Year 9 News

As always there is a lot happening with our Year 9s and the term has been jam-packed with lots of excursions and opportunities for our students. I’m excited to get to share some of these things with our community. The students have settled into the term and we are seeing lots of positive learning happening across the year level. We are seeing lots of KPA’s (Kurnai Positive Acknowledgements). These green Compass reports acknowledge the positive learning behaviours our students have shown, which I share each week with our students at assembly. Please continue to support us in acknowledging your child’s great work to them about these KPAs at home. The Year 9s have also been involved in visits to the Technology School in Morwell and personal development programs run by The Man Cave and Flourish Girls.

LBU Reward Lunch

At the end of last term, we acknowledged the strong finish to Term 1 our students have achieved by giving students who achieved an LBU of above 3.5 a certificate at assembly. We had many students across the year level get above a 3.5, or get very close, which is amazing to see. As well as being acknowledged at assembly and receiving a certificate to put in their professional portfolio, students who achieved a score above 3.5 will also be rewarded with a sundae bar where they will get to create their own sundae to enjoy. The next round of LBUs are due and I look forward to seeing the amazing effort our students have put in recently be acknowledged in those reports. 

Don Valley School of Leadership

Six of our Year 9 students, Nicola MacGregor, Armani Matthews, Arabella Altavas, Claire Lindsay, Harry Forbes and Toby Mountjoy, have started their 8-week program at the Don Valley School of Leadership and have all settled in well. They are e-mailing me their ideas for programs they will be designing while at the leadership school, which they will implement when they return to our school in Term 3. I am excited to see what these programs will look like as well as the growth they will have while at the camp. We wish them well with the experience and can’t wait to see them when they get back.

Year 9 Camp to Melbourne

The Year 9 camp to Melbourne is beginning to come together and I look forward to providing this opportunity to our students. The camp will be running from the 14th of August to the 18th of August. I will be providing more details to students and their families over the next couple of weeks. Please stay tuned and get involved once this event becomes live on Compass.

Tech School 

How to Make a Difference

On Thursday 4 May, Year 9s attended the ‘How to Make a Difference’ program at the Tech School in Morwell. The program had links to Critical and Creative Thinking, and Personal and Social Capability.

The facilitators discussed how well-known companies such as Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook all started out as a simple idea and grew into a global phenomenon. They were able to do this for one simple reason; they identified and met the needs of a user group in a way that was different from anything else that was available at the time. Whether you are looking to make your millions, or change the world for good, developing the ability to identify and meet genuine user needs is a skill that can set students up for life. It is also a skillset that is used across all industry areas and can be used to start a successful enterprise.

The program introduced students to using the Design Thinking process to meet a user’s need. Through the program they learned by solving an identified problem for a classmate, moving through the empathy, define, ideation, prototype, and testing stages of the Design Thinking process. Students learned about building knowledge of a user through interviews and research, and how to use this information to identify the key problem to address. Students were taught ways to generate a wide range of ideas and how to narrow these down to practical solutions. They learned the purpose and key elements of prototyping before presenting their solution back to their user for testing and feedback.

Thank you to all involved for a terrific day.

“Quite a few students stepped outside their comfort zones. It was honestly refreshing to talk in front of a group of people with such certainty. The lessons and ideas the tech school introduced were quite interesting topics that required a decent amount of thinking and creativity. The seating was comfortable to say the least, as well as the technology being easy and fun to use.” - Leah Simpson

“We got to create different things and explore out of our comfort zones. 

The iPads were good and so were the pens that you could draw on it with, my friends and I really enjoyed it, we spent the second lunch break just drawing and finishing up on our ideas and designs.” - Kyra Ottey

Art 

Say it! Creating an impact with Art

Students have spent time learning about the impacts of war on society, the individual, and the environment. In light of the one-year anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine war, students have built a model of a city showing the damage that can happen and the possible interactions that may occur between civilians and soldiers. 

Concerns or queries

If you have any concerns, or queries about any of the items mentioned above, Year 9 student matters, or just general inquiries, please do not hesitate to give the Year 9 team a call on (03) 5132 3700 or email Matthew Suter.        

Matthew.Suter@education.vic.gov.au