CLASS

Staffing

I have pleasure in announcing that Mr Jake Williams has been appointed as our new Mathematics teacher. We are negotiating with his current school to determine when he will be able to commence at the College. I am confident Mr Williams will be a great asset to our Class team and will make a positive contribution to the broader College as well. We are anticipating Mr Williams will start at the beginning of Term 4 or possibly later this term.  

I must take the opportunity to thank our current staff who have been willing to increase their teaching loads and have committed to teaching the Mathematic classes until a permanent teacher could be appointed. This has enabled each class to have one teacher who is able to provide continuity and accountability from lesson to lesson, thus ensuring the students' educational outcomes are maximised. To Mel Butler, Lauren Day and Katie Franco, thank you for your commitment to the students and their Mathematical outcomes. Your extra effort is greatly appreciated by College Administration and I am sure by parents and students as well. 

Memoirs

The Year 11 students have been busy in English writing their memoirs. Whilst these are an assessed piece of work, a major motivation has been to also enter their memoirs into the ABC’s Heywire Competition. 

Entries must be a true story about some aspect of the student’s life. The competition is open to students in regional, rural and remote Australia and is aimed at giving young people ‘a voice’ about the unique challenges and experiences they face living in rural areas. Students initially participated in a special session to introduce the Heywire competition and get them thinking about what they could write about. The students' memoirs were due for submission this week. Mrs Browning and Mrs Dennison have indicated that they have seen some great stories developing over the last week or two and they are now looking forward to reading the completed memoirs. 

The winners of the Heywire Competition, from across Australia, will have the opportunity to work with ABC producers and have their story featured on the ABC. The winners will also get to be involved in a Youth Summit in Canberra.  I look forward to hearing the results of the competition and hopefully being able to read some of our students' memoirs.

Year 10 Biology

Students are studying Biology this term and they are consolidating some concepts about cells with a quick interactive game. 

This week they have begun their first scientific investigation to determine which type of fruit contains the greatest amount of DNA. To do this, students extracted DNA from strawberries, bananas, rockmelon and kiwi fruit and compared the volume of each. 

Can you guess which one has the most? It's strawberries, because they have 8 copies of each chromosome, meaning they have lots of DNA present in each cell.