Tiverton Campus

Primary School Years 5 and 6

The Primary School students have been working hard the last few weeks working on their class debates and presenting them to the wider Primary School cohort, as well as seasoned adjudicators, who discussed their arguments, their presentation skills and what they could develop moving forward into the future. 

We believe these skills are essential for student’s development, and their overall health and wellbeing, in terms of confidence levels, ability to form sound arguments, and debate and rationalize under pressure. The overall winners were the Year 6 teams but the Year 5 debaters accounted for themselves very well as shown by the very close results. 

The Primary students will also continue to develop their health and wellbeing with the Year 5 and 6 Cross Country championship on Friday 6 September at TH King Reserve from 1:30pm — 3:30pm. The students will also be developing their inquiry and scientific minds at Scienceworks in a few weeks’ time on the 18 September, following on from the Maths Olympiad and Games and ICAS English Competition in the same week. 

Year 7 and 8

In Year 7 with our Brain Grow Program and in Year 8 assemblies we will be focusing on the theme of gratitude over the next few weeks. Brain research tells us that our brain has a preference for negative information, so we need to make the positive experiences stick in our brain when they come our way. 

Gratitude helps us do this by asking the question of ‘what is right in my life’ instead of ‘what is wrong in my life’? We believe that for Year 7 and 8 students feeling gratitude is so powerful because it activates many different brain areas responsible for their wellbeing. 

The students in Year 7 as part of the DLS DNA program will be writing down five things that they are grateful for that are good and right in their life right now. For example, ‘what am I thankful for in my life today – and who in my life has helped to make it that way’? The students are then going to write a short letter to the person they feel gratitude towards expressing their thankfulness to them. 

The letter will focus on:

  • What specific actions the person has done for you?
  • What makes you thankful for those actions?

The key in this letter is for the students to express their appreciation by being thankful and this will hopefully improve their overall health and wellbeing. 

Mr Martin Gibbs
Director of Students — Middle Years

Back to The Duce Issue 2019 12 - 29 August 2019