It's been a great week for the TMC debating teams across both the Primary and Secondary campuses. Wednesday saw all teams competing across four venues from Upper Coomera down to Reidy Creek. 

The Senior and Intermediate teams both held the affirmative position in debates arguing that 'Australia should do more for asylum seekers'. The Seniors faced off against Queensland Academy and the Intermediates were against A.B. Paterson. Both teams showed real growth in their development of arguments and received valuable feedback from the adjudicator. This week's debates saw the end to the season for the Seniors, Intermediate, and Primary teams.

The two Junior TMC teams were both successful in their debates arguing that 'School exams should be banned' in their first ever short prep debates. TMC 1 held the negative position and was against Foxwell College, whilst TMC 2 held the affirmative position and went up against Trinity Lutheran College. Both teams have one more round of debates to go and are in very strong positions - good luck.

The real highlight of this week's debating was the amazing success displayed by the College's two Primary debating teams. This week's prepared debate tackled the topic that 'Humans are the most dangerous creatures'. Again, both teams were successful in winning their respective debates, putting forward some great arguments and successfully rebutting the positions of their opponents. However, this success was not the end of the evening's amazing triumphs. After the officials counted up all the points over the debating round robin, Tamborine Mountain College was awarded the overall champion school for the 2021 Gold Coast Primary Debating Championships for the third year in a row. A massive congratulations must be given to Mrs Deborah Horn and Ms Jodi Byron who have coached the teams to a fantastic win. Well done TMC. 

Mr Dave Haskins

A small number of students have been wearing incorrect uniform items to school in the cooler weather. Please take note of the following:

• Any non-TMC uniform items need to be completely covered. For example, under shirts must not have long sleeves that appear from under the College shirt. A short sleeved thermal shirt or singlet would be appropriate.
• If girls wish to wear culottes or a skirt, they may wear skin coloured stockings and socks, or black stockings. Stockings come in a range of denier that offer warmth at higher ratings. Leggings are not to be worn.
• Sports hoodies are not to be worn with the formal uniform, and vice versa.
• Please assist your child to remember to bring their TMC jumper or sports hoodie to school each day. Make sure all uniform items are named.

This week's featured image comes from the Year 5 excursion to St Helena Island, a colonial prison in Moreton Bay. Here the students sit in front of the old kitchen area, where the prisoners went once a day to collect their rations.

The competition came down to the final evening, with Coomera Anglican College going into the night with a one point lead. Our two TMC teams represented themselves and our College proudly, and were announced as the winning team at the conclusion of the competition. It was such a close race and it was wonderful to see our students go to thank the debaters from the other schools at the end of the night.

Our champion Primary debating team for 2021.

Front - James H, Mrs Horn.

Middle - Mr Stevens, Jessica D, Ariana S, Isobel S.

Back - Lucas R, Lilli H, Madison C, Archie A, Ms Byron.

The Primary Debating Competition trophy will sit proudly for another year in the TMC trophy cabinet.

(NB - TMC has retained this trophy since 2018! The competition was unfortunately canceled in 2020)

Over the past two weeks, students throughout the school have been competing in a Push Up Challenge. The aim of this challenge is to complete 3318 push-ups in 25 days. In just one week however, students have completed 8000 push-ups, which is an amazing result.

When asked about the challenge Gemma Close, Dylan Sippel and Jacey Chia all agreed that they think the Push Up Challenge was great for bringing awareness to mental health, improving fitness, productivity and motivation as well as raising funds for an important cause. Specifically, Dylan said that “This is a good challenge, as it brings the school closer together and allows the students to bounce off of each other”. All three students said that they would recommend the challenge to anyone interested. 

Overall, it is wonderful to see the dedication and hard work that many teachers and students are putting in to raise awareness of mental health. This competition has been a massive hit. Across Australia over 170 000 people have joined in and, as of the end of week 2, have raised over 5 million dollars to support groups like HeadSpace. 

Team TAMBO has completed a total of 14 955 push ups for mental health in the first 10 days of the challenge!

It is amazing that all these students are doing their part to hit the target of 33 180 push ups in 25 days.

