Micro Habits and Learning

Micro habits are small, bite-sized habits that are easy to incorporate into your daily routine. They are designed to be simple and achievable, making building and sustaining positive behaviour changes easier over time. Micro habits can be particularly useful for improving learning.

Here's how micro habits can help improve learning for this age group and ways to encourage and build them:

Study micro habits:

• Set a timer for 10-15 minutes and commit to focused studying or homework during that time.
• Read one page or section of a textbook or study material daily.
• Write down one new thing learned from each class or study session.

Micro habits for organisation:

• Spend 5 minutes at the end of each day organising notes, materials, and backpacks for the next day.
• Create a designated study space and keep it tidy by taking 2 minutes to straighten it up before and after use.

Micro habits for active learning:

• After each class or study session, spend 2-3 minutes summarising or explaining the key points to a parent or sibling.
• Create flashcards or practice questions for 10 minutes after covering a new topic.

Micro habits for self-care:

• Take a 5-minute break every hour to stretch, hydrate, or practice deep breathing exercises.
• Get up 15 minutes earlier to start the day with a healthy breakfast and mindful preparation.

For parents:

Encourage and model micro habits by doing them together or sharing your own micro habits.

• Set reminders or use apps to help track and reinforce micro habits.
• Celebrate and acknowledge small wins and progress made through micro habits.
• Adjust and modify micro habits to ensure they remain achievable and effective.

The key to making micro habits work is consistency and repetition. By breaking down larger goals into smaller, manageable steps, students and parents can develop sustainable habits that improve learning, organisation, and overall well-being over time.

Computing News

For World Earth Day our robotics group went to UCL Marshgate to demonstrate the progress they have been making with the robotic Jellyfish and to deliver a series of workshops for primary school children. The students showed the primary school students how to use servo motors to get a jellyfish tentacle moving and also talked to them about prototyping and their actual Jellyfish project which is coming along nicely and will be showcased as part of UCL Engineering week in July.

Further developments in the UCL robotics project

As part of the research project, we have been working on how we can publish and provide materials for other schools to use as part of the teaching of robotics. We hope that all the lesson plans, resources and end products created will be able to be shared with other schools across the country. To help with this, we had a web designer coming to the school to do a web design session with our year 11 Computing students, where they analysed existing websites and evaluated what they liked and disliked about them and then provided valuable input into what a website for the UCL robotics project would look like. The website should be up and running by the Autumn term. We will publish details when it has gone live.

Digital diet

We had a number of students in year 8 and 10 take part in a discussion activity with researchers from UCL working on another project called digital diet which is looking to support and inform education strategy around digital and social media.

AWS APP competition

We finally completed the ambitious task of getting all of our year 8 students to take part in the AWS web APPS competition. We had excellent pieces of work - some of which can be viewed here. Unfortunately, we could only submit one entry and, sadly, did not get in the top 3 in the country. Having said this, some of the ideas would make fantastic APPs which we would hope someone will take on to develop.

• Service squirrel
• Carbon track
• Recycle it
• Safe buddy

Camden Girls Dazzle at the Emirates

A squad of six Camden Girls were given the opportunity by Arsenal football club to do battle with other north London schools on the famous Emirates pitch which, just a few days earlier, had hosted the men’s team in a tragic end to their season.
This didn’t dampen our girls’ spirits, however, as they dealt Clapton Girls a fatal blow 2-1 in their first match with two thunder strikes from our very own Miedema, Juno assisted by our Year 8 superstar Hana, sparking wild celebrations from Camden’s answer to Mikel Arteta, Mr O’Connell.

The second game was more difficult, however, as the girls came up against stiff opposition from mostly older girls from Le Sainte Union. Camden still managed to score with our Hana popping up to restore pride. Mia, who claims she doesn’t really play football, put her body in the line to perform a wonderful block against the able striker, and Catalina was kept very busy in goal with shots coming from all angles, keeping out all but the most superb strikes.

In the final game, the squad faced Hackney’s Cardinal Pole in what became one of the most one-sided matches ever played on this glorious pitch. It seemed as though a giant magnet was placed behind the Cardinal Pole goal as the Camden Girls peppered the goalkeeper with shots for the full 10 minutes. In what must surely be the performance of her life, the Cardinal Pole keeper saved everything, leaving Juno and Hana very frustrated indeed.
Yeleen was pulling the strings in centre mid-feeding the strikers, and Karis kept things secure at the back, but the team couldn’t keep out a rogue shot which found the bottom corner and Pole robbed Camden of a much deserved victory.

Overall, a great morning spent at the home of football and the girls did Camden proud.

They look forward to a phone call from Arsenal Women’s manager Jonas Eidevall for an invitation to training very soon.

Music Department Request

The music department is asking for a donation of two high-hat cymbals. If you have some spare and can donate them, please contact nhirsch@csg.school.
Thank you

Year 12 A Level Music

On Tuesday evening, the Year 12 A Level Music students gave a spectacular solo concert in the Music Hall.

High quality performances of a huge array of styles were given on trumpet, trombone, violin, cello, recorder, flute, piano and voice. 

Many congratulations to all the performers!

