Wishing our Judo superstars the best of luck as they prepare for the 2019 Judo National Championships! Students Noa and Mateo Langhi (Year 5), Tiaan Klopper (Year 7) and Luka Puljic (Year 9) will compete in the competition on the Gold Coast this month.
Date: Tuesday 25 June
Time: 7:00pm
Where: Cousins Hall
This is an opportunity to hear about post school pathways and WACE graduation, and to discuss any questions with Heads of Learning Area. We encourage you to attend, or alternatively to access the slide presentation of the evening which will be made available in SEQTA on the Documents page. The Year 11 and 12 Curriculum Handbook, as well as information about applying for Independent Study in 2020, is now available in SEQTA on the Documents page and on the Parent Portal.
Date: Tuesday 25 June
Time: 6:30pm
Where: Theatre
This is an opportunity to hear about future pathways, subject offerings, and to discuss queries with Heads of Learning Area. We encourage you to attend, or alternatively to access the slide presentation of the evening which will be made available in SEQTA on the Documents page. The Year 11 and 12 Curriculum Handbook is now available in the Parent Portal and SEQTA on the Documents page.
Date: Monday 17 June
Time: 6:30pm
Where: Theatre
This evening will provide an overview of requirements for WACE Graduation, presentations about elective subjects, and the opportunity to ask questions of Heads of Learning Area. Parents and students are invited to attend.
The 2020 Duncraig Curriculum Handbook is available online, and can be found either in the Parent Portalhttps://portal.ststephens.wa.edu.au/parent-and-student/learning-resources/curriculum-handbook.html, or in School Documents – Parent Information on SEQTA. The Handbook will assist when choosing electives for 2020. The slide presentation from the evening will be uploaded to SEQTA Documents.
A group of Year 10 students tried their hands at plastering, tiling and bricklaying during the School’s recent Try-A-Trade program at the North Metropolitan TAFE’s Clarkson campus.
The students spent three days learning new skills, with plastering proving very popular – shown by the amount of plaster spread around – and groups enjoying the tiling and bricklaying opportunities as well.
Try-A-Trade is a short course to give students a chance to participate in a trade environment and experience what an apprenticeship may be like.
VET in Schools liaison officer Vicki O’Connor said it allows the students to have a better overview for subject selection at school as they can make an informed decision on the course of study they would like to follow.
“Students were totally engaged in each trade, displaying excellent skills and behaviour, prompting positive comments from the lecturers at North Metropolitan TAFE, and they represented our School in an extremely positive way,” Mrs O’Connor said.
“Parents were also very supportive with phone calls, emails and chats at your Careers Expo on the positive effect it had on their child as it had given them a direction for upper school studies.”
The VET Liaison Officers from both campuses were very impressed with the students’ “have-a-go” attitude and the questions asked about pathways into trades.
Year 9 student Josh Davies played with his team the North Metros on Friday night. The team won the baseball national championship. A really close, hard game that they won by 1 run. Josh got to hit the winning run!
This means the team will go to Michigan, USA in August to play in the World Championship, fully paid by Baseball Australia.
Great effort by Josh!
Year 12 student Matt Coleman made his debut for the West Perth Falcons Colts recently in their match against Peel Thunder. Donning the number 47 red and blue guernsey, Coleman had some great possessions and marks and received good feedback from the coaches. While the score didn’t go their way, we’re really proud to see Matt out on the field!
So you don’t have much homework tonight? Assignments and study notes up to date? Have you ever thought about spending a bit of time each night learning touch typing?
Touch Typing is when you can type without looking at the keys while you type. This means you can type much faster than if you had to look and see where each key is, and it means you can keep looking at whatever it is you are typing instead of the keys. This is an incredibly useful skill to develop – it will help you at school and later in life as well, improving your efficiency and speeding up work on assignments and essays. Once you learn touch typing, you will know where the keys are located on the keyboard through your sense of touch and you will be able to look at the screen or whatever you are typing rather than the keyboard.
On www.studyskillshandbook.com.au there is a section to get you started on your journey of learning touch typing. Click on unit Technology Tools and on the Learning Touch Typing page you will find links to lots of free software to help you develop your touch typing skills as well as some great tips to get you started. There is also a discount voucher to the professional TypeQuick course. Being able to touch type will definitely make life easier for the students in the senior years and beyond. 10 minutes practice a day could end up making a big difference.
But don’t neglect your handwriting skills either. As long as you have to submit handwritten work or handwrite for tests and exams it is also important to improve the legibility and speed of your handwriting. Go to www.studyskillshandbook.com.auand visit the Writing Skills unit and click on the Improving Handwriting section. You’ll find some excellent strategies for improving your handwriting as well as some special pens that can assist you with this such as the RingPen shown below.
Should students type or handwrite their study notes?
Short answer, they are better off doing whatever the exam or test will be. So if the exam is handwritten, it is better to handwrite notes. This creates muscle memory, it sets up a pattern in the brain of what they will be doing in the exam. If they do not have exams, then it does not really matter, they can choose to either type or handwrite their notes.
For students who do have written exams, they are better off getting used to writing as much as possible, especially as students do less and less pen to paper and more and more on the keyboard. It is also argued that by writing the information, you set up pathways of familiarity and recognition in your brain that will kick in when you are in an examination situation.
On the other hand, some subjects have so much content that to try and wade through it with handwritten study notes would take forever. A good compromise for students who would prefer to type is to start making initial notes on the computer as this allows you to cut and paste, group information and rearrange it with ease. Once you have a core set of notes completed, you may like to further summarise some sections on paper using a more graphical or visual form of note-taking such as mind-mapping. And when you are learning the notes, read a section, then see what you can write without looking, this way you will be testing if the information is in long-term memory and practicing your handwriting at the same time!
Given that students now have to be masters of both the pen and the keyboard it is important to develop both legible handwriting and touch typing skills. When exams all go to typing at some stage, which they will inevitably do, everything will change.
Sarah Cooke
Careers Advisor
School students will swap their school bags for sleeping bags later this year for the annual Anglicare School Sleep out. Although St Stephen’s isn’t part of the Anglican Schools Commission, Anglicare were impressed by our commitment to giving back through our Service Learning arm that they extended the invitation for our community to experience sleeping rough for one night, to see how the more than 9000 West Australians who are homeless live. If you’re interested in forming or joining a St Stephen’s School team, go to www.anglicarewaschoolsleepout.org.au.
Our School team page is at: https://anglicarewaschoolsleepout.org.au/teamststephens
Moving up to Secondary can be a bit daunting for some but the Year 7-10 Mentoring Program helps to welcome the newest recruits into the fold. Year 10 students recently spent time playing games with some of the Year 7s, helping to bridge the gap from Primary to Secondary, with Celebrity Heads, UNO and Two Truths and Lie offering lots of laughs. The groups meet twice a term to provide the younger students with a familiar and friendly face before they transition into their Houses in Year 8.
