Curriculum News
Electives Choices for 2020
Students in Years 8 and 9 will be selecting their electives for 2020 early next term. At Carroll College, we run electives for one year, and students then reselect again for the following year. Students have received a booklet with information about all the electives and been spoken to about how electives are chosen. In week 2 of next term, students will be invited to use a web-based subject selector program. In the program, the students need to select their TWO preferred electives from the lists. It is important that they select their most preferred elective first, followed by their second choice. The program records the time and date of the selections as well as the order selected. From this information, the electives that will run are decided and students allocated to them. Please encourage your child to seek out more information from teachers and students currently in the electives they are interested in. The more information they have the more suitable choices they can make. As part of this process, the College runs a Curriculum Information and Expo evening where teachers are available to discuss the electives in more detail. The evening will be held on 30th July in the Hall.
Students in Year 10 have received an invitation to meet with a senior staff member to discuss their subject selections for next year. Students need to gather as much information about their subjects as possible so that they make informed choices about the courses they will be studying for the next two years. I have encouraged them to speak with other teachers and students currently studying the courses to get a real picture of what they are selecting. It is important that students select courses they are interested in (not what their friends are interested in!), that will challenge them and that will help them achieve their long term goals. More information for parents and students will be provided at the Curriculum Information and Expo evening on 30th July.
Year 12 students will be sitting their Trial exams in six weeks time. These exams are very important indicators of overall success at the HSC exams at the end of the year. Students should already be spending considerable time making summaries of all their topics, attempting past HSC style questions and revising all the work they have done to date. Students need to be writing! They cannot expect to retain information by just reading over notes. They need to be writing, re-writing, summarising, drawing and labelling diagrams, making mnemonics, putting information to songs or whatever they find works best for them. If students do not yet have a regular study timetable then they should devise one and stick to it. If parents want any information about how to help their child study, please contact the College.
John O’Neill
Assistant Principal, Curriculum and Achievement