Update from Director of Student Engagement

Dear Families, Students and Community Members,

After such a long period of remote learning, we were so pleased to welcome back all our students from Years 8-10 to on site learning this week. On Monday, returning students participated in a day of activities to connect with their classmates, which was very enjoyable. In this same week, we farewell our Year 12 students, who have their final assembly this Thursday. We wish them all the best as they prepare for their future endeavours or continue their revision for final exams.

In Week 7 of this term, the College will again hold our Student Led Conferences for students in Years 7-9. Student Led Conferences are a celebration of the year’s work and are a compulsory part of the program - students must complete their conference to demonstrate their readiness to progress to the next year level. The College will send a letter to families next week to explain conferences in more detail, as well as additional details of the Week 7 program and the 2021 Head Start program, starting in week 8.

Despite remote learning this year, students have had the opportunity to participate in numerous virtual student engagement activities. We continued to run House Competitions remotely, which included RSPCA Cupcake Day, Cross Country, a reading competition, Australia’s Biggest Morning Tea, a World Environment Day Art Competition and various physical challenges. Additionally, we introduced a new competition this year- Mordialloc College ISO Challenges, which involved a different challenge for students to complete at home each week including Household Olympics, a household scavenger hunt, best workstation set up and a lip syncing competition, to name a few. We have had excellent entries and our final competition concluded this week.

The MEX 2.0 program for Year 9 students was not able to continue in its usual format this year, so we made changes to accommodate for remote learning. We are so proud of the maturity shown by students in undertaking each task and the high quality of their work. Across the year, students completed four MEX units. One unit was ‘Looking Out,’ which involved students creating their own project idea and carrying it out to contribute positively to their community while in isolation. In Terms 2 and 3, all students completed the ‘Looking Within’ unit, which involved completing a different practical activity each week to contribute to maintaining positive wellbeing. Students learnt touch-typing skills, completed art works, made positive music playlists, learnt phrases in a foreign language and participated in physical and creative activities.

The annual College Crown Student Competition ran successfully throughout August and September. This competition encourages students to submit an original piece of work demonstrating their abilities in the following categories: Music, Photography, Visual Art, Performing Arts, Creative Writing, Design Technology and STEM. Once again, we had a significant number of high quality entries, which made judging the competition a very challenging task. Winners of each category and an overall winner have been selected and will be announced at a whole school assembly later this term.

Sally Mitchell

Director of Student Engagement