Senior School News
English News – The Dorothea Mackellar Poetry Awards – Senior School
The Dorothea Mackellar Poetry Awards are once again underway. Students from Years 7 – 12 are encouraged to enter the competition. The theme this year is ‘We Used to Live There’ but as stated on the competition site:
“Our poets are encouraged to take inspiration from wherever they may find it, however, if they are looking for some direction, competition participants are invited to use this year's optional theme to inspire their entries."
English teachers will be discussing the competition with their classes. It is compulsory for students in A-classes (including Literature Circle) to submit an entry. Indeed, with online learning and considerably more time being spent at home, students might find that writing a poem can be a wonderful opportunity to express how they are feeling during these challenging times.
The competition closes on June 30th and entries need to be submitted to English teachers by Thursday, 18th June for collation. The entries should be word-processed in a distinguishable font such as Arial, Calibri or Times Roman. Poems should be no more than 80 lines.
More about the competition, prizes and conditions of entry can be found by going to the competition website.
Michelle Arentz
Assistant English Coordinator
From the Farm during ISO
Firstly, John and I would like to welcome Hayley Mahoney to the Agriculture Faculty and we are looking forward to sharing the day to day events and successes of Farm life here at St Greg’s!
What a strange time we at the College Farm have found ourselves in although not too dissimilar to the end of year break, I guess not seeing teachers and students alike. Virus or not the Farm has certainly kept us busy with good rain over the last few months giving us the opportunity to make 135 round bales of silage and clearing the way for the sowing of some winter pastures.
We certainly miss not having the students around and the farm is a little empty for not having them come down each day to help out. They are all sorely missed! Our sheep breeding program is well underway with our ram now entering his third cycle with the ewes which will give us a lambing beginning in August. The stud cows and heifers started their reproduction program this week with 8 entering our CIDR program ready for artificial insemination in 9 days.
John and I have been busy keeping students, teachers and our much-loved followers up to date with our very own Google Farm Classroom where we post happenings such as calving, silage production, winter sowing, sheep husbandry and anything farm related.
The classroom can be found using the link class code fqpvbcn.
The students’ vegetable gardens have also been maintained with weeding, as well as harvesting of any vegetables ready for the table. These are distributed to staff to ensure no wastage of the students’ hard work in planting them.
All up a busy time and looking forward to the return of our students and staff to have things return to normal here on the farm.
The farm at sunrise
Rick Nieuwenhuis
Farm Manager
Stage 4 Academic Care Competition
Online learning has presented many challenges, but students in Stage 4 were quick to prove they have the skills to succeed when they used their creative abilities to design posters for success. The Wednesday morning Year Assembly slot in Week One asked students to produce a poster highlighting their top tips for success. This task ran alongside a mandatory activity on goal setting. The two tasks demanded that students think about how they have worked in the past whilst also considering how to improve in the future. Please ask your son about his SMART goal for Term Two and discuss whether you think it is a worthy focus in light of his performance in his Term One Progress Report.
I thoroughly enjoyed viewing the poster submissions and was amazed by the variety in design and advice. I am pleased to use this space to announce the winners and runners-up. These boys will be receiving a prize when we get to see each other again in Weeks 3 and 4.
The winning posters are included below.
Year 7
Winner = Joshua Adams
Runners Up = Kai Allie & James Palpal-Latoc
Year 8
Winner = Malachai Agoo
Runners Up = Lachlan Bailey & Sam Labbozzetta
Mrs Lee Ursino
Senior School Academic Coordinator | Years 7 & 8