YEAR 8 CAMPUS NEWS

THE LATEST NEWS AT MERCY CAMPUS...

We have been fortunate this term at the Mercy Campus to be spend some extra time as a year level and as Pastoral Care Group classes discussing some of the issues that often confront students at this stage of their education and development. Last Thursday, we split the Year 8 cohort into a boys and girls group to answer the question “if you could tell the other group one thing, what would it be?”. We are very fortunate to have a great group of students and their responses to sometime prickly questions and statements were great to see.

In our role as a restorative school, we understand that we all make mistakes and that no matter how much we would like to, we can’t go back in time and take these errors back. What we can do however is to try our best moving forward and put things in place to make sure we don’t make the same mistake again.

Also, last Thursday, all Year 8 students were privileged to view a presentation from the visiting Chinese students. It was great for our Year 8 students to listen to the first hand experiences of what education is like in a very different part of the world and how the visiting Chinese students have found their Australian experience. With any luck, a few of our current Year 8 students will find themselves in a position in two years to visit Dali themselves and educate them about life in Australia and Australian schooling.

To add to the busyness that was week four, last Tuesday Fr Mick and Fr James blessed the Cecilia Room and the Coolock Library Resource Centre. This was a very respectful occasion that saw us dedicate these two spaces to God’s work and the benefit of our students and staff moving forward. The Year 8 Student Representative Council were very involved in the whole process and it was great to see them reading, singing and assisting in this celebration.

Finally, Term 3 has seen “The Man Cave” commence under Mrs Dixon’s guidance. As we had with the STRONG program for female students in Term 2, Term 3 has seen a number of our male students experience a range of different activities over lunch time from fitness and strength training in the gym through to a bike ride around the Aero ovals complex. One of the concerns of students has been “what do we do at lunch?” and this has helped in this area. Everyone’s experience at school is always different and sessions such as these attempt to make it more enjoyable for everyone.

Mr Marcus Parker

Head of Mercy Campus