As of yesterday Johnson were back in the lead on 5839 points. 

Shown above are some of the posters from our previous shows and we are so excited to have our annual dance show, Velocity, return this year. It is not too late to get involved! Join one or more of our dance clubs to take part in a performance or if you are interested in costumes and props, come and talk to the dance department.

Tickets go on sale Monday 22nd November 2021 at 9am. Please visit the Sandpit website to book. We strongly suggest booking your tickets early to avoid any disappointments. Letters with more information about rehearsals, dates and ordering of items will be released shortly.

A prop plea! If you or anyone you know has wooden tables or wooden chairs that they wouldn’t mind lending for the show, please get in touch with the dance department as we are currently on the lookout for these props for the show!

Congratulations to Luke S (11T) who recently achieved his ITF Blackbelt (1st Dan) in Taekwondo.  Luke trains with Harpenden Taekwondo and is pictured here receiving his belt and certificate from Master David Stanton (5th Dan).

We would love to hear of any students who are going above and beyond in the community, with sport, in the arts or academically so please email the admin email address with any details and/or photographs if you would like them featured in our Student Spotlight.

We are aware that several of our students in Year 9 and 10 are studying additional languages out of school as native speakers and may be interested in sitting a GCSE later in this academic year. Although the exact timeline and nature of next summer’s exams have yet to be confirmed, we would be grateful if initial expressions of interest could be emailed to fleur.baikie@sandringham.herts.sch.uk stating the student name, tutor group and the language they are studying which they wish to be examined in. The final deadline for enquiries is Friday 17th December. Once we have all the requests, we will work with families to see if we can accommodate the requests. Thank you.

Don't forget that the Fo$S Christmas Fair is on Saturday 4th December from 11-3pm. There will be lots of stalls, food and drink, and even a bucking reindeer ride! Your attendance would be greatly appreciated to support the school and if you would like to volunteer to help please let us know at the admin email address. Thanks and see you there!

If you are entitled to Free School Meals, you can now sign up for some FREE activities over the Christmas Holidays thanks to Hertfordshire County Council and the Herts Sports Partnership. Activities will be running in different venues across the county for young people aged 5-16 years and all include a nutritious meal each day.

As an eligible family you can book for free using your unique HAPpy Booking Code, RK&RV3.  Please search for activities using your postcode or child’s age from Monday 6th December at https://www.sportinherts.org.uk/happy/booking and be sure to do so quickly as places are on a first come first served basis.

Additionally, there are a range of fun online Enrichment Activities to look through, with ideas for learning more about arts and crafts, history, music, and theatre, plus ways to keep your family active for 60 minutes each day! View these at https://www.sportinherts.org.uk/hafhappy

Music Tour letters have now been released for July 2022! All members of Jazz Band and Show Choir should have had a letter emailed home, please speak to Mrs.Beaton or Miss Stothard if you did not receive one.

YMCA St Albans gym are starting up Friday evening football for the local teenagers in St Albans. This is completely free and aims to engage with the youth of the local community, improve their fitness and wellbeing, provide an opportunity to access a facility they may not otherwise get the chance to and to provide an alternative activity to those that might find themselves with nothing to do.

The current times available are on a Friday 11-13’s 7:30-8:15pm and 14-17’s 8:15-9.00 pm at the St Albans Gym, One YMCA, 59 Russet Drive, St Albans, Hertfordshire AL4 0DB. If you have any questions or would like your child to go along, please contact Daniel.monaghan@oneymca.org

We have the following opportunities currently available at Sandringham School:

Careers Co-ordinator

Theatre Manager

Business Management Administrator

To find out more details you can check here 

 A massive thank you to our amazing supporters who have donated 825 tokens! We have also been given 1462 tokens by the scheme! Our order will be the following:

• Compost bin = 1000

• Gloves = 400

• Meadow flower seeds = 465

• Butterfly attracting seed packs = 135

• Watering cans = 195

• Purple carrot and chard seeds = 90 tokens

I’m looking forward to launching the scheme again next year to support the horticulture module and sustainability club. If you have any surplus gardening supplies please email me via malonej@mysandstorm.org to arrange dropping them off, they would be gratefully received. 

