Below is the writing group's latest article for the St Marychurch Gazette:
Beethoven, Skipping and Staying Safe Online –
Article from the St Margaret’s Academy Writing Group
(Led by Holly, Larissa, Seren and Anton)
Beethoven
Here at St Margaret’s, we support students with disabilities and students who are deaf. We have a Hearing Support Centre, and many interpreters. We have a composer of the month and two months ago, we focused on Beethoven. When we focused on him, one of our deaf students, Anton, aged ten, was interested when his communicator, Ms Down, told him that Beethoven was profoundly deaf Anton and Ms Down decided to look further into this. Beethoven was born in 1770, and his fulltime job was as a music composer. When Beethoven was 28, his hearing started to deteriorate. Then, at the age of 44 to 45, he was fully deaf but he made one of the most beautiful songs, called Moonlight Sonata. You may be wondering how he wrote this being deaf. Well, it was because of his love for music. Music was in his heart; his soul and he could feel the vibrations in his body. Even though he couldn’t hear, it is still such a beautiful song. I hope he keeps on inspiring deaf people for years to come. Sadly, in 1827, Beethoven died due to lead poisoning, aged 56.
Skipping
Recently, all the children across the school enjoyed skipping workshops. We learned different types of ways on how to skip, examples are: normal skipping, backwards skipping, cross skipping, double dutching, hopping and partner skipping. The lady also told the students that lots of sports people use double dutching as a warm up. She also told us to keep an eye behind us because someone could be walking through and they could get seriously hurt by the rope because they are proper adult ropes and have really hard whips and more. We are now doing more skipping at playtimes.
Staying Safe Online
The older children have recently been learning more about staying safe in the online world. We know most people are good but there are some bad people who have been using social media and online games to bully children. We must never share our passwords and remember that online people are still strangers if we don’t know them. We always tell a trusted adult if we are worried and we always think carefully if what we see and hear online is true or not.