TAS/VET News
MAJOR WORKS
Term 2 has been such a busy term! Year 12 are in the midst of their Major works and their Personal Interest Projects.
All Year 12 students in all of our courses will be starting to prepare for their upcoming Trial Exams and we wish them the very best of luck. Most of the students have been working diligently to have their projects at the 90% completion stage by the end of the term. There are a large variety of projects and I must congratulate those students who have been working solidly from the beginning of the process. I am confident the students that have been working continuously and abiding to course requirements and time frames will be rewarded with very good HSC results at the end of the year. Year 12 Timber are busily working on their major projects. With the due date closely approaching Miss Reyen will be offering holiday classes to support the students. The Year 12 Engineering Studies class are currently completing the Aeronautical Engineering module. This module focuses on how planes fly and working out the mathematics behind them flying.
Year 12 SDD and Mrs Hogan have finished their Major Projects, creating a game based off a board or card game. They have successfully used their skills in coding to create some amazing games. Most students used the programming language, Python, with one student challenging himself to learn C++. Part of the assessment task was also to create a maintenance manual which included work from Part A of their project and a user manual. Well done to all students, now to work and study for the Trial and HSC exams!
Year 12 SDD Major Projects
YEAR 12 HOSPITALITY
Mrs Pratt’s Year 12 Hospitality students continue to demonstrate their knowledge and skills in coffee making and practical techniques. Being well on the way to completing the competencies of Serve Food and Beverage and Interact with Customers, Year 12 have been putting together their evidence from work placement and school functions for their portfolios for Cluster E 2. Next term they will create their own(virtual) café complete with menu, staff and table design. I look forward to seeing what creative and innovative cafes they design.
RETAIL SERVICES & PRIMARY INDUSTRIES
Year 12 Retail Services class and Mrs Kostalas have been working on visual merchandising. The students have been designing and creating some beautiful window displays and they also helped out at the Op Shop in Special Ed. The Year 11 Retail Services have been working on Clusters A and B this term and the Year 11 Primary Industries class have been busy down at the farm and have been growing and cultivating a range of vegetables. Another fantastic initiative is the work the Year 11 Primary Industries class and Mr Grant have been doing with our students in Special Ed.
They have been working with the students and have been helping the students collect eggs and take care of the chickens. Work placement this year for our Year 11 VET students has reverted back to 70 hours in total. The two Year 11 Hospitality classes and Mrs McTeigue have been busy practising and perfecting their espresso coffee skills and this term they have been making a range of beautiful sandwiches, muffins and slices.
WORK PLACEMENT
Work Placement is coming up in Term 3 for all our s VET students in and the students can RPL if they already have a job in the respective industry to the VET class, they are in. If the students wish to RPL their hours they will need to speak to their teachers and fill out the paperwork. Students can also self-source various businesses if they wish. If students would like to self-source, they need to see Mrs McTeigue for the correct form to use.
YEAR 11 HOSPITALITY
Year 11 Hospitality Busy Making Espresso Coffees, Muffins and Slices!
RETAIL SERVICES VISUAL MERCHANDISING WINDOWS
TIMBER
Year 11 Timber and Miss Reynen are currently building a small table. The drawer that they built earlier in the year will also be utilised in the table they are building. The Year 11 Society and Culture class have just completed their second assessment task and I must congratulate the students on their fantastic achievement in this task. Their responses were conceptually rich with synthesised and sustained judgements and substantiated with consistent relevant strong examples throughout their writing.
Year 11SDD and Mrs Hogan are currently learning about the System Development Approaches and the stages involved. They are currently working on learning new skills in the programming language, Python, and are creating a text-based game. Students are encouraged to discover ways they can make a text-based game fun and exciting while learning the developmental process of designing and programming games.
The Year 11 Engineering Studies class with Miss Reynen have finished the core modules and are now moving on to the specialised modules and now focusing on braking systems.
The 10 IST class and Mrs Hogan started the term with completing a Robot Challenge Day, where they completed in an obstacle course challenge and robot wars. Students used the skills they had acquired in Term 1 to complete the challenges using the EV3 robots. Year 10 are now learning to code in Python, and are creating a text-based game, Mrs Hogan is looking forward to marking some fun filled adventure games!
