What’s Happening at Surf Coast
Is an up to date list of planned activities at Surf Coast Campus that you can use for planning purposes. Please be aware that these dates are set early in the term and occasionally items may need to be cancelled or dates/times altered. This itinerary is altered each week to reflect any changes – please check this list of events EVERY WEEK carefully when you read the weekly VINE newsletter.
TERM 2 2023
Week 4
Tuesday May 16 Discovery and Learning – Prep
Tuesday May 16 Walking tour of Old Torquay – Yr 1
Thursday May 18 Winter Sport – 12.30pm – 3.30pm – Yr 5
Friday May 19 BLP Clubs – 2.45pm – 3.30pm
Friday May 19 East Timor Independence Day – Casual Dress Day – Sausage Sizzle – All Students – More information to come from Project Care
Week 5
Wednesday May 24 Arthur Reed School Photos – All students
Wednesday May 24 National Simultaneous Storytime – 11am in library – All Students
Thursday May 25 Pupil Free Day – No students at school
Friday May 26 Assembly – 2.45pm – 3.30pm
Friday May 26 National Sorry Day
Week 6
*National Reconciliation Week
Tuesday May 30 Geelong Excursion – Yr 2 – More information to follow
Tuesday May 30 Discovery and Learning – Prep
Thursday June 1 Discovery and Learning – Yr 1
Thursday June 1 Winter Sports – 12.30pm – 3.30pm – Yr 5
Friday June 2 BLP Clubs – 2.45pm – 3.30pm
Week 7
Tuesday June 6 Annual Surf Coast Cross Country – 12.30pm – 3.30pm
Wednesday June 7 Annual Surf Coast Cross Country – 12.30pm – 3.30pm – *BACK
UP DAY
Thursday June 8 Winter Sport – 12.30pm – 3.30pm – Yr 5
Thursday June 8 Lunchtime Concert – 1.40pm
Friday June 9 Assembly – 2.45pm – 3.30pm
Friday June 9 Project Care Food Bank Appeal – More information to come
Week 8
Monday June Kings Birthday Holiday – No students at school – Campus closed
Tuesday June 13 Discovery and Learning – Yr Prep
Thursday June 15 Regional Cross Country – Selected Yr 4 and 5 students
Thursday June 15 Year 5 Winter Sport TBC – 12.30pm – 3.30pm – Yr 5
Thursday June 15 History Presentation – Yr 1
Friday June 16 BLP Clubs – 2.45pm – 3.30pm
Week 09
Monday June 19 Dress Up Day – When I grow up – Yr Prep
Tuesday June 20 Discovery and Learning – Yr 1
Wednesday June 21 Celebration of Learning Conferences Session 1 – 2.30pm – onwards – more information to come
Thursday June 22 Celebration of Learning Conferences Session 2 – 2.30pm – onwards – more information to come
Thursday June 22 Lunchtime Concert – 1.40pm
Friday June 23 Last Day of Term – 2.30pm
All About Families!
Our families are the focus of our Integrated Studies unit in Prep for Term 2. We commenced our unit by sharing information about who we are and the things we like in our “all about me” special posters, which have taken pride of place in our classrooms. We then started to explore our own families and who our family members are. We read a special “family tree” story and learnt about how family trees work. We discussed the difference between our immediate family and extended family and explored which family members are in each. We illustrated the members of our immediate families and had such fun creating PlayDoh models of them too! We look forward to discovering more about how the people in our families are related, where they were born and raised, as well as investigating the special events we celebrate in each of our special families!
Caitlin Maher
We Love Reading!
We have been having an absolute blast during our reading sessions in Grade 1! We have been playing lots of exciting games as well as practising our literacy skills.
During our reading groups, we have been focusing on becoming fluent readers and having a go at decoding new words. We love this time as it allows us to explore new and exciting stories and learn so many new words! I wonder what we will be reading next week…
We have also been looking at making and creating plays to focus on our oral language. One of the best things about this is being able to dress up and create our characters! Many of our stories took inspiration from our “School of Back Then” day that we held last week. We cannot wait to keep building on our literacy skills to build our understanding.
