The Thistle - An E-Newsletter of Scotch College, Perth, Western Australia

Extension and Enrichment News

The Junior School has been celebrating many achievements, with students participating in a wide variety of competitions, Year 5 boys completing their PYP Exhibition with aplomb and distinction, and the co-curricular clubs catering for diverse needs, abilities and talents.

In the classrooms, teachers continue to differentiate lessons and cater for all abilities through their planning and collaboration with the Academic Support and Enrichment teams. It is exciting to work alongside colleagues in providing rich learning experiences and to provide our students with appropriate stimulation and levels of challenge.

Winter Term saw a selection of Year 5 boys team up with Middle School students to compete in Tournament of Minds and the DaVinci Decathlon. Both Inter-School competitions require creative thinking, collaboration and the ability to apply skills and knowledge, in order to create something original and thought-provoking. We enjoyed success in TOMs, with one team being awarded Honours for their STEM long-term and spontaneous challenges. Congratulations to Heath Arbuckle, Alexander Fine and Nicholas Zhao for their contributions to this winning team. Our other Junior School participants were Oliver Cooper, Xavier Vanden Driesen, Lachlan Cairns and William Arundel. They are to be commended for all of their hard work and significant input.

The DaVinci event was hosted by PLC, where 22 teams gathered and battled, under great time pressure, in what proved to be an extremely difficult set of challenges. Given the incredibly short preparation time this year, the boys performed very well. Congratulations to Billy Chambers, Jason Rietveld, Tommy Clements and Jarrod Hutchison for their flexibility and commitment.

In 2019 the organisers will be hosting an event purely for the Year 5 cohort and we are already looking forward to participating in this exciting initiative.

The Newspaper Club is looking forward to the launch of our first edition of the Scotch Skedaddle, a labour of love that has been months in the making. The boys are hard at work, composing articles for edition 2, so we are very excited to see our first digital version go live in the very near future.

I look forward to working with the students throughout the remainder of Spring Term and thank them for their enthusiasm and passion for learning. It is exciting to be involved with such self-motivated and curious learners who are continually striving for excellence.

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Mrs Alison Webster
Enrichment Co-ordinator