STAGE 5 HOSPITALITY
Mrs Pratt’s Stage 5 Hospitality class have been very making coffees, coffees and more coffees! This is the competency in Cluster B. Students have been very enthusiastic to show off their beverage skills in preparing and serving espresso coffee. With only a limited number of coffee machines, Year 10 have been working in groups rotating through practicals, espresso coffee instruction and theory to gain skills in all aspects of hospitality. This unit will continue over several terms, overlapping with other units as students practice these competencies. Sandwiches, is now, too in our sights, and have joined the practical rotation forming the basis of Cluster C – Prepare and serve sandwiches.
This semester, the Year 10 Food Technology class and Mrs Ofahengaue studied a unit of work called "Food for Specific Needs “. Food for Specific Needs is a unit of work where the students learnt about the circumstances that bring about specific food needs, the role of nutritionally modified foods, and the role support networks play for individuals with specific food needs. In the practical environment, the students made menu items that catered for vegan, vegetarian, gluten free, low fat, sugar free and reduced salt diets.
Mrs Pratt’s Year 9 FT have been delving into bush tucker, early Aussie foods and multicultural influences on Australian contemporary cuisine. With a huge array of practicals from all over the world, Year 9 have become ‘Foodie Globetrotters’. Along the way, they have gained cultural knowledge of Australia’s first people, their hunting, gathering and farming techniques and the quality of their balanced nutritional diet. Year 9 will continue learning about the many multicultural influences on the Australian diet as they create their own cultural fusion recipe ‘mush-up’. This will form the recipe for their assessment task which they will prepare and cook next term.
This semester Stage 5 100 hr class and Mrs Ofahengaue have been studying a unit of work called Food equity. The Food Equity unit focused on learning about access to safe and sufficient food as a global issue of concern and how the production and distribution of food is affected by many factors. In practical lessons, students created cultural dishes from staple ingredients like cous cous, flour, vegetables, noodles and pasta.
Miss Reynen and the 9/10 iSTEM class have just finished building robotic arms and looking at the mechanics behind this and how it could be used in real life.
The Stage 4 Technology Mandatory classes with Mrs Ofahengaue, Mrs De Kalb, Mrs Woodland and Ms Pappin have been enjoying and embracing their lessons. This semester the students have been working on a unit of work called Engineered Systems. The project involved students designing and making a Paper Roller Coaster that was creative, functional and aesthetic. A folio which included a research report on engineers and a completed workbook were mandatory to support the project.
At the end of the semester, students lined up their roller coaster and had a competition with each other in the class. The Year 7 and 8 Technology Mandatory Digital Technology classes and Mrs Hogan have been completing coding their games in Scratch or App Lab.
Students showed off their skills they have learnt this year, in creating some amazing and fun games. In the last 5 weeks of this term, students have been learning how Robotics help in many areas including the exploration of Mars. Students have coded with Edison Robots to complete many challenges.
8 TEC2 and 8 TEC8 and Mrs Pratt visited the Ag farm this semester as part of the Agriculture and Food Technologies in Technology Mandatory. Armed with wheel barrows, gardening forks, watering cans and gloves, they tended to the herb garden and vegetable patch. After snipping off the fresh basil plants and harvesting the bok choy, they were able to use this produce to cook a beautiful fresh Tomato and basil penne pasta meal and Sticky Thai beef lettuce cups with bok choy. The students were able to enjoy a real Paddock to Plate experience! It was also really cool checking out the chickens!
These holidays will be invaluable for our Year 12 students to work on perfecting and completing their HSC major projects which are all due for submission in Term 3. Please discuss your projects with your teachers before the holidays about any work that may be needed. Also, please check with your teachers about attending the holiday workshops they are holding. These are designed by the teachers and are invaluable in helping students complete their projects.
Year 12 Timber Holiday Workshops: -
Week 1: Tues, Wed, Thursday Week 2: Tues and Wed (9am-2pm).
Year 12 Society and Culture Holiday Workshops: -
Week 1 Tues (10am- 2pm) Wed (10am -2pm)
On behalf of the TAS/VET faculty we wish all our students and their families a safe, relaxing and happy holiday.
Mrs Caroline McTeigue
Head Teacher
TAS & VET