From Compulsory Fun Learning Online to now Compulsory Fun Learning Face to Face in the Classroom

With our spectacular return to face to face learning at Fort Street this week, I would just like to acknowledge the efforts of Year 9 and 8 students with maintaining their focus and engagement throughout their study of English online for the past 13 weeks. To keep motivated, these students competed in the Compulsory Fun Learning Competition invented by Ms Truong, where they could earn points during every Video Conference Call via Microsoft Teams by turning on their camera and participating in verbal conversations about various concepts from texts such as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Poetry from the Romanticism Literary Periods and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Each week, they were also challenged to compose a variety of critical writing and creative writing and drawing activities and the results also contributed to this competition. We also had a bit of dressing up fun where students earned additional points if they turned on the camera and wore hats or shirts that matched that week’s colour theme! When we returned to face-to-face teaching this week, the top 10 students of every class were awarded merit awards and prizes; many of them managed to impressively achieve an accumulative score from the entirity of term 3 and the first three weeks of term 4 of over 1,000 points!!! The best reward is of course, the fact that they kept honing their critical and creative thinking skills even during lockdown and now they can continue applying it to their learning for the final lap of the Year 9 and 8 English courses and beyond.