K-6 Rites of Passage

MAGAZINE PIN OAK ISSUE 18: TERM 2, JUNE 12, 2015 Rites of Passage K-6 Contents 3 Headmaster’s Report 4 Big Issue 5 Films, Music, Books 6 K - 6 News 7 More K-6 NATIONAL SCIENCE WEEK 8 Feature Article Deputy Reports : Learning & Pastoral Oxley College is holding three 10 events to celebrate National 11 In the Spotlight Science Week 2015 with the theme of Making Waves - in the 12 MusicArtDrama International Year of Light, and 13 On the Branch Brain Health. Gallery 14 1. Science Fair. Calendar Students are asked to design a small experiment 15 that illustrates light in some way. They will be Sport submitted in the second week of August and 16 displayed at school. Ideas can come from any source, you just have to build it yourself. E.g. a periscope, a Pin Oak Team kaleidoscope, polarisation with filters. Students Student Editorial Team can obtain a list of ideas from the Science Alexia Cheaib, Ruben Seaton, Evangeline Department. Larsen, Evelyn Bratchford, Ryan Tan, Kaarina Allen, Maddie Thomas, Heidi Bevan, Cate Patterson 2. An Inter-House fun science quiz to be held in Science week. ONE student from each house Student Photographer will compete in a lunchtime quiz. Olivia Donovan 3. Knitting neurones. Designers Emma Croker, Conor Lynch We will be building a model brain with neurones Design Assistants knitted by you, or any other knitter you know. Dylan Whitelaw, Savannah Sandilands, Grace We would like the neurones to be in grey or Patterson, Bree Feary white (to represent grey and white matter) but we will happily accept any other colour. Patterns Head of Marketing and PR for the neurones either knitted or crocheted Emma Calver will be available at Student Services or can be accessed online at Staff Editor http://www.scienceweek.net.au/wp-content/ Beattie Lanser uploads/2014/04/NK_PatternBook_Apr15_v1_ HR.pdf Oxley College Railway Road, Burradoo, NSW, 2576. Some ideas from last years event are available Ph: 4861 1366 at: [email protected] http://www.scienceweek.net.au/wp-content/ uploads/2014/04/Neural_Knitworks_gallery_ v2.pdf 02 HEADMASTER’S REPORT As we get closer to a three week holiday for the borrowing. Our outstanding programme can be seen students, it is a good time to think about how we can at http://oxleybookedup.weebly.com/stage-2.html get your children to read a book or two, or eight, in the This includes the list of fourteen books that we have holidays. particularly recommended and bought up for each year group. Why we read Elizabeth Antoniak, our equally outstanding librarian, Of course, we read mainly because it is its own reward. has been buying up new books. We are getting some Good books suck you in the way that television, new displays and finding ways of making the books computer games and films can only hope to do. For more prominent. We are going to take classes in to some books the words on the page shimmer and borrow some books for the holidays. We will continue disappear so that you hardly notice them, even as you the ‘Drop Everything and Read’ programme on Mondays are reading…. Instead you have been transported to during House period. Some English classes have ten a medieval crusade, a New York loft apartment, or minutes of quiet reading at the start of many of their a fantasy land. For other books, the words are so lessons. amazingly put together that you notice the words all the time, and you can’t believe the skill of the writer. Next term I am going to go into English classes and have a look at the students’ reading logs (you can find these Unlike films and television, books give you the on page 14 and 42 of the Student Homework Diary) and imaginative space to imagine the worlds yourself. also talk to students individually about their favourite Everybody reading the Harry Potter books has their books of the year. I will be very interested in what own personal Hogwarts, everyone reading Lord of the students are reading. I like to get recommendations Rings has their own personal Middle Earth. What a so that I can read some of the books myself and stay film-maker does in comparison is transplant their own connected with what is popular. I also like to see how vision into a million minds. As Groucho Marx once said: the whole reading culture at Oxley is progressing. “I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a What you can do (the younger the children, the book.” more these ideas will work). Reading allows you into the minds of different people You can absolutely push and expect that your children and different lives. We can get right under the skin of will read a few books