Resource Centre

Book Week 2020

This year’s Book Week was inspired by the theme of Curious Times Wild Minds, a fitting theme for this unusual year. It was a week of celebrating the wonderful world of books and the joy of reading.

Students who were at school and those who were in remote learning participated in a variety of activities, competitions and quizzes. Each day began with trivia questions in homerooms and different activities were offered each lunchtime.

It was great to visit all the Year 7 English classes where students shared their book recommendations and their favourite lock down reads. The Year 7 students were excited to enter the Resource Centre again to browse the shelves and to borrow books in their preferred genre.

Senior students had great fun competing in Who wants to be a millionaire? Congratulations to Casey Lai, Tuong Vy Huynh and Sarah Kleiner who showed off their impressive book knowledge and won the competition.

There were some amazing entries for the Manga Drawing Competition. It will be hard to select a winner with so many creative entries. Winners will be announced next week after voting is completed. There were also some excellent entries for the Short Story competition. Students were invited to write a short story on the theme of Curious Times, Wild Minds. The overall winner was Jolyne Tran in 7 Dawson for her story titled Life in Lockdown. Commendations to Jacelyn Vong in 7 Delany, Paruneet Kour in 9 Theresa and Cindy Nguyen in 10 Ruth.

The week ended with a captivating debate on the topic, Is the book better than the film? The Year 11 students impressed the audience and the adjudicators with their careful arguments and persuasive skills. I commend both the affirmative team (Nyat Ebuy, Sera Itisgen, Aishwarya Lakshmi) and negative team (Noami Bawi Tha Khan Thang Eng, Fiona Vuong, Sandhu Prakash) for their amazing work. Congratulations to the Negative team for narrowly winning the debate and to Fiona Vuong for winning best speaker. The debate was recorded and is available to view on the Google Drive.

I thank the Resource Centre team and Learning Leader, Mr Vito Milana for their work in promoting books and inspiring Marian students to become lifelong readers.

Ms Sofie Norello - Head of Resource Centre

Life in Lockdown

March 2020. That was when it all began, when the globe was reduced to chaos. The magnificent blue sky turned pitch black as everyone locked their doors tightly. Closing themselves off from the outside world. The streets were so silent that you could hear a fly sneeze and none of the street lamps were on. I gazed out of my bedroom window as I watched the trees dance silently in the eerie wind. The beautiful green of the tree's leaves turned to a dirty, dark brown. The lifeless grass clung to the sidewalk as if they were trying to survive. But from what? I sat down at my desk and opened my laptop. The screen lit up brightly as I clicked onto the Google Meet. Hoping to be on time for my online classes.

Suddenly, the electricity started to flicker. The lights in my room shut off and the internet logged me out of my class. My family and I gathered together in the main room. I felt shivers down my spine and we all had sweat dripping down our foreheads. My mum and I ran to the front room which was the closest to the front door. We saw people walking down the road. However, they looked controlled. It was similar to a sea of the undead. They marched down the road, underneath the mix of red and black sky. Luckily, the newspaper existed so Jennie and Jasmine, my sisters, checked on that. It said that there was a virus spreading like a wildfire. Those who had been contaminated were called “The infected”. We ran to my parents’ room. It was the furthest from the front door, and the most confined place so we couldn’t get infected. While we were hiding, we had masks and hand sanitiser everywhere. I started to play out a little fight scene in my mind. Where we all had a weapon to fight off the infected. Well, even though they were weapons they were actually Nerf guns since I didn’t want to harm anyone. There were many of them in our area, but they didn’t scare us. Well, maybe they scared me. 

Fighting alongside my family felt fun, but also scary. I was surprised by my family's aggression, but impressed by the fighting spirit I didn't know they possessed. My father was shouting out battle cries and my mum was running around shooting random bullets into the sky. Somehow, they hit her targets. Both of my sisters were spinning in circles and shooting at the infected with their Nerf guns. As for me, I was running and screaming hysterically while shooting my bullets. It was like I was a ninja, with a mask on to protect myself and shooting the infected away. We kept on shooting until there was none left. We managed to survive this evil virus. When Jasmine punched me on the arm I was ripped out of my fantasy and brought me back down to earth. She pointed outside the window and my eyes lit up. The sky turned back to its bright baby blue colour, and people finally stepped out of their homes. After months of being confined in our homes. We had finally escaped, the virus. For now.

Jolyne Tran - 7 Dawson