Last week our Year 10 geography students took part in a walking excursion through Carrington and Honeysuckle. The aim here is to provide students with an authentic understanding of city growth and development, and link career pathways in this field. Students were taught about the transition of Newcastle and the work done to restore the old industrial areas of the foreshore. An emphasis was placed on how recent and past development focused on key criteria such as sustainability, the retention of heritage, consolidation and economic growth. Year 10 will now apply this understanding to their assessment task with group proposals where they pitch a vision for the industrial areas of Carrington. Currently, they are utilising spatial technologies to develop a blueprint for these proposals.

I would like to thank year 10 for the way they represented the school last week and the interest and enthusiasm that they demonstrated. Thank you also to the HSIE staff for the effort that went into the preparation and delivery of this learning experience. The school is fortunate to have the subject specialists that allow us to deliver these kinds of deep, authentic learning experiences.

Year 9 are currently in the mix of their sustainable Biomes unit. Currently they are considering the environmental impact of food production and will extend this knowledge to develop management strategies to address potential food security issues into the future. Miss Blackwell’s class is focused on how soil structure, nutrient load, sunlight, and irrigation impact agricultural yields and are competing for plant growth using variations to these elements.

Please also note that we are entering a busy assessment period. To support families in managing learning, you can find assessment tasks in COMPASS in the learning task tab when the tasks are administered. In here you will find task notifications which provide detail about assessment requirements as well as our marking rubrics. If you have any questions about HSIE assessment, or our courses, don’t hesitate to contact our HSIE staff. 

I would finally like to welcome Cassandra Dorian and Finley Britten-Fraser who are our two HSIE interns joining us this Term from the University of Newcastle. Their engagement and passion for teaching in their early career has been evident from day one.

Michael Flanagan, HSIE Leader of Learning