Around the School

Attention, heroes and villains: 2025 Book Week is coming!

In keeping with all of our fabulous Book Week traditions, this year’s Book Week will bring 12 writer’s workshops to our campus, as part of our Festival of Writers. We have journalists explaining podcasting, dramaturges explaining Macbeth. We will be running workshops on Fantasy writing, as well as workshops on the art of the graphic novel as well as ATAR workshops on short short fiction and Year 12 composition. 

On Thursday, 19 June our Year 12 ATAR students will attend the Curtin ATAR English and English Literature Conference, a whole day of presentations and activities.

In addition to this, the English Department, in conjunction with the staff in The Laurence Library, will be running activities all week, such as inviting students to create their ideal reading space, create a quote wall, match the teacher to the novel, compose a flash fiction and compose a blurb to sell a short story. There are prizes for each of these activities, so make sure you keep an eye out next week when we announce these competitions.

On Tuesday, 17 June we will run our annual Book Week Dress Up. The theme for this year’s dress up is Heroes and Villains. The invitation to dress up is extended to all staff and students. We will be offering prizes for best and second-best costume, in three categories: Staff, Senior Students and Middle School.  We have seen fabulous costumes in recent years and believe that this year’s theme is likely to produce the best costumes ever. 

We look forward to seeing how each of you will respond to this creative challenge

You have 10 days to make it happen, so get busy!

Mr Damien Kerrigan

Head of Learning Area - 

English and Languages

Languages Week highlights

The aim of learning a foreign language is not just to communicate with others - but engage in fun cultural activities. So, for Languages Week, the Foreign Languages Department has provided students with opportunities to watch an animated short-film in Chinese, practice their origami skills, use mini-blocks to build bonsai trees, pandas and shiba-inu, and enjoy Chinese and Japanese meals from the cafeteria.

We also had a “Character Cooking Competition” where students were challenged to bake something which depicted either a Chinese ‘hanzi’ or Japanese ‘kanji’. It was very hard to determine a winner so we did a blind vote with the staff. Evie Craig-Harding won the Chinese section of the Baking comp and Harriet Breheny won the Japanese section. A huge thank you and well done to all the students who took the time to participate and show off their creations!

None of this could happen without the hard work of the staff to prepare everything, so a massive thank you to Mrs Sykiotis, Ms Belyea, Ms Bauer, Mr Lim and Ohm and the Café staff!

Mrs Danielle de Witt

Foreign Languages Coordinator