Secondary Transition for Year 6

Today, PHASE visited William Ransom to conduct a workshop with our year six pupils. The aim was to prepare them for their upcoming transition to secondary school.

On Thursday we had a workshop with PHASE. They are a group who work with young people in Hitchin. They work on lots of different things and today we had a talk about the transition of moving to secondary school.

Five people came in to talk to us about moving on and we did a series of activities that helped us to not get worried or scared about moving on.

Our fist activity was listing as many subjects taught at secondary schools as we could. One group broke the record of 22 (set by another school) by four.

The next activity was a word search that we only had two minutes to solve. It was quite an easy word search but there was a time pressure so no one did quite as well as they could have! The point of this activity was to show that at secondary school you don’t have much time to prepare but you will get used to it.

After that, we made paper aeroplanes out of our word searches. We only had one minute to complete this task. The objective was the same as the word search.     

Next we were given a booklet that gave us tips about secondary school.

Soon after that, we played a game where someone picked a card which was about moving to secondary school. We put it in the section that was either: a bit scary; really exiting; or in the middle. We played this in groups of 7 or 8.

In the last activity we were given 3 Post-It notes. On them we answered 3 questions: How did you feel when you started school? How are you feeling about going to secondary school? And, what does it feel like to be in year 6?

Finally we watched a video of year sevens talking about their new school. This talk really helped us think about secondary school. And we all are really excited to start at our new schools in September.

By Samuel Whyman and Rory Buchanan