On Friday 10 October, 21 girls and three members of the Mathematics Department set off to Winmarleigh Hall for a weekend of outward bound activities and maths study sessions. After settling into our bedrooms and having dinner, the girls enjoyed a game of Ambush in the grounds of Winmarleigh Hall followed by a Maths relay race which the girls completed in teams of four.

On Saturday, we enjoyed a busy day full of adventure activities and a study session. In the morning, we enjoyed climbing and abseiling, even Mr Parry enjoyed having a go! We then used the measurements we had taken in the morning’s abseiling session to work out the height of the tower using trigonometry in our afternoon study session. This is a new topic for the girls and they were excited to find out what the tan, cos and sin buttons on their calculators are used for! We clearly need a lot of practice measuring as we worked out that the height of the tower was between 5 and 14m – it was actually 9m! The day was finished off by racing around the challenge course, a very energetic game of capture the flag outside and a games night where we enjoyed playing games including ‘That’s my fish’, ‘Ingenious’, ‘QBitz’ and  ‘Quirkle’.

After a good night’s sleep we were ready for another packed day at Winmarleigh. We enjoyed quad-biking, the zip pole, a high ropes course and another study session. During the quad-biking session we measured the time it took to travel round the course and used this data in our study session to calculate the speed and plot a distance time graph. We also discovered that we could run around the track more quickly than driving the quad bikes with a lot fewer collisions!

The weekend was fabulous fun and the girls were great company. We thoroughly enjoyed combining adventure activities with practical learning modules and hope we have continued to inspire the girls.

by Mrs A Collard
Teacher of Mathematics