Activities
A host of extracurricular activities is available for pupils, including plays and drama, sports teams, quiz teams, many subject-related societies, and a Combined Cadet Force contingent (Army and RAF sections).
The school has a close relationship with its sister school, Queen Mary's High School. Pupils regularly collaborate to stage plays and the two schools participate in a German exchange every year with a school in the town of Biedenkopf.
Many trips are run throughout the year, many of them international. Pupils, in recent years have had the opportunity to travel to places such as France, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Italy, New Zealand, China, Morocco, Iceland and Alabama.
In sport, the school's Under 18 and Under 16 hockey teams both won the Staffordshire Cup for their respective age groups in the same season.
QMGS also hosted the national finals of Junior Schools' Challenge quiz on 24 June 2007, with a team from the school winning the Plate Final. In 2008, the school hosted and reached the national final, losing in the final. In 2012, they hosted a semi-final against Hereford Cathedral School only losing by one question (610-600).
The school is the only school in the country to have won the UKMT Junior Maths Team Competition twice, doing so in successive years. The competition attracts over 1000 schools every year.
The school has a plaque in St George's Church, Ypres, to honour the ex pupils of the school who died in the Ypres Salient and the Somme, during World War One. The plaque was paid for by the QM club, and was formally unveiled during the Year 9 Battlefields trip. QMGS was the last school ever to be allowed to have a plaque.
Every year, Year 7 and the senior prefects visit Westminster Abbey, London to commemorate their founder on the Friday closest to July 6.
Read more about this topic: Queen Mary's Grammar School
Famous quotes containing the word activities:
“Love and work are viewed and experienced as totally separate activities motivated by separate needs. Yet, when we think about it, our common sense tells us that our most inspired, creative acts are deeply tied to our need to love and that, when we lack love, we find it difficult to work creatively; that work without love is dead, mechanical, sheer competence without vitality, that love without work grows boring, monotonous, lacks depth and passion.”
—Marta Zahaykevich, Ucranian born-U.S. psychitrist. “Critical Perspectives on Adult Women’s Development,” (1980)
“No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“When mundane, lowly activities are at stake, too much insight is detrimental—far-sightedness errs in immediate concerns.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)