It was fantastic to see all of the students in their spotty and casual wear today. If you haven't already paid your £2 on ParentPay, you can still do so (or £1 if you are wearing something spotty.) If you feel able to donate more, there is also the option to do that as well. All money goes towards Children In Need, a charity who work closely with a whole range of organisations to help young people in the UK who need support the most.

The Dance department has been incredibly busy over the last week with supporting the Whole School Show, preparations for Velocity 2022 and organising workshops. We can't wait for you to see us in action. 

DANCE UNIFORM HAS ALSO ARRIVED! Please come and collect your uniform at lunchtimes or during your clubs and lessons.

In other news, our Year 9 module students took part in an innovative workshop led by Make Amplify through the organisation BEEE Creative which introduced new concepts and ways of using live performance with augmented reality. From floating hand sanitiser to jumping cacti in the studio, It was great to see our students being challenged with new ways of thinking and using technology to support their creativity.

The workshop was an interesting way to explore a different side of dancing and get a glimpse of what the future holds. - Beth

This week we would like to show you what goes on at Future Tech club. Mr Weier has been helping students to use Raspberry Pi units to connect to various weather sensors. Our thanks to Fo$$ for making it possible to purchase these.

Other students have been block-coding, using Dropmix to make remix versions of dance classics, and re-imagining buildings famous in the gaming world - Sevastopol Station for example - using CAD software.

As mentioned last week, we are making plans to organise a whole-school challenge to try to achieve a carbon-neutral school day. Net zero itself might not be possible given the need to use electricity and heat the buildings, but we certainly plan to involve the whole school community in producing as little CO2 as possible on that day. If any parents are able to offer expertise in this area then please get in touch.

We are very excited that our Christmas Fair is returning this year. As always, it promises to be a fantastic day but we need your help! Our tombolas are always a great place to win pre-Christmas drinks, chocolates and gifts whilst raising essential funds for our school.

All donations of drinks (alcoholic and non-alcoholic) along with chocolate, sweets and gifts will be gratefully received. Please drop off your donations to main reception during our Learning Review Day on Thursday 25th November between 09:00  - 16:00.

Our vehicle and pedestrian gates will be open during these times. Please note that our car parks are likely to be less busy after 13:00.

The whole school theme for this week is Anti-bullying to align with the Anti-bullying Alliance’s national Anti-Bullying week. Kindness is more important today than it has ever been. The isolation of the last year has underlined how little acts of consideration can break down barriers and brighten the lives of the people around us. This is one of the reasons that ‘One Kind Word’ has been chosen as the theme of Anti-Bullying Week. The students received an excellent assembly from Rich Davis, Performance Director for Year 7, about the importance of considering the impact of your words on the feelings and actions of others. Many of our students hide behind the excuse that their unkind comments are a joke and therefore it is essential that we challenge students to rethink what is and is not appropriate to say to another student. We challenge you to say one kind word to those around you this week. 

If you would like to hear more about what is going on with our Modern Foreign Languages department, you can now follow them @SandringhamMFL. There are lots of fantastic updates such as who has come top in their recent writing assessments, the Faculty's hard work to become number 216 in the world on @languagenut, information on future trips and pictures of celebrating World Dulce de Leche Day. Yum! The team always work hard at going above and beyond in lessons so thank you for all your hard work and do follow them if you'd like to learn more.

As mentioned in our Theme Week news, this week is anti-bullying week and here at Sandringham we encourage students to be kind each other, and to talk to a member of staff if they feel that someone is being unkind to them. YOu can read more about the aims of the week here and at the LRC we have many fiction and non-fiction books on this subject. A few of them are pictured below. Happy reading 

Philip K. Dick’s 1968 sci-fi classic ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ inspired the film Blade Runner and is a nightmarish tale of a San Francisco bounty hunter operating in a post-nuclear world, bereft of animal life.

World War Terminus had left the Earth devastated. Through its ruins, bounty hunter Rick Deckard stalked, in search of the renegade replicants who were his prey. When he wasn't 'retiring' them with his laser weapon, he dreamed of owning a live animal - the ultimate status symbol in a world all but bereft of animal life. Then Rick got his chance: the assignment to kill six Nexus-6 targets, for a huge reward. But in Deckard's world things were never that simple, and his assignment quickly turned into a nightmare kaleidoscope of subterfuge and deceit - and the threat of death for the hunter, rather than the hunted. This Sandringham Read is great for Years 9 and above.

