Friday July 30th, 2010
Learning Centre: We have managed somehow to have a room in the English faculty set aside (it originally have some damp in it) and now the Literacy Committee and the Learning Support Team have arranged to turn the room into a reading room/learning centre. Our STLA Carl Wegener will be the person who uses the room most often when he works with small groups of students who have literacy issues. At other times it will be used by teachers who have donated periods to assist other students in reading and general literacy. The room will be painted, will have some comfortable furniture in it and some computers. In today's society students need to be literate in all forms of communication; both digital and analogue. Hopefully this new room will go a long way to promoting the literacy of all students within the school.
Awards Ceremonies: The school is currently having its semester awards ceremonies for student achievement. As an adjunct to this, we will be including awards earned by students through the new merit system introduced by our AIM (or PBL) committee. For this semester we are recognising all students who have achieved an AIM award at the Bronze level or above. In the future, only students who achieve Silver or Gold awards will be invited as well as those who have achieved excellence in academic results. Bronze awards will be issued at either school assemblies or year assemblies. These will be issued through the Student Adviser for the year group. I know this time there were some mistakes made by the school. We have acted on those and have changed our system accordingly. We apologise to the parents and students who have missed their name on a program or have missed being informed about an award. We can quickly reprint a program to accomodate any omissions. Students who missed an award will be able to collect that award at the next excellence assembly.
Formal Examinations: As I have previously mentioned the Trial HSC examinations for Year 12 are about to begin and the final Preliminary examinations for Year 11 occur at the end of the term. Both formal examinations are extremely important for our senior students. We recognise this time of year can be a very stressful time especially for Year 12. If your son or daughter is not coping well at the moment please contact us. Once recognised we can use some of the resources at hand in an attempt to overcome the stress.
HSC Music Performances: I was pleased to be invited to the HSC Music class's performance on Tuesday afternoon. The total performances lasted about an hour and certainly showcased the many different talents of our Year 12 students. These students have spent many hours practicing their selected pieces.