Science Week | Book Week

Science Week

Dr. Zoe Beringer | Science Teacher

This year’s theme for National Science Week was “Innovations, Powering Future Industries”. 

Primary School scientists put their thinking caps on to compete in a daily science quiz across Years 1 to 6. We were impressed by their excellent answers and thoughtful insights into a range of questions from different branches of science. Congratulations to Miss Girling’s class, who won the Y4-6 division, and to Miss Maguire’s class, who won the Y1-3 division! 

Many of our students also entered the Science Week poster competition with posters that showed how they think the world will look in 100 years. There were many entries, and some of the posters showed an amazing artistic effort as well as some serious thoughts about our future. Congratulations to all the poster winners:

In addition, two students produced posters that were incredible artworks in their own right. These students received special awards for “Best Art”. Congratulations to Anya in Year 5 and Parinaaz in Year 1.

A special thanks to our wonderful Art and Music Captains for this term, Billie and Addison. They worked hard to administer the quizzes, helped mark the entries and helped judge the poster competition.   Well done, everyone and keep exploring this awesome world!

Our Year 10 students visited SciTech and attended various science interactive activities and presentations like the Power Trip Show. In the planetarium, students watched the Tilt show and learned how the Earth's tilt is responsible for the different seasons. Students also had the opportunity to become engineers for the day as they participated in the Rio Tinto Tinkering Workshop, designing crew capsules for a spaceship and testing their prototypes.

Book Week

Mr Raymond Andrew | Head of English 7-12

The acclaimed Science writer Annie Murphy Paul argues that children who read are smarter and more empathetic. The English Department has been inspired by these words. We adopted a back-to-basics approach to reading in our Book Week activities this year, organising a six-week long reading campaign called Drop Everything and Read, DEAR for short. All our students in Year 7-11 were assigned one period of reading in both English and HASS classes, once a week. Students were free to bring their own books or use books provided by teachers. Nothing complicated, just children reading. 

We were greatly encouraged by how our students responded. Although focussed reading was a challenge, only a very small minority resisted reading. The vast majority were keen to read and explore different texts. As the project progressed, we observed that students were able to read uninterrupted for almost 30 minutes. This simple skill will greatly benefit them in life, the classroom, TAFE and university, and the workforce. To our surprise, many students have asked that we continue with DEAR in Term 4. Coincidentally, The King’s College is introducing Renaissance Reading in Term 4 2023. Renaissance Reading is a reading library and software that offers students texts to read and monitors their reading. It tells us what their reading age is and tells us how they are progressing. It offers priceless data to teachers, particularly the Responsive Education team, so that we can better empower student learning. 

As is tradition, we ended Bookweek with Dress-up Day. This year, we held our first ever joint dress-up day with the Primary section, with the theme being ‘Heroes and Villains’, to celebrate literary heroes and villains and the love of reading. There was a good response from students, particularly in the Primary section, but it was the teachers who surprised, with some very elaborate and thoughtful efforts. 

Kylie C. 10G. was named Best Dressed Student for her very convincing rendition of Dr Octopus.

As a school, we have made some progress in encouraging our students to read. We are excited about how the project will grow further in 2024.