents are welcome to attend Round Square Committee meeting as calendared for 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday14th January in the Driver Lecture Room. This does help parents get a better understanding of what Round square can offer the pupils.

There are several WCA events this month. The first is the 3rd form parents' Fish & Chip supper at 7:30 p.m.on Sunday 18th January.  Almost 150 years to the day since the first  pupils joined the school on 20th January 1859, WCA is celebrating with a supper for 3rd form parents here at Wellington.  A chance to meet, chat and get to know each other better in relaxed surroundings.  Supper is bookable in advance at £10 per head.  If you are interested please contact Lindsay Leslie Miller . There are still some places left for this popular event.

The WCA is looking to expand its network of House and year representatives.  These are members of the parent body who support the Committee in liaising with the Co-ordinator and HMs to help keep parents informed about events that may be of interest to particular houses and/or year groups, and who have ideas which will contribute to the ongoing development of WCA as a parent body.  If you would like to be involved, please contact Denise Cook  

Sunday 18th January also sees a full school Service of the Word at 8;00 p.m. at which the preacher is the Reverend Trevor Watt, Chaplain of Broadmoor. Parents of the Hill are invited to this service.

"The Kids' Cookery School" will be running a cookery course at Wellington next term. The course is open to students in the 3rd and 5th form. Students will be taught the basics of baking bread, preparing an apple crumble etc and the benefits of a balanced diet, the health and safety concerns in the kitchen and the joys of eating food cooked not bought! A professional chef will be running the course and students will each cook their own meals in any given week. The course will run for a five week period and cost £20 per lesson. If you are interested in sending your daughter/ son on the course please contact Brynn Bayman.

Do you use AOL web-mail to view this newsletter? AOL's software seems to mess up the URLs for inline pictures, asks for the wrong thing.   The net result is the user sees the text only and lots of little red x's where the pictures are meant to be. We also get hundreds of error messages. To try and help we have emailed AOL's support address, but they bounced it saying they only deal with customers.  Therefore if it's happening to you, please do complain to AOL. To help us get an idea of the scale of the problem, if you could contact Derek Grainge here that would help too.

This term's calendar is now available on-line - click here to get to it. Unfortunately we were let down by the printers and were unable to include a copy with the end of term material. You should however have received a copy by now. In one major change, we have rescheduled  "Chorus Line" to the Summer term, so the performances in the calendar for the week beginning Monday 9th February are postponed.

Letters Home

To try and cut down on the amount of paper we send out and to try and not bombard parents with large numbers of posting, e-mails and information generally, we plan to use this section of the Week Ahead to include letters we would normally send out - either electronically or by post. If there are parents who would still rather receive everything on paper, please e-mail the College Secretary. We still anticipate sending out paper copies  of reports, bills and the Master's letters. To open some of these letters you will need to log on to the intranet as the page they are saved on is only viewable to those in the Wellington community. Do contact me if you need the password - details are further up  in this Week Ahead. All letters home of this sort are stored here . If for any reason you want to see a back copy of the Week Ahead they are all available on the internet.

The WCA January list of events can be found here.

Although not a letter home the Wellingtonian gets produced regularly. The latest copy can be found here.

The Master wrote to all parents this week. If you have not received a copy, it can be found electronically here.

In the Master's letter, he referred to the twelve points of Well-being -  there were Happiness; Strengths; Gratitude; Good works; Belonging; Physical health; Depression; Negative beliefs about ourselves; Positive/negative ratio (the so called 'Losada Ratio'); Childhood depression; Reach of the positive psychology approach; Teachers of well-being. More details can be found in the original letter he sent out  about them, to be found here. Unfortunately finding well-being is perhaps not as simple as the signpost here would indicate!

Sport

Saturday 10th January sees the boys' hockey season commence with a block fixture against Marlborough, the netball season bounces into action against Lord Wandsworth and the footballers were due to play Brighton College but the weather hascaused thefootball to be cancelled.  There is also a basketball tournament happening at Wellington and the badminton team travel to the Oratory. Cancellations are very likely in hockey so please do keep an eye on the intranet site for detials on that.

Tuesday 12th January sees battle commence for the rackets and basketball payers at Winchester and the squash players at Lord Wandsworth

On Thursday 15th January WCHC play Bryanston, the shooting team welcome Westminster, the squash players take on the Oratory and the fencing team do battle with Bradfield.

The sporting week ends on Saturday 17th January with a block netball fixture with Sevenoaks, hockey against Charterhouse and football against the Oratory. It is also the Berkshire Schools cross country championships, shooting at Abingdon and basketball against Bradfield.

Netball, hockey and football fixtures and results can be found on the Wellington College Intranet.

Further Ahead

The Fifth Form Parents Conference is on Friday 23rd January and the relevant  parents should have received a letter about it - if not a copy can be found here. Parents are requested to respond to Sally Yarnton by Saturday17th January as per the letter.

The second WCA event of the term is a Golf Morning on Saturday 24th January.  Do come and join us for a relaxed and sociable morning.  Contact David Rennie.

On Tuesday 3rd February from 7:30 p.m. until 9:00 p.m. in the Theatre there will be a talk on drugs and alcohol abuse amongst the young, open to all 4th and 5th form parents. After this there will be a chance for parents to talk further if they wish over a coffee or a glass of wine. A letter about this event can befoundhere.

Parents of 3rd Form pupils should please be aware that on Saturday 7th February we are planning to take all the 3rd form to the theatre in London. This is a closed weekend for all of the 3rd form. Each year group has a trip to see a top West End show and this has proved popular with the pupils.The trip will cost between £40 - £50. Your son or daughter will be making their choice of show at the beginning of next term. If your son or daughter is not able to attend this event, please let us know by Tuesday 6th January.

As part of our 150th celebrations we are trying to raise £150,000 for Hope and Homes - a charity that helps children whose lives have been ruined by war. We hope that one component of this will be an on-line auction. In particular this summer a group of Wellington College staff are swimming the Channel in aid of Hope and Homes for Children and Berkshire Air Ambulance.  To help raise money for such worthy charities, Eunice Gillan and Kitty Jack are organising a Promise Auction on Thursday 19th March at 7:30 p.m. in the Old Hall.  Your help would be greatly appreciated by all!  If you have a promise that could be auctioned that evening please contact Eunice Gillan.  Many thanks for your help in advance!  Tickets for the event will be available from the beginning of March - more details to follow.

There is a diving trip being run to the Red Sea between 26th June and 3rd July of this year. Currently there are twelve places left of this 'liveaboard' diving expedition out of Hurghada which is open to both parents and pupils. Interested parties should contact Eddy Heddon for further details. Dive qualification training will take place on Wednesday afternoons in the summer term. To get some idea of what the trip involves please view http://www.blueotwo.com/red_seaitineraries.cfm?itid=6

The geography department are running a trip to Japan in the Exeat of the Michalemas term 2010. If you want more details they can be found here.

From the 150th Anniversary Archive Collection