Nick Hogan
Proceeding Through Procedures
The Year 3 students have immersed themselves in reading procedures, following procedures, and writing procedures this week. They are refining their procedure-writing skills, employing logic to create easy-to-follow instructions, and demonstrating their understanding of the conventions of procedural texts. As a result of their foray into this text type, they have created some fun and imaginative artworks, cards, and geometric designs.
Multiplication, 2D shapes and 3D objects have also been a focus this term and the Year 3 students have been revising and practising their strategies to gain a deeper understanding of the multiplication process, and develop their fluency in this area. A recent lesson on 2D shapes and 3D objects had the Year 3 students creating 3D objects with modelling clay and straws or toothpicks, which assisted them in describing the features of their objects.
We hope each of our families has a special time together this Sunday as we celebrate and honour our mothers.
Leanne Crole
Adam Stewart
‘Tis the Season to be Tootin’!
Last week, our Year 3 students were gifted their very own recorders – quite a ceremonious rite of passage, to be sure! Christian College Geelong is well known for its extensive band program, with many highly regarded instrumental staff visiting our five campuses each week to tutor a wide range of instruments including, flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon, saxophone, trumpet, French horn, trombone, euphonium and tuba.
The recorder is a terrific “gateway” instrument for our young people. It introduces them to techniques such as finger patterns/combinations, articulation, pitch, developing fine motor skills and muscle memory; understanding music notation, and concepts such as melody and harmony. As a wind instrument, it also encourages deep breathing techniques, which carry many health benefits. All these skills are easily transferrable to other wind instruments!
The Year 3 students will be working their way through some gentle repertoire via our Karate Recorder program. They work at their own pace, with individualised teacher assistance, and achieve coloured belts as they master new skills.
Our current cohort is already demonstrating fantastic commitment to use effective techniques, ensuring a wonderful experience for all involved! Watch this space…
Kate Notini
Surf Coast House Athletics
2023’s winning house and age-group placegetters
During today’s assembly, we awarded our Surf Coast House Athletics cup and Age Group Champion medals to our Year 4 and 5 students.
Based on points earned by all Surf Coast students at the combined House Athletics Carnival, held during the last week of Term 1, we congratulate Penman House on winning our Surf Coast Athletics cup. Well done to all Penman students for your efforts and success.
Age Group medal winners are determined by the total of individual points achieved in all track and field events.
Congratulations to the following Age Group Champions :
Avery Bowyer Year 4 Boys
Mackenzie Fitzgerald Year 4 Girls
Tom Burnell Year 5 Boys
Rosie Ryan Year 5 Girls
Joanne Richardson
Campuses Coming Together
Last Friday was an exciting day for our Year 5 students. It was the first time we have been able to bring together the Year 5 students from our Bellarine Campus and our Surf Coast campus. It was so exciting to spend the day together taking part in our Face Painting Extravaganza. The artwork that the students all produced was outstanding. The students had been studying different painting techniques, including body painting. The students were asked to choose a topic that meant something to them and then they had to produce a background. They then painted faces or hands to blend in with this background.
But what really stood out on the day was watching the students from different campuses interact and get to know each other. This is the first of these days – we will be holding days like this each term to help our students from different campuses connect and forge friendships that they will hopefully be able to carry on to Senior School when they all come together there.
Claire Deretic
Art Painting Festival
Last Friday the Year 5 students from Surf Coast and Bellarine campuses participated in a Face Painting Festival at the Surf Coast Campus. The students have been exploring the work of famous body paint Artist Liu Bolin and the festival was an accolade to his work. Bolin is a Fine Arts artist who is known for using chameleon-like methods to immerse himself in environments. Bolin says he uses his work “…to pass on a message. It’s my way to convey all the anxiety I feel for human beings”.
The festivities began with the students sharing a lovely morning tea, before getting to work on their backgrounds, faces and hands. The Year 5 students had spent the previous weeks exploring an issue they felt resonated with them and began planning a piece of art which they would eventually become a part of – whether through hand or face painting. The issues explored ranged from bushfires, water pollution, cyber bullying, online gaming and many more.
The students created beautiful, eye-catching work and showed great skill and dedication to their pieces. Overall, it was an amazing day, full of exciting new experiences, new friends made and beautiful artworks shared amongst peers.
