What is Summer School like at Summer Boarding Courses? Week 3

Week 3 is now a wrap and we are swiftly moving into our last 3 weeks of Summer Boarding Courses. Whilst Headington Oxford and SBC Oxford are drawing their first cycle of students to a close, Oxford College and SBC Canford are in full swing with their second cycle of students!

What is Summer School like at Summer Boarding Courses? Let’s find out…

Read on to discover the highlights of our Summer Schools this week; including a day of punting in Oxford, plenty of exploration in London, a spotlight on our Coding course and Headington Oxford’s Time to Shine presentations!

What is Summer School like at SBC?

Every week this year we are coming out with a blog post highlighting the best moments of the week, so you can gain a deeper insight into what really happens at our Summer Schools throughout England.

This week’s post is taking a deeper look into all the fun afternoon and evening activities that happen across our Summer Schools. Read on to find out what happens when our students are outside their lessons.

Highlights of Week 3

The fascinating lessons, fun activities and varied excursions have continued to be in full swing this week across the campuses. Let’s take a look at the highlights of this week!

Students enjoy an afternoon of punting in Oxford

What does one do in Oxford when visiting for the day? Yes, there’s the fascinating colleges to explore, plenty of architecture to adore and endless twists and turns through the tiny streets with many a famous sight to behold! Yet one of our most favourite activities to enjoy during our Oxford day out is punting!

A punt is a long, narrow boat that is moved along the water by a person standing at one end of it and pushing it forwards with a long pole. The pole is pushed down into the river bed to give the boat momentum.

Steering can be a little tricky at first, but with a little patience and practice, it becomes easier! Luckily, our students from SBC Canford and SBC Oxford had the professionals at Magdalen Bridge Boathouse helping them out. Oxford College however were challenged to learn and try it for themselves!

Pizza Time!

After punting, SBC Oxford went to enjoy some delicious slices of pizza. Yummy! SBC Canford also had fun watching Aladdin at the cinema and having free time to go shopping and explore all of the souvenir shops. Harry Potter sweets and Oxford University merchandise ended up in our shopping bags!

Headington Oxford enjoy bowling and a day out in London

Meanwhile this week, Headington Oxford students have been having a lot of fun during excursions and evening activities. Our students went out in Oxford to play bowling and showed us some very interesting tactics and throws with the balls!

There’s also an arcade at the bowling alley, so there was plenty of opportunities to play the games and win some tokens to be exchanged for prizes!

In London, Headington Oxford students had a jam-packed day full of travelling by boat along the River Thames, seeing a birds-eye view of our capital from the London Eye and spending some time in Convent Garden enjoying the street performers, the beautiful covered market and the specialist boutique shops with delightful and unique products inside.

Find out more about the excursions Headington Oxford students enjoy here

Lessons throughout the mornings

Throughout the mornings across our campuses, our students are busy studying English and focusing on the specific specialist subjects they choose to study more in depth.

The variety of learning experiences and topics across our campuses is wonderfully varied!

Here are some of the subjects you can choose to study for the first half of the day at Summer Boarding Courses across our campuses! Click on the school to discover more about the subjects we offer.

SBC Canford (ages 11-15)

At SBC Canford, students receive 15 hours of tuition per week and have six study options to choose from: General English, Summer Study, Introduction to STEM, Introduction to Business and Introduction to International Relations.

Headington Oxford (ages 13-16)

Headington Oxford Summer School offers students 15 hours of English tuition per week. Students can choose between our General English, Summer Study, Global Young Leaders or SBC Coding courses.

SBC at Eton College (ages 12-16)

SBC at Eton College offers students 15 hours of subject-specific tuition each week. Students can further their knowledge of key mainstream school subjects in Mathematics, Science, Humanities or General English.

Oxford College (ages 15-17)

Students at Oxford College receive 15 hours subject-specific tuition each week. Subjects at Oxford College that our students can choose from are: Business & Leadership, General English, Engineering, Medicine, Politics & Economics, Natural Sciences, International Relations, History of Art, Law, Foundation English, English Literature & Creative Writing and Academic Discovery.

Meet our Coding teacher at Headington Oxford

This week we are putting our spotlight on Finn who is teaching SBC Coding at Headington Oxford this year. This is what he had to say…

‘I’ve been learning coding from a young age. I started taking apart computers and micro-controllers and tweaking and programming them to see how they worked and what was possible! This fascination continued into University and here I am today as a Manufacturing Engineer and Coder who is excited to teach the next generation about how coding can change their lives and others.

The SBC Coding course entails learning about certain programming languages:

• Scratch (a drag and drop language) where students learn HTML and CSS
• Python (a scripting language useful for complex mathematics and machine learning)
• Game Maker Language (GML for game development)

We had a lesson related to microbits (a small credit card sized computer with sensors on) where students experimented with ideas. It was brilliant to see what they came up with based on what they have learnt so far.

One student created a computer game with fruit. By touching certain fruits they could navigate left or right through a computer game. Another student set up a remote weather station!

I see the future of coding as very important if you want to work in technology or the Sciences. Many more jobs are going to become automated and coding will become more prevalent in our lives’.

Explore our SBC Coding course here

Headington Oxford present a successful Time to Shine!

We are proud of our Headington Oxford students this week who successfully presented their Time to Shine presentations to their peers and teachers this week.

Time to Shine is a weekly opportunity for students to practice their English speaking and teamwork by working together to share their ideas from what they have been learning throughout the week.

Presentations included Summer Study showing us a Lost World that they had created. General English gave some excellent product pitches including an app that automatically shows you how much money is in your wallet in real time. We also saw some very creative video making. At the end, we heard some thought-provoking answers to a survey concerning morals and ethics that our Global Young Leaders conducted.

See Headington Oxford’s Time to Shine presentation highlights on our Instagram!