Year Seven News

English

It is hard to believe that we are only a few weeks away from the end of our First Year as a Secondary English team. 

We are continuing to focus on developing students understanding of analysis using poetry and Dreaming stories. Students have investigated the elements for analysis - such as tone, structure, bias, context, and imagery - and have applied these to both Australiana and Indigenous poetry and stories. It has been pleasing to see so many students justify and explain their interpretations by using directly stated information from the text to support them and persuade others. 

This week, we have also undertaken both writing and reading assessments with all students to get a picture of how their learning has progressed this year. This provides us with an opportunity to reflect and conference with students about the growth they have shown, as well as discuss any further areas for improvement and focus on clarifying any misconceptions students have.

Students will be continuing to unpack the structure, themes, tone, and rhyme of poetry and will be creating their own poetry pieces next week. 

We look forward to students being able to share these poetry pieces with you.

Music

Our Year Seven Music students have spent the last fortnight presenting their Inquiry on the various musical periods, significant composers and the social influences that were characteristics of that period.  All the students should be commended for their effort in exploring their chosen period.  In fact, this Term's Music students have presented some of the most thought out and well constructed research presentations for the whole year, with many of the groups achieving extremely high scores.

They have now started focussing on the foundational elements of music, exploring rhythms and pitch, as well as the Circle of Fifths and leitmotifs.  It was encouraging to see a number of students challenging each other with some complex rhythmic patterns and seeing if the other students could replicate them.   

This is all in preparation for their composition exercise, where each student will compose their own musical works on their laptops.

Robotics and Coding

As we approach the end of the year, it is a fantastic time to reflect on and celebrate students' learning. This year, Saltwater College has been invited to submit student-created text-based adventure games for the CS in Schools Coding Competition. This is a great chance to show off our students' coding skills and creativity, and also an opportunity to compete against other partner schools for the main prize: a Nintendo Switch! 

Congratulations to Versace, Demien, Aliza, Connor, Eshan, Sukhraj and Andre for being selected to represent our school in this competition. Entries will be judged on game design, usability & python code. We wish our finalists all the best of luck and look forward to the winner being announced at the end of this month.