Year Seven-Nine
Coaching Parade Campus
Year Seven-Nine Updates
Book Week 2025: Book an Adventure
This year our school celebrated Book Week with the theme Book an Adventure. Across the week, students shared their favourite stories and reflected on the journeys that books can take us on.
We finished with our much-loved Book Character Parade, where students and staff dressed up and filled the basketball court with colour, imagination and plenty of fun. It was a wonderful way to celebrate a love of reading together.
Talk Money
Our school recently participated in the Talk Money with Ecstra Foundation program, which included two interactive workshops designed to help students learn money lessons for life, to be confident talking about money and to make informed financial decisions.
Our Year Seven and Eight students attended the “Spending and saving money” workshops, where they explored how spending and saving choices today can affect future finances.
Our Year Nine students attended the “Making money work” workshops, where they discussed different ways to make money and learned some practical skills for navigating the world of work.
Year Eight English
Year Eight students have been diving into Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in an exciting new way.
Using Provocation Rotation Stations, students explored thought-provoking prompts about themes such as love, fate, freedom, and the choices we make. Each station encouraged them to connect Shakespeare’s story with their own lives and the world around them.
The result was a classroom full of energy, discussion, and creativity. Students debated passionately, shared fresh ideas, and challenged each other’s perspectives.
By the end of the session, they weren’t just answering questions — they were asking their own. Some of the incredible questions created by our students included:
“If destiny is affected by choice, how could Romeo and Juliet’s tragedy be changed?”
“How does love affect our actions and our perception?”
Can we control the impact of our choices?
How can we learn to assess our problems before taking action?
“Do your choices change your fate, or are they the steps leading up to your fate?”
These thoughtful questions show just how deeply our students are engaging with Shakespeare’s timeless play, and how they are learning to see its messages in their own lives today.
Mandarin
大家好!
We are now three terms into many students’ first year of learning Mandarin Chinese in Years 7, 8 and 9. Throughout a range of engaging topics, students have been building a strong foundation in both Chinese language and cultural concepts.
Towards the end of Term Two, students completed the culminating activity for their family unit: creating videos to introduce either their own families or fictional families, entirely in spoken Mandarin. This project allowed students to apply their speaking and writing skills in a creative, personal way, while also learning to edit and present their work using digital tools. The videos showcased their growing confidence in pronunciation, vocabulary, and sentence construction.
In Term Three, students began their “Times” unit, with a strong focus on numeracy in Mandarin. They refreshed their understanding of numbers from 0–99, first covered in Term One, and expanded this knowledge to talk about days of the week, years, months, dates, and telling the time – all essential skills for everyday communication. Lessons have included asking and answering questions such as “今天是星期几?” (“What day of the week is it today?”), saying dates in full, and accurately expressing the time.
First Language and Background Speakers
Some students in the Coaching Parade cohort entered the Mandarin program with a strong grasp of the language, often due to prior learning or family background. In Terms Two and Three, they have extended their skills through advanced reading, listening, and writing activities on the Education Perfect platform, exploring topics that often parallel the second-language curriculum, such as family, cultural values, and tourism.
These students have also engaged with authentic Chinese texts, both written and spoken, covering topics such as Confucian values (and how they have evolved over time) as well as travel diaries from famous tourist destinations in China. A number of these students also participated in the family video project, using a broader range of vocabulary and more complex sentence structures to convey intricate family dynamics and ideas.
We are extremely proud of our students’ achievements so far and look forward to seeing them continue to grow in confidence, skill, and cultural understanding as their Mandarin journey progresses.
Visual Communications
This term in Year 7,8 & 9 Visual Communications, students have been exploring the world of design through a fund and hands on approach with mobile phones and DSLR camera equipment.
Using iPhone 15 and creative editing apps like Snapseed, students have been learning to apply core design principles such as, the rule of thirds and symmetry. Students are experimenting with aggressive forms of photo editing to help enhance the experience.
Students have also explored presentation design and visual research using Keynote by creating mood boards.
An extended year 8 group of children are moving on to more advanced techniques of capture and post production using Adobe Photoshop
Students are keen to express themselves visually in this digital age and here are some of the examples.