Bea Greenhalgh
Mothers’ Day
It was our pleasure this week to host all of our Surf Coast mums at our annual Mothers’ Day pamper afternoon. The mums and their children enjoyed afternoon tea together a time of dancing and then an opportunity to visit the classrooms and take part in craft activities, selfies, decorating biscuits and of course the chance to have their nails painted and their hair done. On Friday the annual Mothers’ Day stall was a hype of activity, with the children perusing the many gifts with the hope to choose just the right one for their mum. We hope and pray our mums have the most wonderful Mothers’ Day and that God richly blesses them.
Debbie Riddle
Camp Australia
ChatGPT, Generative AI and Young People
Information and guidance for parents
Parents may be aware of the news and hype around recent developments in generative AI (artificial intelligence), especially the digital tool ChatGPT that launched in November last year. ChatGPT reached a million users in five days, and by January of this year had 13 million daily users.
By typing in a specific prompt, a person can ask ChatGPT to produce a written response and it will create it in seconds. It can produce emails, poems, song lyrics, speeches, reviews, recipes, stories, social media posts, working program code, and academic essays and reports. It can analyse text and code, and offer advice on improvements, corrections, and alternative approaches for just about any written text.
ChatGPT facilitates a chat-based conversation between the person and the AI chatbot that produces the output, allowing for questions, refinements, and iterations on the original output until the resultant text suits the intentions of the user.
Since ChatGPT’s launch late last year, there has been an explosion in the proliferation and availability of similar digital tools to the average person – including our young people. Google and Microsoft are racing to build AI tools into their browsers, office suites and search engines, and you may have heard of Microsoft’s new Bing Chat or Google’s BardAI.
Popular social media platforms are including AI features with the same capabilities as ChatGPT into their features, such as SnapChat’s ‘MyAI’ feature and Discord’s ‘Clyde’ AI chatbot. Other AI tools available online allow the creation of images, artwork, and music from a straightforward text prompt.
ChatGPT and similar AI tools have their limitations, including the potential to produce inaccurate information or to return text that has inherent biases. Depending on the AI tool used, it can also be difficult to cite sources or track back and identify where the information originally came from. The free version of ChatGPT is not a real-time search engine and only has access to information up to 2021, so the text output it produces may be outdated.
Generative AI and Education
The proliferation and accessibility of these digital tools for our young people presents both opportunities and challenges for education. It prompts questions for teachers and schools such as:
- What does this mean for contemporary learning?
- How does this influence our approach and thinking around assessment?
- What are the issues of safe and ethical use?
At Christian College, we have begun to grapple with these questions and are taking a careful and measured approach towards the development of guidelines and policy around the use of AI tools in the context of learning.
On Wednesday, May 3, teaching staff from across all campuses were well-represented at an in-house professional learning event introducing ChatGPT, generative AI and education where the limitations, opportunities, and challenges of these tools in the education context were explored. There is potential for these tools to provide many benefits to teachers and students in the classroom setting in future, if used within an appropriate framework that promotes age-appropriateness, privacy and safety, ethical use, and an understanding of these tools’ limitations.
Interim guidelines for staff were released while we work towards developing more formal and robust policy. These interim guidelines acknowledge that most AI tools require a personal account for use and come with Terms of Use that require users to be 18+ or else 13+ with parental consent. As with any online technology-based tool, student safety and privacy are an important consideration.
Currently, student access to ChatGPT and AI tools is filtered, to the degree possible, on their school device during school hours. This is a short-term approach as we continue to review and develop more formalised policy and explore implications for teaching and learning, including assessment.
We’ll continue to consider what this means for our College and community going forward in the context of our philosophical statement, which acknowledges that we live in a “progressively technological age” and identifies a commitment to adopting the best educational technology practices to support student learning. Our response to the increasing availability of AI tools must ensure we enable students to be their best and to thrive and positively influence their world – now and into the future.
Guidance and Support for Parents
I encourage parents to engage with their young people at home, especially teenagers and those using social media, about experiences they may have had with AI tools such as ChatGPT and to experiment and explore together.