FRENCH: Le mot de la semaine- taciturne

GERMAN: Das Wort der Woche- wortkarg

SPANISH- La palabra de la semana- taciturno/a

Thinking Questions

• Sometimes words are made up of other words. How can this help us when reading in a foreign language?
• Sometimes we don’t understand every single word in a foreign text – what can we do in this situation?

T is for taciturn [adjective]

Definition: (of a person) reserved or uncommunicative in speech; saying little.

Example: After such gatherings she would be taciturn and morose.

Synonyms: Dour, Laconic, Reticent

Antonyms: Communicative, Fluent, Talkative

Etymology: From the Latin word ‘tacitus’ meaning be silent.

We are delighted to announce that Logan H, Henry T, Sara M and Lauren P have all been nominated for the WCSQM Student of the Year Award. They have been chosen for consistently showing the qualities it takes to be a World Class student and we are incredibly proud of them for the hard work, community spirit and resilience that they have all shown this year. They will now go with the nominees from other schools to the Annual Awards Ceremony at Oxford University on 6th December where the winner will be announced. The evening includes a tour of Oxford University and the ceremony itself, so it is a fantastic opportunity for all four of them and we wish them the very best of luck. 

Saturday saw us break new ground in the cross country arena. It was the Regional Finals of the English Schools XC Cup at Verulamium Park. The very best schools from the region who had been successful in their respective County rounds were present in the junior, inter and senior age groups of both the boys and girls competitions. We were the only school in the whole region to have 4 teams represented at this level, which is a huge honour and achievement for the school demonstrating how far we have come against some traditionally very strong school including some of the best independent sporting schools in the country. We weren’t going to settle for this however. On the day we had 2 individual winners in Georgia T (Junior girls) and Luke C (Junior boys) and one runner up in Lily T (Senior girls). This is a huge achievement in itself to be so successful at this stage, however not the main focus of the competition. The idea is you get your four fastest finishers from a possible team of six across the line and the lowest cumulative team score wins with the top 3 schools in each race going through to the National final. In the girls race with one not finishing we were 4th school home and top of the reserve list to go to the finals, which is a huge achievement when you consider the quality of the opposition and the fact that 4/6 girls are a year young in the competition. The Junior boys, however improved on this mark and took 2nd place by one finishing position behind Dulwich College. Luke C was 1st, Harry W 4th, Otis L-J 11th and Will A 28th to give us a total of 44. This has now secured their spot in the National finals in Newquay on December 4th, the first time the school has ever done this and an amazing achievement for the boys to be on the verge of National Success. The Senior boys finished in 8th and Senior Girls 6th to top off a fantastic morning of racing. Well done to all our students competing at this level.

The Y9 boys have had 2 football games, which saw them beat St. Joan of Arc school on Tuesday in a 3-1 win with goals from Anton R, Shaun U and Jed T to secure their route into the next round of the County Cup. Then on Thursday we hosted the London Nautical School in the ESFA National Cup. The opposition on this occasion were too strong and they beat us 6-3 on the day to knock us out of this for 2021/22 with lessons learned for the rest of the season.

The Y10 football team booked their spot in Round 5 of the English Schools National Cup with a 5-2 victory over Queens school. We knew it would be tough after having gone out to Queens in Y7 in the last 16 of this competition. An unbelievable first half performance and hat trick from Jonah H saw us play Queens off the pitch and take a 3-0 lead into the break. In the second half Queens came out to rectify the first half and if it wasn’t for Vicente L, we would have found life tough. With another Jonah goal and one from Harry G we ensured our passage into the last 64 with the 5-2 win. Well played boys.

On Wednesday our 1st XV were in action against Sir John Lawes school at home and the result, although in our favour was overshadowed by a terrible injury to one of our guests’ players. In a routine tackle one of the SJL boys suffered a triple fracture in his ankle and dislocation, which resulted in being airlifted to hospital and a subsequent operation. We wish him all the best in his recovery.

On Monday the 1st XI fresh off a 4-3 loss in the County Cup to Richard Hale in a thrilling match the team travelled to E London to play St.Bonaventures school in the ESFA National Cup 3rd round. The team bounced back superbly with a 3-0 victory in convincing fashion with goals from Leo T, Elliot P and Joe B.