Name                    Total for the first 10 days

Ben Garvey                           100

Lachlan James                       310

Bridget Nickols                     1025

Lachlan Williams                   1169

Caitlin Ward                          516

Lana Bignell                          742

Cleah Sullivan                       160

Magenta Watney                     41

Dylan Sippel                         1335

Maya Griffiths                        17

Gemma Close                        476

Oscar Suffolk                         274

Greg Fowlds                          513

Portia Ilaoa                           610

Hannah Dalton                      624

Ryan Adam                            361

Jacey Chia                            373

Tom Brittle                            76

Jacob Hafford                       902

Vinnie Taituha                      1169

Jesse Addison                         48

Carl Creed                              62

Keane Diong                         1209

Joel Freiberg                         377

Kendall Cox                          1124

Michael Lockett                     133

By Lily Parker Year 9 and Zoe Close Year 11

On Wednesday 2nd June and Friday 4th June, Mrs Tammie Ward-Hawkins, our Year 8 -12 Technologies Teacher, was invited to travel to Toowoomba to represent TMC at the Youth Entrepreneur Skills Conference and the It Takes a Spark EDU Conference, held at St Mary's College and St Savior's College. These conferences are designed to encourage young people to become involved and interested in STEM. The conferences offered interactive workshops for both teachers and students with a future focus. There was a wide variety of activities for students and teacher to be immersed in. 

Mrs Ward-Hawkins presented two workshops for students. The first involved students creating a piece of art work and then bringing it to life using coloured LED lights, a battery and some tin foil to make a circuit. They also experimented with using graphite pencils to make the circuit for the lights. 

The second workshop was a problem-solver workshop where students and teachers were to solve the problem of food wastage. The United Nations has a number of goals and one of these deals with food production and wastage. The problem solver was to look at ways to reduce or prevent fresh food from being wasted and people going hungry around the world. 

Both the workshops were well received by the teachers and students. The ideas and innovations produced were most impressive. Along with the displays the keynote speakers and innovations in the STEAM industry.

Well done to Mrs Ward-Hawkins at being selected to present at this conference. 

Having a child that loves to read is a little like winning the Lottery! We can read as much as we can to one child only to do the same to a sibling and have the opposite response. The years of home-reading from Prep through to Year 3/4 where children are reading the school-prescribed readers can be the most challenging- particularly with a child who struggles.

One of my favourite resources in raising children who love to read is from an ex-colleague of mine, Megan Daly. Megan was the school librarian for my classes in my early career over 20 years ago. She has gone on to write a wonderful book, which I have linked here: https://childrensbooksdaily.com/shop/

Megan has five tips to help with the home-reading routine at home. I hope you find the following useful.

Mrs Kelly Pavey- Learning Enhancement Specialist

5 TIPS TO STAY POSITIVE WITH KIDS AT HOME READER TIME

1. Create a short and snappy routine. Read the home readers at a similar time each day, so there is no surprises (and hopefully no arguments) around when and for how long. For us, home readers were always done on the drive home from school. You may prefer to fuel up with afternoon tea then do the home reader, or perhaps mornings work best in your family.
2. Treat it as training. I often compare home readers to the practice or training sessions required for football, netball, piano (or whatever your child does). I compare it to exercise and I believe it’s okay to admit to a child that ‘this is not always what we want to do, but the outcome (reading fluency) is going to be great’ and ‘it’s like learning to ride your bike. Lots of bumps and frustrations but when you can ride, the feeling of freedom is wonderful!’.
3. Follow up with fun! Always stress to your child that the home reader is for ‘learning to read’ and then follow up with a recreational read (self-selected library book or favourite from your home shelves). We want to lay down strong neural pathways associating reading with enjoyment, delight, freedom in reading choice and time spent with a loved adult.
4. Build confidence. Home readers should be at a level which is achievable for your child – one to two errors on a page maximum. If the home reader is too easy, hard or is becoming a battle, speak to the teacher, they are the experts in the ‘Science of Learning to Reading’.
5. Be a good reading buddy. Be as patient, positive and encouraging as you can. It is key to building trust so that your child accepts that errors are part of the process and knows that when they have really run out of reading steam for the day, you’ll recognise this and let them play instead.

Mrs Kelly Pavey - Learning Enhancement Specialist P‑12

On Tuesday, the Year 5 students, Mr Stevens, Mr Golden and Mrs Noel went on an excursion to St Helena Island, Moreton Bay, to explore our own historic Penal Settlement and National Park in Queensland. It was a fascinating, hands-on display showcasing a largely intact colonial prison settlement. Our day began very early when we all boarded the bus at 7 am! Our first stop was Fort Lytton National park where we climbed aboard a boat to take us out to St Helena Island. It was great to see the modern port facilities at the Port of Brisbane with visiting cargo ships. And we were also lucky enough to be guided by some dolphins!

Once we arrived at St Helena Island our tour guide James, took us on an exploration of the island and we learnt about how the prisoners lived and were treated while serving their sentences. We found out that they lived in very difficult conditions and were forced to work extremely hard. It was very difficult to escape because many of the prisoners could not swim and there were sharks surrounding the island. After a wonderful time exploring the island we headed back to the boat for lunch and for our journey home. It was such a great day and we were so lucky to have such warm weather.

