Learning  

Dear Parents /Guardians,

At this point in the term, students are settled into their classes, getting to know their teachers and understanding what is expected in each subject at their current year level. They may be starting to receive results of assessments feedback on their work. Students often find that there is an increase in expectations as they move into the next year level. This is normal as the academic rigour increases from year to year and can easily be seen by the amount of homework a student in each year level is expected to complete:

• Year 7                  45min to 1 ¼ hours
• Year 8                  1 hour to 1 ½ hours 
• Year 9                  1 ½  hours to 2 hours 
• Year 10               2 hours to 2.5 hours 
• Year 11               2.5 to 3 hours  
• Year 12               3 hours to 3.5 hours 

At the end of term, feedback on students’ approaches to learning will be provided in Compass in the form of mid-semester reports. This will focus on students’ organisation, participation, collaboration, response to feedback and homework completion. 

To help students with time management, we encourage students to create a study timetable outlining to be able to manage their homework expectations and any additional revision that may be needed. If a student doesn’t have any homework, we encourage them to review the work they have done during the day and week or to spend time reading and revising work.

We encourage your child to talk about what they have learned at school; articulating what they have learned that day and week helps students to synthesise what they have learned. If they can teach the concepts they have been learning then it shows an excellent understanding of these concepts. Teaching someone else is a good revision strategy for students leading into an assessment or revising their work. 

A famous quote by Ralph Nader is “Your best teacher is your last mistake”. This is great advice and at the Academy we realise that mistakes are a good thing, as long as we learn from them. We encourage all students to read the feedback they have been given and act upon it. Some examples include refining sentence structure, adding more detail, proofreading and checking grammar, adding more emphasis to a performance or redoing questions they have got wrong. It is also a good idea to discuss the feedback with a peer or the teacher who has provided the feedback. An additional piece of advice is when they have made these improvements, they retry it again in a week and again in a few weeks

NAPLAN

Year 7 and 9 students are currently completing their NAPLAN testing in Writing, Reading, Conventions of Language and Numeracy. Students who miss a NAPLAN session will be required to complete a catch up session. Students will receive emails and notifications about catch up sessions.

Debating Success

Congratulations to the Year 9 - 12 debaters who won their first competition of the year. Thank you to Sherine Baydoun for coordinating the debating teams and to Edwina Martin,  Fiona Tassone and Andrew McLeod for their work in preparing the teams. It was great to hear that students were supporting, learning from and providing feedback to each other. 

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Ms Lucy Neil

Deputy Principal, Learning & Teaching