The Y7 boys football team also played their 3rd round ESFA National Cup match on Tuesday V Sir Henry Flloyd Grammar school from Aylesbury. It was another good display from our youngest team and a 12-0 win to see them comfortably through to round 4. Well played boys and good luck in the next round.

The Y9 basketball teams have had a busy week and have been in action 3 times, twice at the time of writing. On Monday they faced Beaumont in the County League/ District League as a double header. A good first half performance saw us trading baskets and stay in contention. In the second half Beaumont played well and developed their offence to go 12 up in the 4th quarter. With a very tense and exciting last couple of minutes the team were excellent and pulled it back to actually go 2 up in the last minute before the scores were levelled to take it to overtime. In overtime the team were outstanding and went 6 up before the game was pegged back to 3, which gave us the win. A great team performance and this gives us something to work on without a couple of key players.

On Wednesday the team then travelled to St. Columba’s College in the same competitions. In what was one of the best first half performances I have seen from a Sandringham school basketball team we led by 26 points. The second half saw us rotate our team around with 10 out of the 11 players all scoring to take the win by 21. Well done on a great week of basketball and let’s hope this evenings game is also as favourable.

Another good performance from the U14 netball team beating Marlborough in the District Cup 32-9. OPM - Emily W & CPM - Lizzie S

In other netball news the U13 A and B teams were in action away against Beaumont. The A team won their match comfortably 20-4 and the B team took victory 19-9 to give us a good afternoon on Thursday. In addition the Y9 team were away at Marlborough. They were excellent in this District Cup match with a 32-9 win, with Emily W and Lizzie S standing out. Well done girls.

We now sell and accept Theatre Tokens! You can use these tokens to purchase tickets for any of our shows or buy them as gifts to be used at over 260 venues nationwide and in the West End all while supporting theatres including us!

Following Government guidelines, you must wear a face covering while attending The SandPit Theatre and must present a valid NHS COVID Pass or proof of a Negative Lateral Flow Test if aged over 18, unless you are exempt as stated in these guidelines. If you do not wear a mask or do not have a valid NHS Covid Pass/Lateral Flow Test result, you will be refused entry and your ticket will be forfeited.

Our Bar will be open during these performances for drinks and snacks but please note we will only be accepting card payments. Alcohol is available for sale 30 minutes before the shows begin. The box office is open from 11.30am – 3.30pm Monday, Wednesday & Friday. Alternatively, you can call us on 01727 799565 or visit www.sandpittheatre.co.uk

For many years no-one was interested in the art of the Impressionists. Artists like Monet, Degas and Renoir were vilified, attacked, and left penniless as a result.

Some collectors we may recognize and some we may not, but Hansen amassed a remarkable collection housed at his summer home, Ordrupgaard, on the outskirts of Copenhagen. Exhibition on Screen tells his fascinating story and, with exclusive access to a sellout exhibition at London’s Royal Academy, brings the extraordinary collection to the big-screen in glorious high-definition.

Tickets £8/£6

Grab your wands, don your house robes, and apparate yourselves to the box office! A very magical improv show awaits...

The smash hit Spontaneous Potter is an entirely improvised Harry Potter comedy play, based on an audience suggestion of a fanfiction title. Hilarity ensues as an entirely new Potter adventure is magically improvised on the spot - with live musical accompaniment!

Running Time: 60 minutes

Tickets: 2:30pm - £12 / £10 or 7:30pm - £16 / £14

Chuckl. In association with The Sandpit Theatre bring you the very best in live standup comedy.

Enjoy some of the biggest names in comedy along with our favorite handpicked artists.

Tonight’s lineup includes Sandringham School alumni Nick Helm (Live at the Apollo, 8 Out of 10 Cats) / Esther Manito (Live at the Apollo) / Ben Norris (Mock the Week, “. unbelievably brilliant” - Jason Manford) / Mark Row (A1: The Long Road to Edinburgh on Amazon Prime)

Please note the lineup maybe subject to change.

Tickets are on sale now for just £16.50 each

Welcome to our 20th anniversary year as we celebrate The SandPit Theatre turning 20 years old this December!

We can’t wait to see you back through our doors and we have some exciting shows and films coming up for you this season!

All the latest performances are on our website, www.sandpittheatre.co.uk, and you can keep up to date with what’s going on by giving us a follow either on Instagram & Twitter or give us a like on Facebook, just search for The SandPit Theatre!