Deputy Principal News: Enrichment of Learning

At St Joseph's, we pride ourselves on the quality of the teaching and learning that takes place in our classrooms each day. Up to date research of best practice informs all of our teaching and learning approaches, and we take pride in the assessment data that continues to indicate that our students, both individually, and as cohorts, are making strong progress and growth against the curriculum outcomes.

Whilst all lessons in Reading, Writing and Maths from Prep to Year Six provide extension opportunities, we recognise the importance of offering enriching and extension learning opportunities in programs and competitions run externally from the school. These competitions are typically offered to senior primary school-age students offer them the opportunity to test themselves against students from across Australia and New Zealand.

While we aim to ensure that these programs compliment the rich learning already taking part in the classroom. When practical, we aim for our students take part in these opportunities during scheduled classtime, however, quite often our students have to give up their lunch times in order to take part and practice. We're incredibly proud of so many of our senior students' willingness to take part in these initiatives and enrichment opportunities and look forward to continuing to share their progress and results across the rest of 2024.

Term Two

Maths Olympiad: Students competing in the Maths Olympiad complete four tests across the year, each containing five questions. Alongside the tests, we run a unique, school-based competition where students work in teams to develop their problem solving skills and answer Maths-Olympiad style questions which require them to apply their strong Mathematical thinking and reasoning skills. This runs from the beginning of Term Two until the end of Term Three. 30 students each year from St Joseph's are selected to compete in the Maths Olympiad based on their assessment data. Last year one of our former pupils got a perfect score. She was one of 221 students in Australia and New Zealand, from the nearly 38,000 that competed, to achieve this milestone. 

Da Vinci Decathlon: This year we took part in the Da Vinci Decathlon, a school-based event held at Korowa Girls Grammar. Eight students in Year Six were selected to take part in this event, where they took part in 10 learning challenges across the day, based on a range of subjects such as Science, Mathematics, Ideation, Poetry and Code Breaking. The students prepared for this by giving up an hour of break time each day to gain an understanding of the types of questions they would be faced with, and strategies that could assist them.

Design, Engineer and Construct: Another initiative we are taking part in this year is the 'Design, Engineer and Construct' challenge. For this enrichment opportunity, the students are competing against groups from around the world to design a train station for the athlete's village for the 2032 Brisbane Olympics. For this challenge, the students need to work together to read and interpret mapping and geographical data to plan the ideal location, ensure it meets community expectations, design the station and compose a ten page report on their reasoning. Our students are using Minecraft Education in order to design the station, as well as a range of mapping software to plan the ideal location. A huge thanks to Kate 

Ramsey who has been a huge driver of this initiative.

Term Three

Tournament of the Minds: Our students will take part in this competition midway through Term Three. During the Tournament of the Minds, students work in a group of seven students for six weeks every lunchtime to develop a novel solution to a given problem. The problems come in one of four categories: Social Sciences, The Arts, STEM and Language and Literature, and the students must nominate which category they would like to take part in. The students present their solution, which must go for seven minutes, during their presentation day at Deakin University. 

Ethical Olympiad: This is an enrichment opportunity we are yet to take part in, but we are excited to embrace. The Ethical Olympiad is a debating competition that will take place in Term Three. Five students are selected from each school to take part, and they are given several real-world literature prompts in which they must argue both sides of. The prompts they're to argue focus on leadership, the greater good, friendship, honesty and artificial intelligence. During this competion, the debates will take place online via Zoom, and we will compete against schools from Melbourne, interstate, and internationally.

While these external opportunities are mainly tailored to students in Years Five and Six, this is generally the nature of these programs, with not as many options tailored to students in the younger year levels of primary school. However, we are looking in bring some of the learning from these wonderful programs and competitions into localised opportunities for our younger students. In particular, the Design, Engineer and Construct enrichment program has the potential to open up the door for come additional online design learning and programming to take place in our middle school in Terms Three and Four. Keep an eye out for some future initiatives in this space for our middle year students over the next few weeks. We also look forward to continuing to highlight the amazing work our students are completing in this enrichment space.

Tom Hartney

Deputy Principal and Learning and Teaching Leader