Out and About

Checking out Chinatown

Selected Year 8 students of Chinese walked to Northbridge for “A Day in Chinatown”, an amazing excursion organised by the Chinese Language Teachers’ Association of WA (CLTAWA). Even though the forecast was rain, it turned out to be a beautiful sunny winter’s day, which we were very grateful for as we ended up covering nearly 7km on foot!

We had hoped to start with some bubble tea, but the shops weren’t open that early, so we backtracked to  the State Library where students spent some time exploring the Chinese language and children’s books in the Community Languages section. Learning a language is a long process, with minimal “instant gratification” so the students were encouraged to look for written characters they knew rather than be overwhelmed by the characters they didn’t know. They were pleasantly surprised to see many they recognised! 

Walking around Northbridge, students were encouraged to use their Chinese and were shown signs in Chinese at restaurants, a hair salon, bubble tea shops and a Chinese butcher. 

It is always fun to watch the students’ reaction when they realise they can understand the characters and even point out mistakes in translations. After a stop for some snacks at a Chinese supermarket, we arrived early at Moon Flower Chinese Restaurant for our dim sum lunch, so some of the students practiced their Chinese language skills with students from other schools while waiting. The dim sum lunch is always the most highly anticipated part of the day, so it was with much enthusiasm and chatter we enjoyed spring rolls, bao buns, deep-fried squid, shumai, steam prawned dumplings and egg tarts. 

Thank you to Mrs Sykiotis who was able to join us for part of the day and especially to the students who participated with great energy and enthusiasm.

Ms Danielle de Witt

Foreign Languages Coordinator

Focus on photography and furniture

Year 9 Design students ventured into the city to explore compositions with portrait photography. With so many great backdrops and opportunities to get bird’s eye view photos, collaborative teams cooperated in roles of model, photographer and props. It was a beautiful autumn day so natural lighting was abundant and their photos will now be enhanced in Adobe Lightroom.

In another city outing, Year 9 Design students visited Living Edge Perth’s furniture showroom in Queens St to admire high-end craftsmanship, test the furniture and take note of materials. What fun.

Ms Michelle Hyland

Art Teacher

To Infinite and Beyond!

The Binar X Co-Curricular program, run by Mr Dempers, with help from Mr Truong, is something the school has been fortunate enough to be chosen for as one out of seven schools in the country. 

It has allowed myself and a group of students to work on a satellite payload that will be sent into Lower Earth Orbit with Curtin University on a Space X rocket.

These past few months we have been working really hard on our mission concept and have decided on investigating the interactions between the Earth’s atmosphere, magnetosphere, and space time curvature. 

On Wednesday this week, a few of our group members went to Curtin University for our mission concept review presentation, where we shared our ideas with stakeholders and how we plan to execute our mission in front of the Binar X team, engineers, professors, and scientists. 

We got the opportunity to talk to and meet so many incredible people and gain some useful feedback for our mission, as well as meeting students from other schools who are also involved in the program. 

We can’t wait to work on and see our experiment be sent to space and released from the International Space Station over the next few years. 

Zara Jones

Year 10