From the Executive Principal

Andrew launches the New Home Ec Room and welcomes you to Term 2! 

Executive Principal Andrew Linke shows you the brand new Home Ec room and provides updates on the next building works taking place this term. He also invites Old Scholars to express interest in the new annual Ernabella trip aimed at distributing bibles to the Pitjantjara community.

New Home Economics Room Gallery

Video Transcript

Hello, welcome to Term 2. It’s such a blessing to welcome you back to the Term. My prayer is that you've had a really great couple of weeks holiday whether you still worked or not, you've had the chance to enjoy an Easter break, which is a long weekend, followed straightaway by the Anzac Day, long weekend as well. So my prayer is that, irrespective of your family circumstances, you've had some time off over the last couple of weeks as well.

While I reflect on Easter, at the end of last term, it was such a blessing to see our whole college community together with our Pilgrim friends, for an Easter service on the last Thursday. We had about 1,800 people all up gathered together to celebrate God's

goodness and ultimately an invitation to the gift that keeps giving and that's the gift of Jesus.

Here this morning, I'm welcoming you in our brand new Home Ec room. We've just refurbished this over the last term, so you get a bit of a sense of the room here. It's brand new and hasn't seen one student foot yet. That'll be happening in the next day. We've got beautiful induction cooktops and a whole range of other lovely appliances. This is more of the area of the school where we're going to be looking at domestic type cooking. The new area, which I'll be showing you in about one term's time will be our commercial kitchen area. At the back here we've got operable windows, these open out and you might think what opening up to the old toilet block, all of that will be gone soon and it will be a lovely plaza area in the heart of the school where we'll be able to have serving facilities for tea, coffee and food when we have large parent functions out that way into the future. So at the end of this term, we will be launching next door a brand new commercial kitchen. 

At the end of Term 3 will be launching upstairs, two brand new areas which will be our new Art room area and at the end of the year, we’ll be launching to the north of the site, our brand new car park area.

I would also love to share with you what we do on Pupil Free Days. On Monday, we are actually having a whole staff professional development day focused on three key parts.

The first part is on wellbeing, and this is to enable all of our staff to take care of your young people in a really profound way, and we’re really exploring how we do that to the best possible level here at Emmaus. Then we’re following on, with a session with Amy Chesser.

She may be someone who's familiar to you, she used to be a teacher here, and now she's a lecturer at Tabor and that's on faith formation. We're developing our staff in the areas of faith formation, how we can take care of that spiritual side and that spiritual development for your young people.

And then the last session today, all of our staff are really focusing on an element of science of learning. But this time we're focusing not so much on the brain and how that works and how teachers can best educate kids to understand the architecture of the brain. But we are really focusing on what's called metacognition and motivation. These are areas where we teach young people how their brain works, how they learn best so they can take agency over their own learning, as well as what our teachers do.

And the final thing I just want to showcase is we had from Easter Thursday through to Easter Monday a group of six old scholars with Neil Blenkinsop, a group from the Bible Society, including David Barnett, went to the APY lands, Amata and Ernabella launching the children's Bible. And you've heard me share this before. This here is a legacy of Nami, her painting Genesis 1, God created everything. It's really a posthumous thing for her because she had the vision of launching an indigenous children's Bible together with the Bible Society.

Our team went up there over the holidays and gave away copies, selling copies of this book to the indigenous people in the APY lands. The old scholars were so taken by this that it's something that we are now considering in partnership with the Bible Society, doing on an ongoing basis. It showed that the Anangu people from a Christian background are so passionate about their faith. 

Together with Emmaus and the Bible Society, we want to make an annual event of this. So if that's something that stirs your heart as an Old Scholar and you're interested in being involved in the future, let Neil Blenkinsop know because we are planning trips like this every year to share the goodness of God's love throughout the APY lands. 

I pray that it's a great Term 2 for you.

God bless you.

Andrew Linke