DEPUTY PRINCIPAL'S REPORT

Head of Campus

Events and Excursions

The College is continuing to roll out more features in the Compass portal for parents. 

We have been trialling the use of the portal for school events and excursions. 

Approval and payment for any excursion or event organised by the College will now be available through the portal with options to update personal detail and medical information, list dietary requirements and medication, compliance with COVID measures and pay for the event/excursion if needed.

Paper notes will no longer be sent out.

Once the due date for approval or payment for the event has passed you will need to contact the College office to make other arrangements or approve and pay manually.

Please look out for notifications either on the Compass App or an email.

Parent-Teacher Conferences

As Term 2 disappears, please keep in mind the Parent-Teacher Conferences coming up at the end of the term.

Wednesday 16 June                       Year 7 and 8                  3:30pm to 7:00pm

Friday 18 June                                  Years 9, 10 and 11       8:30am to 3:30pm

Reports will be made available in the previous week on Compass.

Trevor Howard | Deputy Principal - Head of Campus

Teaching Learning and Innovation

Literacy is Everybody’s Business

One of the great benefits of becoming a K-12 college is seeing the bright eyed enthusiasm with which young students embrace this mystical business of reading and writing. I was walking past the library last week and heard two girls proudly disclaiming how many books they had borrowed and how much they were looking forward to reading them—it got me thinking about how and when the light sometimes goes out with our love of literacy and learning. It seems a truism to suggest that literacy is the key to learning and yet it can at times be lost amidst the other realities of a busy life, and a world entirely built, it seems, on digital technologies and devices. 

Last term we asked the staff how important they felt literacy was in regards to their particular subjects. The results were interesting:

• 99% of staff recognise literacy is the core of their subject and learning in general
• 100% of staff felt literacy skills were vital in achieving lifelong learning success

The staff are also very enthusiastic about a whole of college approach to literacy that will see shared language and strategies across stages and subjects. 

I often remind my students that this literacy business does not come naturally and it has to be learnt. Humans have existed for around 200,000 years*, yet we have only been reading and writing for around 5000 years. Our primitive brains are well designed for communication of the verbal (speaking comes relatively easily to us) and visual (we are generally very good at reading body language) variety. This ‘scribbles, symbols, letters on the page representing meaning’ thing that is reading and writing it something else. No wonder we are so excited when we write our name on a piece of paper for the first time—it really is quite magical that these ‘squiggles’ represent me!

We are all literacy teachers and literacy takes a variety of forms. One of the questions I am most asked by parents is ‘how can I get my child to read more’, or ‘my child used to read all the time, but they don’t any more—what can I do?’. Here are some basic ideas as to how you can instil that love of reading.

1. Model it for them - reading to your child from the youngest of ages lets them know you value stories and the way this is possible is through reading. For older children make it visible. It used to be that is was pretty obvious when someone loved reading—you would see them with books, their room or house was filled with books and books were something they discussed. These days digital media is replacing books via Kindles and other online mediums. How can a child know that you value the e-book you are reading, as opposed to checking your Facebook status or playing…gulp…Candycrush? They will only know if you tell them. Discuss what you are reading (digital or otherwise) with your children to generate the why of reading.
2. Digital solutions can actually help…unless... audiobooks have a role to play in helping develop reading fluency. My advice is that the child should always be using the audiobook in conjunction with the hard copy of the text to encourage correct scanning and identification of letters, words and all these other strange symbols (semi colons anyone?) that make up our language and how it is understood. I actively advocate against just using audiobooks when students are developing their reading skills—in reality this is listening, not reading.
3. Find the entry point for resistant readers. Remember the Harry Potter reading revolution? It was remarkable to see a trend of the kind around reading that had previously only been witnessed in regards to yoyo fads and other cultural movements such as hip hop. Here it was, a series of books that inspired a whole generation of children to see reading as cool. I am not saying that Harry Potter is the solution. The key take away from all of that was that children will read if it is enjoyable and engaging. If your child would rather play or watch AFL than read, the entry point to reading may be an AFL magazine or autobiography by their favourite player. Find what they like and give them a book about it that can work at their level.

Finally, remind your child of the gift that reading really represents. Reading brings us to worlds that have never been, our world and how it is, and future worlds to come. 

As Malorie Blackman puts it, "Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while”. That sounds pretty magical to me. 

* The debate continues regarding this date—we do know humans started wearing clothes 17,000 years ago as clothing lice is different to head lice! See what literacy can do for you? 

Anthony Heffer | Deputy Principal - Teaching, Learning and Innovation