as part of a balance of activities. characters and people. We can understand what makes (Of course there are many students who won’t need people tick. Reading in this way can enlarge our own any push at all). For some students this will still be a humanity. regular time at the end of the day. For others it will be a few days of sustained reading followed by a few days Having said all this, it seems a little pedestrian to say that of something else entirely. reading helps students’ literacy, vocabulary, capacity to write and capacity to concentrate. However, these You can take a visit to a library or Bowral Bookstore things are all true to. Reading is an excellent means to (the bookstore is owned by Marie Fitzpatrick an ex these other ends…. As well as being an excellent end Oxley parent and Board Member, so you can say that in itself. Oxley sent you). They have a good range of books for younger people. All in all, there are many good reasons why reading should be part of a child’s entertainment diet in the You can talk to your children about books that were holidays. your own favourites. If you still have them in your house, that would be even better. Many children love What we are doing to encourage reading. these recommendations. For older students, talking We will be doing our bit over the next week or two. about classics such as 1984, Catcher in the Rye or To I will be speaking on assemblies about reading and Kill A Mockingbird may pique their interest. talking about some of the books I have read over the You can be seen reading yourself - or read with them. last six months. Our Head Girl Evangeline Larsen will They are more likely to pick up the habit if it is done also be talking about it. with a whole family. In the library we will be cranking up our wide reading Good luck. And I do hope that you all have a terrific and programme in anticipation of a rush of holiday safe school holiday period together. 03 Dance your pain away Music as an escape from reality. Most people hate Mondays – not me. I love around the globe. Like a punch in the face, To Mondays. Because every Monday afternoon, Pimp A Butterfly instantly engages the audience for one hour, I cease to be a stressed student into a new world: a grimy world of downtown and, instead, roam fearlessly through the hills Compton, where street credibility is the new and valleys of Westeros as Jon Snow, or Tyrion currency for freestyle rapping ability. Headphones Lannister, or Arya Stark. Because Monday is in, and I’m King Kendrick, striding the sidewalks, Game of Thrones Day, and on Monday I can revelling in the glory of my rise from a “peasant, escape. to a prince, all the way to a king”. Escapism is a basic psychological phenomenon Of course, it’s just as easy to embrace the that most contemporary citizens encounter on eccentric: January of this year heralded the a day-to-day basis. Floating away from reality release of I Love You, Honeybear, the second is so easy in the 21st century; if daydreaming LP from psych-folk singer Father John Misty. A fails to fully capture your imagination, a click hyperbolic, raw, passionate release, it draws of a computer mouse and a Netflix subscription on sweeping nu-baroque composition to create surely will. The nebulous consciousness knows a bizarre concept album centred around the no bounds, and the bittersweet feeling of love of a beautifully dysfunctional marriage. As abandoning a banal reality for excitement in the acoustic guitars strum giddily, I escape the imaginative adventures is more enticing than it single, teenage boy blues and become a third has ever been. wheel to Josh and Emma on honeymoon in the What is truly intriguing, however, is the ability Chateau Marmont hotel in LA. Lovely. for us to slide so easily into a context – whether The list is endless: it’s near impossible to refrain it is cultural, societal, or emotional – completely from being sucked into the poignant whirlpool divergent from our own. While this is plainly of Sufjan Steven’s childhood memories of evident in films, video games and television, abandonment (“When I was three, maybe four, a glance at contemporary music reveals that [my mother] left me at the video store”). I can this trend transcends entertainment mediums. “shop for winter when it’s just May” in Kanye In the first half of 2015 alone, critics and fans West’s exuberant consumerism to cheer for the alike have lauded releases spanning different superficialities of life, while Courtney Barnett’s socioeconomic classes, races, ages and genres.

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