From Year 9
With two weeks to go including Mercy Day, Year 9 Camp and Reflection Days, there is a great deal of excitement around the Year 9 students.
Today and yesterday, six Year 9 students have represented the College at the Regional Mercy Seeds to Justice Conference overnight in Anglesea. This Conference focuses on Social Justice and the Ethos of the Catherine McAuley and the Sisters of Mercy. No doubt these students will learn a great deal and have many inspiring ideas for how to implement social justice at the College both for the remainder of this year, and beyond.
Over the course of the Semester, each Pastoral Group worked together to run a year level assembly during nourish. This week on Monday 28th August, 9B ran their assembly with a focus theme was on multiculturalism in community. They respectfully started with an acknowledgement of country and prayer, followed by a number of interactive games designed to keep the year level on their toes, with prizes as a great incentive! The assembly also included a mindful drawing task to settle students down after they'd been energised with all the games. The assembly created community spirit. It was fun, engaging and educational as students had to solve problems and think of responses. Well done to 9B on their great work.
Here is a reflection from Poppy Ten Hoopen 9B on how the Assembly went.
This week 9B had the great opportunity to create and organise a assembly for our lovely year level. Everyone in our class participated in the organisation of our assembly and enjoyed contributing ideas and suggestions towards our theme and activities to run. In our assembly we focused on our multicultural diverse community as we wanted to explore our different backgrounds and nationalities of our year level. We did this through inspirational quotes in many different languages, provided statistics and many fun games where our fellow peers had the opportunity to win prizes. Everyone was very engaged and found the year 9 assembly very interesting. Overall, everyone had a great time participating and creating the assembly.
Many Year 9 Mercy RITES Projects have now taken place. The students have been able to embrace new skills while focusing on their interests. Poppy from 9B and Alanah, Eliza and Scarlett from 9C worked together on their shared interest in sport. Early this term, they approached the Head of Sports and asked if they could participate in the training of the ACS sport for Year 7. Once permission was granted they attended training sessions, before and after school as well as lunchtime sessions. They had to devise the warm up activities, umpire and provide feedback to the Year 7 students on how they can improve. On Tuesday 29th August, they attended the Grand Final acting as assistant coaches. To everyone’s delight, the ACS Year 7 Netball B Team won (read more about that here). The Year 7s have really enjoyed getting to know some of the Year 9 students and they feel they have really improved because of the Year 9 coaching and mentoring. Senior coach Jodie Laube said the Year 9 students have demonstrated great initiative and leadership. This is just one of the many wonderful, empowering initiatives that the Mercy RITES Program has allowed students to partake in.
Here is an additional quote from Poppy on her experience of coaching the Year 7s for Netball.
For our Mercy RITES Project our group all had the passion of netball in common, so we decided that we could help coach the Year 7 students for their ACS Netball Competition. We supported the Year 7s with their teamwork, communication and fitness skills. We worked to the best of our abilities to pass on our knowledge and skills of how to play to the Year 7s. They were a delight to coach, and we had a great time with them. All teams were very successful with the B team winning the grand final on Tuesday 29th August. This was a great experience and a good way to give back to our school community.
Mary De Bono
Year 9 Leader