It’s hard to believe we are already half way through the term!

Students across the College are busy preparing for assessment across all English subjects. As parents and caregivers, you can support your child by ensuring they are attending as much as possible, getting plenty of rest and nutritious food, and by encouraging them to seek support early. 

English Homework Club will open to all students from Monday 27^th February and will continue to run until the end of term. Running every first break in J121, students can access support with preparing exam notes, drafting and editing right up until their due dates.

Year 7 English students are developing their creative writing skills in preparation for the creation of an engaging memoir this term. They have been working on their descriptive writing skills and building their vocabulary. For this particular activity, students were learning how to write descriptively using the senses. They were given a bag of goodies that could only be felt and then a corresponding description of this sensory experience was written. This same process was repeated with sight, smell and finally everyone’s favourite, taste! Ms McLeod’s class have been working on their descriptive writing skills by building their vocabulary. Ms McLeod identified basic words that, if changed could significantly improve student work. Students were then given 5 puzzle pieces with sophisticated vocabulary terms and had to work out what basic, or over-used word (e.g. Small) they had synonyms for and take it to the correct table. The words puzzles were completed and are now on display in the classroom, creating a bank of sophisticated adjectives that students can refer back to during their assessment planning. How lucky are our students to have such a hands on approach to learning?

These activities not only generate some excellent description using the senses, but also produced wonderful peer discussion and laughter as a result. We can’t wait to read the excellent description in your memoirs, Year 7!

Ms Diesing's Year 10 English Extension class have been preparing for their assessment by eating in class!! Students took a deep dive into the cognitive verbs required in their first unit: identify, describe, and compare. Using Skittles and M&M's, students identified key features of each. The most popular key feature seemed to be taste! Students the used this information to describe the tasty treats in sentence form. Lastly, students wrote paragraphs that compared the two demonstrating their ability to work at all three levels of cognition. In the coming weeks, students will use these levels of cognition to compare the representations of war and conflict in poetry.