Mr Golden and Mrs Noel

The students of Year 6 have been visiting the Prep classrooms in recent weeks to share the magic of reading.  Some prep students have been entertaining us with their incredible reading and storytelling talents!  Others have enjoyed the opportunity to be read to.  The visits have quickly become our favourite part of the school week.  

Mrs Deborah Horn & Mr Khan Holm

The last couple of weeks the Pre-Prep group have continued to explore books by Julia Donaldson. Charlie brought in his personal collection for us to explore and this sparked curiosity about other titles. Jack and the Flumflum tree has facilitated many outcomes and has seen the group's memory and recall skills put to the test. The children have played memory games to recall what Grandma packed in the patchwork sack and 3D collage creations, creating Jack’s boat. This week we will be testing whether it floats or sinks and making our own predictions. The story explores ways to keep the boat from sinking and the children have done an excellent job of recalling this! 

The story titled,  ‘Squash and Sneeze; has been explored through creative expression creating a group mural. The children challenged their recall skills to tell the story through the representation. Many hands-on provisions were offered to retell the story investigating volume. 

Extending on our community workers interest the children have been exploring vets! What happens at the vets and how we help animals. New vocabulary we have introduced included ‘symptoms’ and ‘treatment’. Eli’s mum came in to talk to the children about the role of a nurse. The children were able to see the scrubs, bandages and a chat about our emergency number. It was great to see the children engage with a real life community worker in our community that happens to be one of our mum’s. 

We always love to have families share any special knowledge they may have with the children. We will be working on getting some firefighters in to talk with the children. This will be timely as we have been practicing the evacuation and lockdown procedures with the children the last couple of weeks. 

In the Kindy room they have been practicing their fine motor skills.  Little hands need to develop dexterity and strength and through a variety of activities this is being supported. Activities such as tongs and marbles and pom poms. Cutting and pasting, threading, playdough and sticker collage. 

Cutting and pasting was a challenge, we will continue to practice this skill each week. It was wonderful to see all our little friends engaging, using their concentration skills during these fine motor exercises.  Well done Kindy children! 

Reminders 

• Winter clothes -  with  the changes in the  weather the children may need long track pants and jumpers as we still love to explore the outdoors as much as we can. 
• Vacation Care Bookings - Don’t forget to book your child into our Vacation Care over the three week holiday period.   Check out the Program on the College's Website. 
• This is the season for illness, please keep your child home if they are unwell.  
• Afternoon tea - if your child attends after school care please provide them with some afternoon tea.
• Late Fee for after 3pm. If your child has not been picked up by 3pm they will automatically be moved across to after school care which is a $20 fee as per our late fee policy. 

Mrs Rachael Fernandez

$1000 each! Art Excellence students Hannah Dalton and Jamie Castley have been successful in obtaining funds from the Scenic Rim Council LaunchPad grants for the purchase of creative devices to assist with their arts practice. The grants are for young creative people aged 16 - 25.

Ms Jenny Radley

A lovely day with some personal goals met and qualifiers for state champs. Great to see Bella at her first comp with the girls supporting her.

Primary 60cm

Bella Pidd 4th overall

Secondary 70cm

Summer Jacob 6th overall

Secondary 80cm

Grace Fullarton 14th overall

Emily Seagrave 17th overall

Secondary 90cm

Ashlee Lowe 5th overall

Secondary 100cm

Summer Jacob 2nd overall

Ashlee Lowe 7th overall

Secondary Team Reserve Champions

Summer, Ashlee, Grace and Emily

This term Dance has formed part of the schools sporting provision and we have been very pleased with the program. Our Dance program during Wednesday Secondary Sport is student led with CeCe Knight as head coach and Bridget Nichols as her assistant. The feedback from the children involved has been fantastic and they are all enjoying the challenges produced by our student coaches. We have been so pleased by the progress of the dance group that we have decided they will continue their lessons during Term 3 sport and they will perform at the TMC Arts Fest later in the year. This is an amazing achievement for a group that formed only six weeks ago.

Mr Andrew O'Loughlin

During the second half of this term, Mr O'loughlin instigated a new incentive award for Wednesday afternoon sport. Each teacher supervising sport nominated a student who they felt had made the greatest effort and contribution to that afternoon’s activities. Thus the Effort Award was created. The students selected had their names placed in a hat and the winners were drawn on the following Monday’s assembly.  The Effort Awards prizes consisted of family arcade passes at iPlay and family food vouchers at The Park, both located at Coomera Westfield. 

The students who won these prizes were Ava Byrnes Year 7, Bailey Green Year 9 and Lily Parker Year 9. 

The Effort Award was a great success and identified some worthy individuals. We hope this award can continue to be part of Wednesday afternoon sport next term. 

By Emily Clarke Year 11

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