First we arrived at the convent after a short coach ride from school. When we got there we were greeted by the Sisters, who were very as they let us stay at their house for the day, and have lots of fun in there beautiful garden.

Our first activity was to silently get into order of shoe size- we completed it successfully. After that we were split into groups and given a 3rd world country to be a family in. My group's country was Kajikistan. In these groups we had to role-play the life of the people who lived in your chosen country. There were market traders who dealt with your earnings for the year out of four. Some year's one family member could receive government training, this came as a benefit as your family could then use the skills learnt to increase their production of crops.

Year 6 pupils have been busy collecting donations for the Royal British Legion’s annual poppy appeal, with the Prep School’s stock of poppies dwindling to near zero as children throughout the school chose to wear their poppies with pride. Thank you to parents for supporting this appeal so positively. Many prep school pupils took part in acts of remembrance in their towns and churches on Sunday, with the whole school marking the 90th anniversary of Armistice Day on Tuesday with two minutes silence at 11:00 am. The atmosphere in the playground was particularly moving as children in Years 1

On the 15th October the second form visited St Lucy's Convent in Medstead on retreat. The theme for the day was "trading trainers" reflecting on how hard the peoples' lives are who make our trainers.

The weather was not on our side but this did not stop many of the activities that were planned for the day going ahead although it did mean that we could not enjoy the wonderful gardens at the Convent.

We started off the day with a few games to waken us up, such as: getting into groups of a given amount of people without being left out, and ordering ourselves into height order without speaking.

Nursery and Pre-Prep had a wonderful day celebrating Harvest this year. We started the day joining the Prep School in celebrating at the Harvest service. The children delighted in seeing all the produce displayed and watching the older children perform. The highlight of our day was welcoming many of the parents to our informal Harvest lunch. There were 30 children & approximately 25 parents and siblings celebrating together and it proved to be a delightful occasion. We had perfect weather, enabling us to all share lunch together with the children on the decking. The children behaved beautifully and really enjoyed their extra special lunch consisting of a Ploughman’s, home made cakes and apples from the Sisters’ garden. Thank you for taking time to share in our special day.

The Harvest Festival was on Tuesday the 14th of October. It was great! There was loads of produce from everyone which included cakes, bread, fruit, vegetables and lots more, and it was a great success. The orchestra played and the Chanteurs sang the Clare Benediction. With Year 4’s drama and the talks from Mr Maher and Mrs Bird it was great and very tasty! The Marian Hall looked brilliant with all the harvest art work on display.
In the afternoon there was even more fun! We had a little harvest sale and Year 6 got to sell the things. We raised lots of money for CAFOD thanks to everyone’s generosity.

On Monday, Mrs Bell (a former teacher at Alton Convent) came into school to talk to Y6 about her visits to St Joseph’s School in Varanasi, India. Like our own school. St Joseph’s was founded by the sisters of Our Lady of Providence. There are many other similarities between the two schools. For instance, they study similar subjects each day including two languages (we learn English and French; at St Joseph’s, they learn English and Hindi). They work very hard indeed, they wear school uniform and they enjoy art, drama and music. Just like us, they love chocolate! Mrs Bell brought us a selection of beautifully drawn cards and lots of photos showing the children dressed in their smart new school uniform and enjoying an open-air assembly.

On Tuesday 30th September the 5th Year travelled to St Lucy's Convent in Medstead for a day's retreat and reflexion. Although the day was wet and cold and we did not get chance to walk around the stunning gardens at St Lucy's, this did not end our activities, we found plenty to do!

We started the day with a few simple activities to get ourselves warmed up, these included arranging ourselves in birthday order and in height order symmetrically, with the tallest in the middle, all without talking! We coped surprisingly well and got ready for the rest of the day. We took a quiz about the facts of water in the world, moving about to different parts of the room to show our answers. We were thrown in to the deep end, but the answers to the questions really sunk in, for instance we learnt that the amount of water used in one toilet flush in the UK is the equivalent to how much water, on average, a single person in Gambia uses in one day. We were then put into groups and given a pack which contained information about aspects of water, such as facts and real-life stories; we then created a presentation to display the facts and stories which we found. This helped us to share information and resulted in news stories, role plays and raps!