Inverurie Academy host virtual transition day
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As Primary 7's going into their first year in Secondary in Inverurie missed out on their usual five day transition day before the start of the Summer holidays, staff at Inverurie Academy came up with the idea of creating their own virtual transition day so the new S1 pupils were still able to see around the school before returning.
Transition + has taken place each year since 2017 at Inverurie Academy with up to 80 new S1 pupils normally attending during the last week of the school holidays to take part in different sports and activities linked to the extra-curricular and wider community programmes at Inverurie Academy.
As all schools across Aberdeenshire closed on March 20 this year due to Coronavirus and the current lockdown situation, this meant that schools like Inverurie Academy had to cancelled all events taking place.
Inverurie Academy's Transition + Virtual 2020 ran from Monday August 3 to Wednesday 5 and allowed new S1 pupils to take part in online activities and engage with each other over three days.
Following a similar timetable to the original one they normally use, the school used an online classroom where the pupils received an option each which was either an informative video, a challenge or a sporting activity they could do at home and were able to ask questions about starting at the Academy.
Contributions to the videos included former pupils including Olympian swimmer Hannah Miley.
Active Schools Lead Co-ordinator for Inverurie Academy, Malcolm Grant, said: “As it’s the first time we have had to use an online option to run Transition + we don’t have a comparator but we saw just under 40 of our new S1 pupils from Inverurie Academy taking part and uploading examples of themselves taking part in the different challenges and they have been chatting to each other about the move to the academy.
“ We have also had some great video contributions from former pupil, Olympian and Commonwealth Champion swimmer Hannah Miley via the Inverurie Youth Sports Foundation along with some internal contributions from the council’s waste team, linked to how everyone can look after the new Inverurie Community Campus when it opens.
“We also had an input from the Libraries team within Live Life Aberdeenshire and our colleagues from Community Learning and Development were able to take questions at the start of the week and provide the pupils with some answers and guidance to some of the normal concerns that are always there ahead of the first day at the academy.”
Pupils will be returning to the older building as work has not yet been completed on the new Community Campus, which at present is expected to welcome pupils from the Academy and St Andrew's in October.
