English News
End Of Term 1:
English Department
Term 1 has been a busy time for English classes across the school as we move into the middle part of Semester One and laying the groundwork for the rest of the year.
By this time of the year, the expectations have been clearly set by teachers that all students need to meet in their English classes. Students need to come to class on time, with all of the materials they need to be successful in their English class. This includes a copy of the current novel, a workbook, pens and pencils so work can be completed in their workbooks and a charged laptop so that work can be accessed and completed.
This is the expectation in all mainstream and advanced classes.
Our English classes are currently in the midst of reading their book listed novels that build their vocabulary and comprehension skills.
Please support your child with their independent reading at all levels so that they practise and embed essential knowledge.
What are we reading in our Year levels:
Year 7 - Reading "Coraline"
Year 8 - Reading "Holes"
Year 9 - Reading "Runner"
Year 10 - Reading "Catching Teller Crow"
Year 7 Advanced - Reading "Trash"
Year 8 Advanced - Reading "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time"
Year 9 Advanced - Reading "To Kill a Mockingbird"
Year 10 Advanced - Reading "Like a House on Fire"
Have a great term break
Adam Myors
Head of English
Year 7 Camp Reports
The Arrabri Days
Arrabri’s best revealed
A rabble of enthusiastic year 7 students arrived at Arrabri Lodge on Wednesday morning, hopeful of the days to come and the events to do.
After a bite, they headed off to do their activities. Hardly had they come back then eagerly discussed the fun of their various activities.
“Did you hear?” “Yeah, someone found gold at the river activity!” “I hear it was large enough to fill a pocket!” “I wander who found it?” The conversation of fun decreased no less as each group had unique experience like the sabotage of the giant swing, which became the giant failure due to an old length of rope, soon to be immortalized among the gossip that night.
So, it went on until the time had come to leave. Everyone mourned their leaving, remembering the food, accommodation and activities but all happy times must come to an end and so it was with the camp.
The bus arrived at the schools at last and the students stumbled away, dazed and tired from their trip from camp. Many had exuberant faces and were gushing to their parents about the new friends they had made at camp. Stay tuned for more next time.
SOSC NEWS
Arrabri Pool Party
By Year 7 Student Jim M
Year 7 students accompanied by Year 10 peer support from South Oakleigh Secondary College, went to an amazing camp called Arrabri Lodge in Warburton. It was here that activity groups B and D had their turn to visit the swimming pool there on February 26th Thursday.
Just as the lifeguard had finished running through the rules of the pool, the most important of which was “No shoving”, Next thing we know Bobby was in the air falling into the pool.
Now let's wind back a few minutes and see how this all unfolded. We were all listening and sitting down when Patrick got ahead of himself and rushed to Bobby for no apparent reason, and with a grunt and some oomph shoves Bobby into the water, knocking her knee with a big splash! At this moment we were all shocked as we rushed to get her out.
After getting her out of the pool she sat down on one of the chairs in pain, holding her knee. 15 minutes later, her knee was better, but she wasn’t too happy with Patrick. When we asked him why he did it
he said, “I just felt like to be honest.” Which will probably result in him getting a few detentions for that.
A look into the food at SOC camp
By Jasmir Safwan
Edited by Jazzy boy
Recent insights into the food at South Oakleigh College’s camp may be a shocker for some people. It appears that the food at SOC camp may be tasty, but also not quite suitable health-wise. The problem with the food is the high amount of sugar in it, as the students had ice cream as desert after every meal. This increases the amount of sugar they intake every day and may have some consequences on the student’s health. However, diet health is a complex subject with many different variables which make it impossible to determine exactly what consequences it might have for the students.
The students may have consumed plenty of sugary ice cream in their desert, but they did eat other foods as well. We must consider that the students did not eat camp cooked meals during their first snack, but instead brought their own food. Chicken schnitzels and coleslaw was the first meal that they had that was cooked in camp. The question is: was that healthy? Fatsecret, a calorie app that also checks nutrients, says that it containns 63% carbohydrates, 30% fat and 7% protein approximately in 100 grams. However, a study showed that Fatsecret often underestimates the amount of sodium and protein in a food. Obviously, the coleslaw will also vary by region and recipe making Fatsecret’s estimate rather unreliable. Fatsecret will still be used despite these glaring issues as we have no other highly rated and cost-effective calorie app that shows nutrition as well.
For the other meals, the students had beef mince with roti, hotdogs (it is unknown if the hotdog had wieners or beef mince) and breakfast, which we will get to later. Starting with the beef mince, the food is 72% fat, 28% protein and 0% carbs. Taking into account the fact that Fatsecret underestimates protein, we can see that the fat in the beef mince is still quite plentiful. This is not a good sign, not only because the fat is too harmful, but also because the students ate hotdogs and chicken schnitzels the day before. The hotdogs may have contained beef mince or sausages/wieners, both fat heavy items. 1 fillet of a chicken schnitzel’s calories is 51% fat, according to Fatsecret. Then again, Fatsecret may have overestimated the amount of fat in it due to its underestimation of the amount of protein in it. Another fact is that different students took different parts of the chicken, each piece with their own varying amounts of fat.
Breakfast is an important meal as well and we have not touched on it yet. The students ate cereal as an appetizer before eating their toast. The options for the spread were jam, vegemite and butter. Vegemite is generally considered healthy because of the amount of Vitamin B in it and the lack of fat. Jam is high in sugar and butter is high in fat, but both are extremely popular as a breakfast item all over the world. This does not make the health labilities of these items any better, sadly. There was also an unidentifiable fried item that contained cheese, which gave this meal more protein. The last meal at SOC camp was something you could choose. There were seven options and they were all a sandwich or toast of sorts, such as ham and cheese. Although our anonymous source could not tell us exactly what they were, he mentioned that he had reason to believe all the food items in that meal contained some form of butter.
Now that we know this, we still must determine how healthy (or not healthy) the items were for the students. This heavily depends on the student’s background, genome, placebos, environment, his/her previous food choices, air quality and so much more. Trying to find a perfect diet for each student is very difficult. We mentioned how the meals were rather heavy on sugar and fat, and many students may have a genome that specifically adapted to heavy amounts of sugar and fat. The students ate this food for a period of 3 days which is not a lot if most of them live to an average lifetime. It is unlikely that the meals at camp would have caused lasting damage to the health of the students.
Overall, the health of the students and the effects of the meals at camp will vary. The high amounts of fat and sugar are proved to have been bad for most normal human beings but their effect on the students may be nullified because of the short amount of time they ate such meals. Diet health is a complex branch of science, and the health of each individual student will remain unclear. On average, however, the meals were not very beneficial for most people.
