Newsletter Competitions and Executive Director's Reading Challenge

Hello everyone. St Andrews College has been running a writing competition since March, encouraging students to submit writing on various topics. While most months we have been operating an Open competition, in the month of August we tied our competition to the Bragg Science Writing Competition operated by the University of NSW. This involved all students in years 7-10 submitting a piece of writing about scientific research that is changing our world for the better. 

The classes engaged with the topic on a class basis, with all students submitting a piece on the one topic. The classes were then asked to select what the students’ felt was the best piece representing their class. The winning pieces of writing were then entered into the internal St Andrews Writing Competition for that year-group. A winner was then chosen from those best pieces. On top of this, any student who wished to enter the external Bragg competition could do so and we entered 33 students from across the Junior Campus. While we did not have any students win the University of NSW competition, the quality of writing from our students was high and the St Andrews part of this writing earns $30 gift vouchers for the winning entries of each year-group.  Without further delay, the winners of the St Andrews Bragg writing competition are:

Year 7: Jobella De la Cruz.

Year 8: Marcia Chua.

Year 9: Ana Vaokakala

Year 10: Hailey Magat.

I am happy to say that we also have a Year 7 winner from the September writing competition with a beautifully written poem. The winner in September was:

Year 7: Mackenzie Jones.

I would like to thank all students who entered and continue to enter on a monthly basis. It is clear that St Andrews is lucky to have some committed writers within our student body and I look to encourage you to enter the many external competitions around the world. The October competition was so popular I am still processing entries, but we will clearly have a winner for each year-group to announce shortly. 

The November competition is an open competition once again and I encourage students to enter any piece of writing they are proud of. You do not need to be someone who spends all day making notes or writing endlessly. You could have a piece of writing from English or history that you are proud of and wish to enter. Remember, there’s no such thing as good or bad writing when it reflects a moment of pure clarity from which you learn. Take a chance and enter in the month of November.

The Executive Director’s Summer Reading Challenge is back, bigger and stronger than ever in the Summer of 2020-2021. Every year the Executive Director awards Chromebooks and $30 gift vouchers to students for simply reading books. It doesn’t matter if students read novels, comics, manga or anime, any reading that interests our students can be entered. Books can be accessed from home, the local library or the diocesan electronic library that is available to all St Andrews students. 

To take advantage of this fantastic opportunity, students finish the books they love and write up to 50 words about why they loved reading it. Just 50 words! Many students can sneeze 50 words. It’s that easy. Further information and the entry form can be found here. Please encourage your students to enter as many times as they want. Good luck!

Instructions on how to access the Electronic Library are below and worth the time to access hundreds of books.

Duncan Dewar

Leader of Learning Literacy