Years 7, 8 and 9 Program Leader | Mr Damien Coman

Term 3 has commenced with many conversations regarding student reports. The goal in this is for boys to clarify what they are wanting to achieve and how they plan to do this. It can also help refine the way that they organise themselves at school. These conversations occur with Tutors, myself and parents at the interviews held last Wednesday and last night in the Campbell Centre. The importance of the Student/Parent/Teacher tripartite approach here is evident and one of Terrace’s strengths.

On Tuesday, we congratulated a significant number of students who received Academic Medals. We also awarded five students in each year level the ‘Principal’s Award.’ These were presented at our start of term year level assemblies to recognise the boys who have never won a medal but have a high level of achievement and conduct themselves as a Terrace Gentleman consistently.

The formation program has started with planning for the upcoming term and will then move into the following topics:

Year 7 | Self-esteem/study spaces/strategies for learning.

Year 8 | Time online-the challenges of adolescents spending large amounts of time on screens and the body’s reaction to this.

Year 9 | The seven Habits of Highly Effective Teenagers (Sean Covey’s work), sleep studies and the effects on performance.

As always, we have many students involved in Music, Chess, Rugby, Basketball and of course, House Choir last Friday night. Year 8 camps continue whilst Year 9 commence their camps in Week 5. Terrace hosted a variety of schools for Future Problem Solving on Monday, others competed in the Maths Team challenge and placed first, the Australian Maths Competition was contested on Wednesday (just to name a few).

Finally, these Year levels had a spelling bee at their year assemblies which was hotly contested. The final word of triskaidekaphobia (suspicion of the number 13) was spelt correctly by a student in each of Years 7,8 and 9! Well done Gentlemen.

Parents will have received an email talking about a new initiative that Terrace has embraced called School TV. Links are provided monthly where our parents now have access to Australia’s leading experts in their field. Tough topics such as depression, screen time, pornography, anxiety are examples of the areas covered by these experts. It is led by Dr Michael Carr Gregg, arguably our country’s leading adolescent psychologist.