Academic Excellence

Term 1 highlights

Our Year 7 – 9 Academic Excellence students have had a busy term. The eager group of students met early Friday mornings to enhance their learning and be involved in some challenging and fun activities.

The students learnt in depth about organisation, improving study habits and how to improve your thinking to achieve success. They were given weekly mini challenges relating to the topic learnt. One challenge was to identify a bad habit, find the triggers and over a week try to slowly change the habit. Another was to complete a homework/study chart and stick to it for the week. Both were simple in theory but harder to put into practice. Students had different degrees of success.

Our first project of the year sees the students working in groups and becoming advertising executives. They have been asked to use multimedia to produce some advertising material that will promote St Norbert College. Given that we are celebrating 900 years of the Norbertine Order it seemed fitting to have a project that was focussed on our College and its heritage. The project will continue into next term.

Australian Brain Bee Challenge (ABBC)

This week, a small group of Year 10 students competed in Round 1 of the Australia Brain Bee Challenge. Prior to the competition, the students completed online tasks to study numerous facts about neuroscience. Their knowledge was then tested by completing a very challenging online quiz. We await their results.

Australian Geography Competition

The Year 8 & 9 Humanities Extension classes and 30 students from the Year 10 Humanities Advanced classes recently sat the Australian Geography competition. They tested their geographical knowledge, competing against each other and thousands of students across Australia. I hope the students enjoyed the challenge.

Computational and Algorithmic Thinking (CAT) Competition

On 25 March our Senior Maths Specialist students sat the CAT competition. CAT competition is an online problem-solving competition that seeks to identify a student’s computer programming potential. We now look forward to finding out how well they did.

Write4Fun Competition

A few students have displayed their literary skills by participating in the Australia wide Write4Fun competition. They have each written either a short story or poem which has been submitted. We await a positive outcome.

Mrs L Cardenia 

(Academic Excellence Coordinator)