Cultural Diversity Week
From the 9 – 16 August, students in Years 7-9 celebrated Koonung’s annual Cultural Diversity Week. This event gives students an opportunity to celebrate their family’s cultural backgrounds and engage in the cultural aspects of the languages they are learning at school.
This year, students were able to participate in a Junior Education Perfect Languages Competition, create a piece of artwork or a cooking portfolio of a chosen recipe. We were absolutely blown away with the level of involvement and the amazing things our students came up with. It was so hard to choose winners in the cooking and artwork categories, however we want to particularly recognise the following students for their outstanding entry. These students will receive a small token when we are all back together again at Koonung.
Year 7
1st Adi Nair 7C – Adi showcased a beloved home recipe of Vegetable Biryani
2nd Damian Zampella 7H – Damian created a portfolio of a delicious Pizza recipe that has been handed down from generation to generation in his family.
3rd Camila Duque Cadavid 7C – Camila drew a picture of a girl at the carnival of Barranquila in South America which is one of the world’s largest carnivals with over 100 years of tradition.
Year 8
1st Gabi Huber 8C – A great little film of her cooking pretzels and connected it beautifully with her cultural heritage.
2nd Aleezay Babar 8A – Aleezay created a portfolio to share his culture of Pakistan. This included photographs taken in a virtual tour of the country. Great imagination in coming up with this portfolio!
3rd Dakota Phillips-Ryder 8B – Dakota created a ‘Cooking with Dakota’ video where she demonstrated how to make trifle and an English Breakfast! Yum!
Education Perfect Languages Competition Winners
The involvement in the Language Competition on Education Perfect was amazing! The overall top-scorers on an individual level were:
1st - Gavyn Sanusi-Goh (18,845 points)
2nd - Derek Liau (14,767 points)
3rd - Renos Vassiliades (6,999 points)
Year 7 winners:
1st: Renos Vassiliadies 7H
2nd: Jessica Huang 7I
3rd: Alicia Leong 7E
Year 8 winners
1st: Gavyn Sanusi-Goh 8G
2nd: Derek Liau 8D
3rd: Aleezay Babar
Year 9 winners
1st: Lachlan Simon 9D
2nd: Christos Karagiannis 9A
3rd: David Aumann 9B
Fantastic achievements by all and we are really looking forward to seeing what you come up with for our Cultural Diversity Week in 2022!
Some of our students wrote about their experience in competing in Junior Education Perfect Diversity week competition:
I believe that the 2021 EP Cultural Diversity Competition was a great way to learn and inspire yourself to start and practice learning new languages. The rewards associated with the competition definitely gave me enough motivation needed to participate during this difficult period of remote learning. According to statistics provided by Education Perfect, I would spend upwards of six hours every day on the website at the start of the competition, but after being caught up with schoolwork, extra curricula, and other events, this amount would be reduced to about two hours per day. Added up together, this equals to around 26 hours in total, completely diminished by the 62 hours spent in the same competition last year. In the end, I took second place for the Year 8’s with a total of 14,767 points.
Thank you Mrs Moussi!
Derek Liau 8D
To celebrate Diversity Week at Koonung, an Education Perfect competition was organised, which ran for one week. Even though I started a little late, I am pleased to say that I was able to catch up, and in the end, reach first place. Many students participated, and many of my friends would not have even logged onto Education Perfect if it weren't for the mention of pizza! With some encouragement my class became very competitive and determined, resulting in winning the pizza party, and only a 2 point difference between the Japanese class and the French class. It was a very close competition!'
Thank you Mrs Moussi for organising the competition.
Gavyn Sanusi-Goh 8G
Nicole Moussi
Languages Domain Leader