English

Ms Rachel Deligiorgakis – Leader of Learning

In English this semester all our students have been busy writing. Students in Year 7 all the way through to Year 12 have spent a great deal of time refining their imaginative and discursive writing, and learning how to adapt their writing to suit different situations. We are all proud of the way our students are developing into thoughtful and purposeful writers.

In addition to their writing units, our junior students have engaged in study of a range of different texts and concepts this semester. Year 7 enjoyed their reading of Tristan Bancks exciting novel Detention, and have learnt about how authors craft characters to give readers a new perspective on the world. Our Year 8 students proved themselves to be budding actors as well as writers, demonstrating great enthusiasm in acting out Honey Spot by Jack Davis. S.E. Hinton’s coming-of-age classic, The Outsiders, was a hit with Year 9, who now have a strong understanding of the bildungsroman genre and the literary value of young adult fiction, while Shakespeare’s Macbeth showed Year 10 the potentially tragic consequences of ambition and power.

Year 11 Studies, Standard and Advanced studied a wide range of texts from the autobiography of a boy soldier,  to an Australian true crime podcast, to Arthur Miller’s seminal 20th century play Death of a Salesman. Our Year 12 students have applied themselves diligently throughout the semester, attending tutoring in the library before and after school, submitting drafts to their teachers, setting goals and developing good study routines, and they are now ready to knuckle down for the final stretch before the HSC. 

Our junior and senior students have also benefited from some additional opportunities outside of their regular classrooms. Our Year 12 Advanced students attended the Sport for Jove symposium on The Tempest and Hag-Seed, a valuable experience involving live theatre and discussion that gave them new insights into their HSC texts. Our Year 8 students attended Riots and Revolutions, an informative performance from ‘Poetry in Action’ that complemented their Term 2 study of protest poetry, while our Year 10 students were lucky enough to watch a live performance of Macbeth. Finally, Year 7 concluded their study of Detention with a hands-on workshop on an upcoming theatre adaptation of the novel.

We look forward to another semester of literary adventures ahead!