BHCS Enrichment

By Allen Dickson (Enrichment Co-ordinator)

This week has seen some BHCS students who excel in Writing and Coding participate in several online master classes.

Twenty Year 2 students spent over an hour working with ‘Write Away With Me’ educator Beth Cregan. Beth took them through ways that they can develop ideas for stories and how to shape them using character and setting. She purposefully built upon the videos that Mr Ludbrook has been sending out through Class Dojo… and is also going to produce three short videos that all the Year 1/2 students will use as a part of their Learn From Home curriculum.

Beth also ran two sessions with our gifted writers in Year 3/4. She ‘zoomed’ them through developing characters, establishing plot and building upon their enjoyment of writing. This was great follow-on work from when she visited us last year (remember when we actually had special guests teach face-to-face?).

Mr Dickson teamed up with The Melbourne Young Writers’ Studio to begin what will be a 4-week course on creating a Fantasy Narrative. Nine of our best writers in Grade 5/6 and thirteen of our Year 7 & 8 literati have joined with four smaller Christian Schools. The result should be some fantastic pieces set in some very strange lands.

Finally, close to twenty Year 7 & 8 students have also signed up to do a Python coding course with Headstart Academy. In this 2-day course, students will code their own chatbots, programming them to understand and respond intelligently to emotion and bias via sentiment analysis.

All of this is just another way that our students as individuals can demonstrate the ‘Courage to Grow’, while as a school we continue to ‘Grow by Giving’.