Making Music with Recycled Materials

Our Year 9/10 Music students explored the connection between music and sustainability through a hands-on instrument-making activity. Guided by the 3Rs—Reduce, Reuse and Recycle—students transformed everyday discarded materials into musical instruments, giving these items a new purpose while exploring how sound is created. The project encouraged creative thinking and resourcefulness, showing how we can reduce waste and make music with materials that might otherwise be thrown away.

Year 7 Science

Forces, Fair Tests and Blasting Off at KIOSC

Our Year 7 students have been working like real scientists this term. They’ve been investigating forces and motion, running experiments, and learning how to communicate their findings in a clear, structured scientific report.

Learning physics by doing

In class, students have been exploring balanced and unbalanced forces, and how forces change the way objects move. They plan investigations, change one variable at a time, collect measurements, and look for patterns in their results.

The big focus has been report writing. Students are learning that an experiment isn’t finished until the story of it has been told well. Each report includes:

• Aim and hypothesis: what are we testing, and what do we predict?
• Method and materials: clear enough that someone else could repeat the experiment
• Results: data presented in tables and graphs
• Discussion: what the results mean, how they compare with the prediction, and what could be improved
• Conclusion: a short answer to the original question

This is a skill that will carry students through every science subject, right up to VCE. We have been encouraging them to back up their claims with evidence and to treat unexpected results as chances to learn rather than “mistakes”.

KIOSC Discovery: Space Force Quest

To put their learning into action, our Year 7 students took part in the Space Force Quest Discovery program at KIOSC (the Knox Innovation, Opportunity and Sustainability Centre). Set in a space-exploration scenario, the program connects directly to what students have been learning in class, including Newton’s Laws of Motion, momentum, energy transfer and simple machines. Students rotated through three challenges:

• Drone Rescue Mission: Students became Mars mission engineers, coding drones to find a supply drop blown off course by Martian winds and deliver it to the Mars base. They saw balanced and unbalanced forces at work as they tried to control their drone’s flight.
• Space Clean Up: Using Sphero robots, students programmed their “spacecraft” to collect orbiting space debris. They discovered how momentum and motion affect the way objects move and why clearing space junk matters for protecting satellites.
• Space Impact: In a creative engineering challenge, students used virtual reality tools to design a rocket-launch chain reaction, exploring how simple machines and energy transfers work together.

Sustainability Corner

Space Junk, Earth Junk: Small Actions Matter

Our Year 7 students recently learned that there are thousands of pieces of debris orbiting Earth, and that this “space junk” is a real threat to the satellites we depend on for weather forecasts, navigation and communication. The lesson was clear: if we don’t look after our environment, it becomes harder to use and fix later. That idea applies on Earth too.

Here are some simple ways our school community can look after our planet:

• Reduce waste first. Choose reusable containers, drink bottles and wraps. The best rubbish is the rubbish we never create.
• Sort it right. Check what goes in recycling, soft plastics, compost and general waste. Putting the wrong items in the wrong bin can contaminate a whole load.
• Think energy. Turn off lights, fans and devices when they aren’t being used. Energy is a big part of what Year 7 are studying right now.
• Repair, reuse, rehome. Before throwing something out, ask whether it can be fixed, passed on or turned into something new.
• Walk, ride or carpool. Fewer cars at drop-off means cleaner air and a safer school gate.

Year 9/10 Japanese: Reconstructing Characters

Our Year 9/10 Japanese Specialism students got hands-on with learning how to describe people — and no, it wasn’t an early Halloween activity!

Students worked in teams, using an envelope of jumbled sentences and a picture of a popular character. Their challenge was to piece the sentences together in the correct order to describe the character.

The activity was a fun and engaging way to practise teamwork, reinforce Japanese sentence patterns and build confidence in describing people. There were plenty of smiles along the way, with prizes awarded to celebrate the students’ efforts!

Year 9/10 Outdoor Ed Surf’s Up: Surfing Excursion at Inverloch

Students in our Year 9/10 Outdoor Education specialism recently headed to Inverloch for an exciting day of surfing, adventure and outdoor learning!

The excursion provided students with the opportunity to step outside their comfort zones, develop new skills and experience the challenges of surfing in a safe and supportive environment. With guidance from experienced surf instructors, students learned about surf safety, ocean awareness, paddling techniques and the fundamentals of catching a wave.

Throughout the session, students demonstrated resilience, perseverance and a willingness to give surfing a go, supporting one another as they practised their skills and tackled the waves.

The excursion was a fantastic opportunity to put the skills and knowledge developed in Outdoor Education into practice, while also building teamwork, confidence and an appreciation for the natural environment.