Dear Parents and Friends of Eddie’s,
Here is what’s happening in the buzzing halls of English and Languages, including some exciting incursions and excursions for our boys.
In Japanese, students recently enjoyed a wonderful visit from the Embassy of Japan and are now learning hiragana and katakana, talking about daily routines and school life, and in the Senior years, exploring religious perspectives in the Land of the Rising Sun.
Meanwhile in Italian we are learning la lingua dell’amore to talk about ourselves, daily routines, and the people around us. We are looking forward to our upcoming excursion to an Italian restaurant, where our boys will be ordering in Italian, no inglese!
In Year 7 English, we are working on writing good sentences and strong paragraphs, and studying a post-War classic, Lamorisse’s film The Red Balloon, a simple yet poignant story about friendship, innocence, and magic.
In Year 8 English, we are journeying into myths and legends. From the Dreamtime to King Arthur, Monkey King, Romulus and Remus, Hercules and Antaeus, the boys are diving into some powerful old tales that bind us. We are soon to be creating multimodal myths that speak to our world today, and crafting rationales to accompany them.
Both of our younger year groups are using Writer’s Toolbox, a fantastic program that makes composition fun and, in the parlance, ‘gamifies’ writing. With a focus on arming our boys with an array of sentence styles and paragraph structures, this program is leading to great improvements in the fluency of our boys’ written work.
In Year 9 English, we have donned our Akubra and dusted off the Blunnies to look at Australian identity. From Peter Weir’s Gallipoli to Alan Marshall’s I Can Jump Puddles, David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter and John Marsden’s Tomorrow, students are exploring mateship, the fair go, the fair dinkum and contemporary multiculturalism, and crafting compelling essays. Are you with me?
Hovering through the fog and filthy air, Year 10s are marking the Bard’s 459th birthday by studying The Scottish Play. Thanks to those students with vaulting ambition who attended Bell Shakespeare’s performance of Macbeth at the Canberra Theatre in the holidays.
If your son missed this, never sag with doubt or shake with fear, because on June 1st all Year 10s will enjoy an in-school performance of Macbeth: The Rehearsal. By Bell Shakespeare’s Players, this is an acclaimed production of the play’s most famous scenes and soliloquies. The boys will be observers and participants in an immersive and interactive show. We hope this will be a good spur to prick their sides into Exam Week.
In Year 11 English (T) we continue our unit on Social Satire and Dystopia with Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a prescient book that asks us to celebrate quality, the texture of literature, good conversation, and to stuff our eyes with wonder instead of VR. For Literature students in Year 11 and 12, Tolkien’s Hobbit is being looked at through the lens of Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, which is based on Carl Jung’s symbolic theory of archetypes.
In Essential English we have been making podcasts and writing reports on social issues, looking at marketing campaigns and creating PSAs. This is an important unit of work where we look at the harmful effects of advertising on young men today and equip our students with the skills to think critically about ads.
And in Year 12 English, students are blowing down that old dusty road with The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, the epic realist novel that examines the human spirit, the plight of the poor, and workers’ rights. This book encourages us to consider the forgotten and excluded, and is very much in the spirit of Blessed Edmund Rice.
Before we know it, it will be Term 4, when our 12s will be studying Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night for their Final Exam, and enjoying an October evening performance of the play at the Canberra Theatre with our old friends from Bell.
We are now taking nominations for students who are interested in attending creative writing masterclasses at the University of Canberra in July and November, and we are looking for nominations from teams of students to enter the Write a Book in a Day competition, which we will be running as an incursion in Term 3. If your son wants to push his creativity and loves writing, please contact oburke@stedmunds.act.edu.au
Thank you to all parents and carers for your ongoing support and nurturing of the boys’ literacy.
Good luck to all students in Term 2. Read widely and write frequently, boys.
Oliver Burke
Acting Head of English and Languages