Houses at Holly Park

At Holly Park all of our children from year 1 to year 6 belong to one of our five houses. Siblings belong to the same house.

The ‘House system’ was set up at Holly Park over 10 years ago. Originally, the children and teachers put forward ideas about possible House names. Ideas such as planets, birds and famous people were put forward. The outcome of a vote resulted in the names of mythical beasts being chosen to represent the five houses.

Our five houses are :

  • Griffin – yellow
  • Hydra – blue
  • Phoenix – red
  • Unicorn – black
  • Dragon – green

Each house has two captains from year six. Here are this year’s:

Children at the school collect house points across each week for good effort, good manners, polite behaviour etc. These house points are added up each week. The winning house is presented with a cup for the week. Results are reported in the weekly newsletter.

We hold house challenges each year when the children from across the school work together in different age groupings within their houses to do various challenges to earn points for their house.

Past house challenges have included – choral verse, tower building, pancake races, relay races, poetry, a bake off and a potato Olympics.

At the junior sports day, the children race in house groups to earn points for their house.

House points are collected across the year and are added up to give a total .The house with the most points for the year is presented with the Margaret Maxwell Shield.

House Challenge

The theme of the house challenge was Performance Poetry. The children worked in house team groups. Each class began by watching a Michael Rosen video with tips for performing. They watched a few other poems too. They also did a warm up with a Julia Donaldson poem as a class/group. They thought about rhythm, speed, actions, volume etc. The groups were then given a poem to work on and to turn it into a performance.