An Enriching English Experience for Year 10

After a year of hard work and enriching learning experiences, the Year 10 English Enrichment program has come to end for another year. This year, we had 13 dedicated students in the class who attended every lesson from week 7, term 1 to week 5, term 4 (even when we went online for 100 days). These students are: Sharaya Acharya, Esther Alex, Hugo Ceran-Jerusalemy, Jeffrey Chu, Arlo Coleman, Ruby Hamilton-Brown, Niamh Hannan-Spinks, William Leung, Ethan Lin, Aslesha Nepal, Arlo Thwaites, Yexuan Yang and Dennis Yeo.

The program this year involved a major work with 4 components: Investigative inquiry question, personal exposition, imaginative story and reflection and the critical essay component. Students were required to compose their own inquiry question from one of four topics that are often explored in great works of literature: War, Human Psyche, Colonialisation and the Representation of the other. Their inquiry question was based on their own curiosity and they had to investigate and present their findings through reading a wide range of literature and writing in different modes. Before the lockdown, the class managed to complete the personal exposition and imaginative story and reflection section. However, the critical essay writing component became tricky to navigate online so the class instead attended a 6-week online intensive essay writing program called the Advanced Writers Critical Writing Program which was invented by me, Ms. Truong, to continuing sharpening their essay writing skills. Each online lesson ran for 1.5 hours once a week and each week, students focused on mastering a different component of essay writing (such as composing an introduction, topic sentence, thesis and textual analysis) to a variety of essay questions such as statement questions and extract questions. During this period, the class also competed in Ms. Truong’s Compulsory Fun Points program for the work they completed every week. The top 6 winners were Niamh Hannan-Spinks, Hugo Ceran-Jerusalemy, Ethan Lin, Dennis Yeo, Jeffrey Chu and Sharaya Acharya. Nonetheless, since they all committed time and effort, they were all rewarded with a certificate for completing a very academically intense English Enrichment program. I am certain that the skills they learnt from this program will allow them to have a strong foundation for critical, creative and reflective writing, skills they will all need to overcome the challenges in their study of Year 11 and HSC English in 2022 and 2023. It was my absolute pleasure to teach this class and I wish them all the best!