For parents new to this technology, you may find value in viewing the video below at home – together with your young person – and considering possibilities and questions that it prompts. This twelve-minute video ‘Why OpenAI’s ChatGPT is Such a Big Deal’, though produced by American news channel CNBC, provides an engaging and accessible overview of ChatGPT, generative AI, its limitations and possible future impacts.
- View the video: Why OpenAI’s ChatGPT is Such a Big Deal (CNBC, February 2023)
I also highly recommend the two parent support articles below. While they both focus primarily on ChatGPT, the guidance and parent advice can be equally applied to any generative AI tool.
- Guide to ChatGPT for Parents and Caregivers (Common Sense Media)
- ChatGPT and its Role in Education (parent advice on our CCG Online Safety Hub)
Parents and young people should be aware that:
- ChatGPT and AI tools like it can get things wrong, and their information shouldn’t be trusted.
- Confidential or personally identifiable information (such as names) should not be entered into AI tools as part of a prompt due to risks to privacy.
- These tools have clear Terms of Use, requiring that users are over 18, or at least 13 if they have parental consent to use them.
- AI-generated content should not be used in the context of school without discussion and explicit approval by their teacher, and only in specific cases. Parental consent will be sought for such activities.
- It is important to be mindful of privacy when using AI tools, and personal information shouldn’t be included in data provided to them (for example, as part of a prompt).
It is important for parents to know that the use of AI tools will not be introduced by teachers in the context of learning activities and assessments for now, and this will only occur in future with careful planning, communication, and explicit consent from relevant parents.
Brendan Vanderkley, Director of Digital Learning
The Story of Buikarin
Buikarin is a small rural community half an hour away from our accommodation house in Viqueque. Within the community there is a kindergarten, that has 128 students enrolled, and consists of three teachers. One teacher is full time, one is on contract and the other is a volunteer. They only have one room to teach these 128 students. The area of that room is 6 metres by 8 metres. The teachers have 64 students at one time in this space. They have two sessions a day. Natercia is the head teacher and she's very passionate about her school. She founded this school with their own money and no support from the government.
On Friday May 19’s Project Care Day, we want to raise money to buy bricks for Buikarin so that we can give Natercia and her students and another teaching space. Natercia has already used her own money to put a roof over a “patch of dirt”and we would love to brick in this area for her so, as she says, “the kids don't run out onto the road when in class.”
One photo here shows 64 students in the classroom. Note the students are on either side of the room because Natercia puts a small wall down the middle to separate the two groups. Imagine the noise coming from this small space with 64 students. It would be very hard to listen, very hard to teach and very hard to learn. The next photo you can see is the roof that her and her husband had paid for themselves to create another teaching space. This is the space we would like to brick in and concrete the floor.
Graham Barton
Qustodio Parent App New Feature
New Activity Timeline View
It is a pleasure to share with parents a newly added feature of the Qustodio Parent App, which all parents have access to as part of our Cyber Safe Schools Program and in partnership with Linewize by Family Zone.
Since our launch of this parent app in 2022, it has been wonderful to note the level of engagement by parents with this tool. I have enjoyed many interactions with a range of parents about how it is helping them support their young people in their digital journey at home.
One area where I have often received feedback from parents is that the information about their child’s digital activity on their school laptop is vague and not as detailed or useful as they would like, and not comparable to the activity reporting available for their child’s personal devices.
It is for this reason that I am delighted to share that parents can now access a new feature, Timeline, that provides more specific and detailed information about digital activity on the school device outside school times.
I encourage all parents to take a few moments and view this two minute video that provides an overview of the new feature and how it can be used to better support parents in guiding their young people at home.
Getting Started with the Qustodio Parent App
A reminder that parents can learn more about Qustodio, create and activate their parent account as part of our school program, and explore Frequently Asked Questions, via our school’s Online Safety Hub.
Brendan Vanderkley, Director of Digital Learning
Uniform Shop Clearance Sale!
A MYTERN Thought for This Week
It’s easy to rush through a cup of tea or coffee and forget to stop and appreciate the moment.
Take time out now to simply appreciate being able to breathe in fresh air. Take a long slow breath and feel it rejuvenate every cell.
Make that your intention and watch your body smile from the inside 👍❤️
Discover more about MYTERN here
