English Faculty

General Announcements

💻 We are a BYOD school. Please bring charged devices to class to access your learning. 

Assessment task support for year 12: During weeks 9 and 10, English teachers will be supervising A9 during recess and lunch breaks to provide support for students working on their English assessment tasks. 

Extracurricular Activities

Creating Writing Club: 

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”

― Toni Morrison

Each week, students head to A4 to explore a different style of writing through visual, auditory, or written prompts designed to spark students’ imagination. So far, we have engaged in free writing and explored the use of the ballad form in poetry, using Emily Dickinson’s “Hope is the Thing with Feathers” as our conceptual focus. 

However, some students prefer to work on their own projects, using the club as a supportive space to collaborate with fellow writers. These projects include novellas, novels and character design. 

For this newsletter, students were tasked with creating a poster (or book cover) for their own creative project. Below is a submission from Mia Eggins in Year 7. 

Absolutely brilliant work!

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Teaching and Learning 

Year 7 English: Our congratulations for students in completing their end of year examinations! We are very proud of their hard work. Students in year 7 have an exciting term ahead of them with the study of visual texts, including graphic novels and picture books. Students will use their knowledge of visual techniques from term 3, as well as learning about visual techniques that can be used in print and visual texts, to analyse the purpose of a range of different visual text types. They will create their own visual texts by crafting and manipulating a range of these challenging techniques. Some of the texts students will explore this term include Anthony Browne’s ‘Into the Forest’, Anh and Suzanne Do’s ‘The Little Refugee’, the multimodal text ‘Species in Pieces’, and a range of TV advertisements. They will have the opportunity to refine their analytical writing skills as they create IEEL and TEEEC paragraphs. 

Year 8 English: After a couple of weeks of rigorous work to prepare for their yearly exams, Year 8 assessments are done and dusted. Assessment tasks are complete, and the creative juices are flowing. This term, Year 8 students are putting their creative minds to the test and exploring Prose Fiction. While we unpack the features of short stories and narratives, students will engage with an assortment of short stories before attempting to construct their own.

Picturing themselves in alternative universes, Year 8 will apply their growing knowledge of setting, character, and voice to craft engaging stories that either emulate a distinct text that they have studied or branch out to create their own original pieces. So, while the ship of assessment stress has sailed away into the distance, Year 8 have kept their creative pirate hats close by as they set sail for when they develop their own prose fiction. 

Year 9 English: Year 9! What a year it has been. We congratulate you on the completion of your Yearly Exams. Now, onto the fun stuff! From jukebox dancing to riding e-scooters after school, Year 9 students are exploring what it means to be a teenager with their new unit of work, Adolescence Through the Ages!

Students will discover how the concept of ‘the teenager’ has evolved over time. Through the exploration of various texts, they will make connections and express personal understandings. Lachlan Philpott’s Silent Disco will lead the way as students critically engage with the play and build their understanding of how a composer’s style reflects their context.

Students will be formally assessed on their discursive writing skills through a discussion of how representations of youth and adolescence have changed over time. They will also revise the discursive form and explore language techniques to support their success in this unit. 

The unit will be guided by the following focus questions:

• How does a composer’s style reflect their context?

• How have representations of youth and adolescence changed over place and time?

The answers to these questions lie ahead, waiting for the students to uncover them. 

Year 10 English: This term, Year 10 are undertaking an Auteur Study and will be exploring the distinctive features of film. Through analysing at least two films that are directed by  prominent directors such as Christopher Nolan and Tim Burton, students will enjoy analysing the similar features across works that have helped to establish the film creators as distinguished artists.

Students will explore intellectually ambitious films to encourage them to think more deeply about the media they are consuming, reframing the idea that film is simply passive entertainment but is instead a tool for stimulating deep thought about the human condition.  As they begin to prepare for the conceptual demands of Stage 6, students will work on articulating their understanding through the composition of analytical responses, linking the analysis of film techniques to the purpose and style of directors. 

We are very proud of how hard Year 10 students have worked this year to prepare for their senior years and have no doubt that diligence will continue through to the end of the year.

Year 12 English Studies and Standard: Congratulations to all year 12 students on finishing their preliminary studies! What an exciting year you’ve had. It’s onwards and upwards now as they jump into their first term of HSC study. Students are working through the Texts and Human Experiences module that all students in NSW study in their first term of year 12 English. They have engaged with a short film, Zero, and are currently viewing their core text, the 2000 film Billy Elliot. This term, they will further develop their ability to respond to unseen texts to strengthen their skills needed for Paper 1 of the HSC examination. For their assessment task this term, students will compose an analytical response under timed conditions exploring both Zero and Billy Elliot through the lens of Texts and Human Experiences.