Teaching & Learning
VCE VM
VET:
On the 8th of Feb we had started VET. VET is a program in which an internal or external elective is chosen by students that could possibly spark a passion of interest. The class participated in different VET classes, such as, fashion design, youth services, beauty services, carpentry, plumbing, and many, many more. One of the electives that were chosen by a particular student was fashion design. She explained that, in the chosen subject, they had used sewing machines to create seam lines and created garments. They also learnt other small tasks such as; embellishment, fashion drawings, hand sewing, and more. She is really enjoying her VET class.
Swim Carnival:
On the 14th of Feb we had a swimming carnival for the students of Coburg High School, the carnival consisted of activities such as freestyle, backstroke, breaststroke, butterfly, relay etc. It was a day to enjoy ourselves in the sun with our friends and relax for a bit. Our role in the swimming carnival was assisting Belinda Parini with timing each of the races, it was our first of many roles within the Coburg High community.
Community Health expo at Oxygen:
On the 17th of March the year 11 VCE VM Personal Development class went to Oxygen Youth Centre to sit down and talk to 12 community health and wellbeing workers that are associated with different local councils. The groups were as follows:
- Danni/Diana - Merri-bek Job Advocates;
- Mohamed - L2P program;
- Lilli – Merri-bek Youth Services;
- Vanessa – YConnect/Merri-bek Youth Services;
- Sarah – Indie College;
- Jag – United Employment Services;
- Kat – Merri Health
- Nahshon – Asuria
- Bernadette – Services Aust
- Ash and Mark – Placement Students Merri-bek Youth Services
- Mark and Cathy - The department of social youth services (DSYS)
As a whole they spoke on what their organisation does for the community and their personal story. They also answered some questions the VCE VM class had written as a class about health and wellbeing and themselves. They also spoke to students individually to answer their personal questions for each worker.
Tree planting with Gary Vella:
On Friday 24th of March the year 11 VCE VM class worked on planting trees for the school. Gary Vella came up with this amazing idea to plant the trees at the entrance so that we have the first VCE VM class legacy to look back on. It's also fantastic for the environment and will make the school entrance look inviting.
Projects:
For our Personal Development VCE VM class students had to get into groups and create a community health and well-being project that aims to promote a dimension of health to run within the school. We used class time to plan our projects, organise materials, email teachers and more. We were required to plan; who would come, who was allowed to come, who was involved, where would it take place, what time would it be conducted, what day do you plan your project to be on, what materials were needed.
The different activities chosen by the groups included; sporting activities, mindfulness activities, and many, many more. One of the groups decided to do a mindfulness activity project which aims to improve the mental health for Year 7 students.
Grand Prix:
The Grand Prix was a good experience. We took the train from Coburg station to the Grand Prix at Albert Park Lake and when we walked in we saw a lot of food trucks, F1 merchandise shops, and then got seats to watch F1 practice races. It was extremely loud, also we went because there were stalls relating to our career courses and expos that could give us some direction in our chosen career that can provide additional information.
Overall Experience of VM:
The VCE experience is more hands-on and the work feels linked with our lives because we can actually use some of the stuff in the real world. For example in our measuring unit in numeracy we made brownies because we were getting taught how to use skills in everyday life while still having fun.
Written by the VCE VM class 2023
Food Tech
Year 10: The year 10s have been learning about Sustainability and how to prevent food wastage in the kitchen by creating dishes with the ingredients that we already have in the pantry. They also have been learning about global issues such as food miles and climate change and how this has an impact on our food production.
VCE: The year 11s have been learning about Indigenous ingredients such as lemon myrtle and how to integrate these ingredients in everyday cooking practices. The year 12s have been focusing on digestion, the importance of consuming foods that are nutritious and food allergies and intolerances. In line with this, the year 12s made a delicious gluten free lemon feather cake that used rice flour as a substitute for plain flour!
Literacy
Literacy is a language elective for years 7 and 8. Rather than learning Spanish or Mandarin, we improve our grammar, and English skills including writing and reading. In order to personalise our writing, we customised our writers notebooks - decorating them to express ourselves! Since then, we have been proactively working on our KLT which is a narrative that began as a short writing piece from our writers notebooks. In our writing we focused on descriptive language including different verbs and incorporating interesting noun groups.
Literacy is important because it helps us to improve our writing skills and make it more intriguing. We add more detail for a better writing piece, we also take in feedback from our teacher using it to make it better.
Next term we'll learn about different strategies for understanding what we read. These will include summarising and asking questions to help us to “read between the lines”. We will also be incorporating what we learn in literature circles in English.
Some of our activities include:
- Noun- common-thing proper-people, place groups
- Verb types
- Making adjective groups
- Learning about GANAG
- Focusing on our reading stamina in our library session
Yen, Oscar, Lily-Rose, Farah, Lewis, Alex, Will, Archie, Grace, Fatima on behalf of the whole Literacy cohort (Year 7 and 8)
Languages
Our 7 to 9 Language program at Coburg High School uses Education Perfect Language as our online language learning platform. Students can easily access set and supplementary material to work on all their language skills. Coburg High School competed in this year's Education Perfect Languages Championship and achieved some outstanding results. We placed
- in the top 200 overall globally out of 2,532 schools
- 56th for Chinese for Chinese in Australia out of 818 schools, and
- ASTOUNDINGLY FIRST position for Spanish in Australia for the 251-500 students category.
Our top 3 performers at CHS were two Year 8 students of Spanish and a Year 7 Mandarin student. Congratulations to Archie R. for placing first and Hugo S. for placing second, with both placing in the top 1.5% of competitors from around the world! Elliot L. took third place and placed in the top 10% of competitors from around the world! Absolutely stunning efforts! Congratulations to all competitors and especially the ones who earned themselves a certificate by placing in the top 20% of competitors from around the world: Ella A., Lara S., Racquel O., Marlowe S., Alexei F., Zara W., Oscar E., Tim Z., Adeline Y., William C., Dominic F., Kimberly A., Frankie-Belle T. and Caden B.. Keep being curious and keep exploring languages!
Simone Laiu
LA Language Leader
Spanish students in VCE have been learning about the experiences of travelling. They have listened to a range of songs that describe such experiences, amongst them songs from Argentineanasrtistst that talk about drinking "mate" (pronounced maté). The curious students enjoyed testing some of the energizing, bitter drink in class. People drink from a special mug using a metallic straw with a filter called "bombilla".
Lourdes Garcia Larque
Spanish Team
Kinesiology
Year 9 Kinesiology class have being measuring their heart rate by using our heart rate monitors that connect via Bluetooth to the iPad. In this class students learn how to describe how heart rate responds to exercise intensity, and how in turn heart rate can be used to compare and contrast physical activity.
Samara Harris