Ms Birchall-Sampson – Music Teacher

Assembly Speaker - 20 May
Gaia Vince - Author and scientific journalist

On Monday, renowned author and scientific journalist Gaia Vince visited The Camden School for Girls in order to give insight into her career, the path she took in life and her views on numerous contemporary issues such as the climate crisis and immigration.

Gaia Vince discussed how, from a young age she felt unsure about her path in the future. After being passionate about both the sciences and the arts in secondary school, she was faced with a difficult decision when it came to choosing her A-Levels. Ultimately, she went down a classic scientific route, studying the three sciences and maths, as she believed that she could always keep up her reading and writing outside of formal education. This choice, therefore, allowed Vince to keep her options open- an overarching theme that ran throughout her life story. As Vince says, it is important to keep one's options open as it is impossible to know what path one will desire in the future: “There’s literally no Mystic Meg I think she’s dead”.

Vince then went on to study Chemistry and Physics at King's College London, again in order to keep her future options open, stating “You only have one life” and thus should not waste it going down the wrong path. She took a year at the University of Bordeaux as part of this degree, which she used to broaden her horizons. Over the course of her entire undergraduate degree, Vince kept up her writing, and was a student journalist as well as being part of many college journalism societies.

Subsequent to her baccalaureate studies, she embarked upon the pursuit of a magisterial degree in the discipline of Engineering. Notwithstanding, her fervent desire to explore futurity and to position herself at the vanguard of scrutinising and chronicling the protean metamorphoses within the scientific corpus, persisted with unmitigated intensity. At this critical juncture, Vince initiated a peregrination to India with the purpose of engaging in philanthropic activities as an antecedent to her subsequent expatriation to the Commonwealth of Australia. Subsequently, she resolved to undertake an additional advanced postgraduate Master's degree in Journalism, thereby further entrenching her unwavering commitment to the erudition and dissemination of scientific epistemology.

Deciding not to narrow herself down with a Phd, Vince’s years of education came to an end with her first formal employment as an editor for the New Scientist and then the journal Nature.

Immersed in information and articles on the newest breakthroughs in Science and change in our modern world, Vince “realised for a while that there was something uniting all of these stories, and that something was us!”. This cognizance lead Vince to leave her role at Nature and become an investigative journalist, ever-drive by the question of what may have lead humans, “just another African ape”, to become a dominant and world defining species, namely through our impacts on the environment and the consequential creation of an entire new geological epoch; the anthropocene, and the effects that this would have on people and the environment globally.

Vince secured a one-way conveyance to Kathmandu with the express purpose of initiating a comprehensive inquiry into the multifaceted dimensions of climatological transformations. She embarked on her investigative odyssey by conducting a series of penetrating and meticulous interviews, initially within the territorial bounds of Nepal, subsequently broadening the ambit of her research to encompass a global purview. This entailed the scrupulous documentation and curation of subjective experiential data from a plethora of diverse populations, each grappling with the heterogeneous and pervasive impacts of climatic vicissitudes. In the aftermath of amassing an extensive repository of anecdotal evidence, traversing locales as disparate as the Ethiopian highlands to the Mexican lowlands, Vince authored her seminal opus, "Adventures in the Anthropocene." This work serves as an erudite and comprehensive compendium, meticulously delineating the heterogenous human experiences and adaptive strategies in response to the advent of this nascent epoch, ubiquitously referred to as the Anthropocene.

However, Vince remained unsatisfied with her question on just how human, this ‘smart ape’ became this world-altering force, so went on to write her second book, Transcendence, about human evolution.

Vince then worked in the television industry, presenting Inside Science and making “Escape to Costa Rica” for Channel Four before becoming deeply intrigued about the ever-growing importance of climate refugees, and how migration could be used to solve growing issues of aging populations in the developed world- she believes that ‘The most important resource in the economy is human labour. Birth rates are falling- we need more people’ and that an ever growing tide of climate refugees could be the answer to this dilemma. After an extended period of research, Vince produced her most recent book, Nomad’s Century, on this topic.

Ultimately, Gaia Vince stands as  an example of literary and journalistic excellence, her sagacity in the esoteric domains of natural philosophy and environmentalism having achieved widespread and enduring renown. Most celebrated for her magnum opus, "Adventures in the Anthropocene," which secured the preeminent Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books in 2015, Vince’s unparalleled capacity for expounding upon abstruse scientific doctrines has indubitably entrenched her as a luminary of the highest order in her discipline.

Vince’s favourite thing about her career so far has been the variation, excitement and intrigue that it has brought her, and has been defined by a winding and indecisive path to success.

Griffith - Sixth Form Senior Prefect

DofE Bronze Day Training 

On Sunday, May 5 the second group of Bronze Duke of Edinburgh had their inside school practice. It was a day dedicated to checking our equipment and learning how to use it.

The day started at 10am with a briefing showing us how to put a 60ml rucksack on without damaging your back. Then we finished planning our route, making route cards and plotting the journey on the maps whilst our bags and sleeping mats were being checked to make sure they would be suitable.

Once we had finished, we had a short break and headed out to the grass space where we attempted to put our tents up for the first time. After struggling to fit our tents back in their bags, we watched a demonstration on how to cook the pasta, and then it was time for us to make our lunch. Once we had eaten and cleared up, we were dismissed

Coco 9M