The library kicked off the New Year with a resilience skills challenge. All tutor groups from all Houses were invited to take part in the Matchbox Challenge. The rules were simple, collect a box from the library and fill it with items of the colour of your House.

The box had to close, all items had to be different – you could not fill it with just red paperclips and all items had to be listed. The tutor group that had the most amount of items would win - simple!

The challenge was underway. It became very competitive – items were traded and swapped and teachers’ desks were plundered for pen lids, stickers and drawing pins. In fact there is now a school shortage of orange, purple, green, blue and red paperclips!

We had a fantastic response to the competition and the library would like to say a big “thank you” to everyone that took part. Every tutor group that took part received House Points, the winning tutor group received extra House Points and a prize. We also awarded points to the House that collectively had the most number of items. All students in that House have received an extra House Point. Results are as follows!

Winning matchbox - F9 - 87 items!

Winning House – Winton - 401 items were collected in 10 boxes!

A special mention goes to F13 who were awarded extra points for ingenuity. They typed out and then cut up the letters and symbols on a keyboard. Some would say genius - but not quite within the rules. Although the letters are different, the rules stated that each item had to be different and as each item was a piece of paper, it was technically the same item and could not be counted (sorry) but we were impressed with their thinking!

In total, 1,155 items were collected by the tutor groups. A few of our favourite items were a lentil, fortune telling fish (well done W8), blade of grass, playdoh, a variety of sweets including smarties, tic-tac, skittles and parma violets (although most of these are now very sticky – yuck!) The weirdest item was a strand of Miss Bailey's orange hair! A special mention goes to all of the tutor groups who put glitter in their boxes - Mrs Simkins’ desk now resembles a sparkly fairy grotto!

Thank you once again for taking part in the competition, it was great to see so many tutor groups get involved and generating hundreds of points for the House system.

Mrs Osborn and Mrs Simkins