At times staff go out of their way to notice a student who is sitting in the corner and looking a little bit unhappy. Sometimes it’s a staff member who spends an hour with a student helping with an essay, and sometimes it’s a coach who’ll watch the games either side of his team. All these people are here at Knox.

Sometimes it’s a student who will go up to an individual and tell them to stop harassing another student. Sometimes there are students who will come and sit in my office and make suggestions about the spirit of the School and how we can increase attendance at a particular fixture or performance. These students exist too.

In the last two weeks, I’ve had a number of students respectfully approach me and talk about these matters. Knox is in pretty good hands when we have students willing to positively express their opinions, give constructive feedback and work collaboratively towards improving their School.

Year 7 Cape York Cultural Experience
Information Next Monday Night 9 March 5-6pm

Thank you to the Year 7 parents who have submitted their Expression of Interest for the Cape York trip. The Year 7 Parent meeting will be held NEXT Monday 9 March in the Roach Lounge in the JAPAC between 5pm -6pm (at the dinner break). Mr Daniel Carson from Red Earth Organisation, will provide information and paperwork for the trip and there will be an opportunity to ask questions.

The Cape York Cultural Trip is offered exclusively for Year 7 students in July this year.

The group will be accompanied by two Red Earth guides and two Knox teachers.  An information booklet and application information will be available at the parent meeting. More details below.

Cape York Expression of Interest Form
Cape York Immersion Information

The Kuringgai Chase Special Olympics Fun Run and Barry Easy Walk is on again this year!
This annual event will be held on Sunday 15 March morning at 9am, Claude Cameron Grove, Wahroonga. Fun activities and sausage sizzle available on the day. A shuttle is available from Turramurra. More information here.

Each year Knox boys buddy with the special Olympians as they complete either the 5km walk or the 10km run. All welcome to participate. It’s a fun day and our support of this event is important. Register or donate here.
 
The Knox Annual Easter Egg and Pots of Noodles Drive
For the past 12 years the Knox community has been supporting Wesley Mission each Easter with gifts of Easter Eggs and Pots of Noodles for Sydney’s homeless. This small gesture for those who are struggling and isolated brings a lot of joy and appreciation that the Knox community reach out to help those in need.
Please bring your donations along to the SAOs or to Room 15 (Mrs Helen Clarke in The Social Justice Office).  

Bushfire and Drought Relief
We are supporting those impacted by fire and our drought impacted regional neighbours via the Facebook page ‘Mobilising for Mogo’ initiative. See the list of specific items to donate here and please drop these donations to Room 15. 

World's Greatest Shave - Tuesday 10 March
Social Justice Prefects and guest speakers will present at assemblies over the coming weeks. Boys must remember that cuts will be in line with the School's regulation cuts. Register online here.

Breaking a World Record and helping community projects.
The Rotary Club of Wahroonga is attempting to set a World Record of connected socks on 25 October this year at St Ives Showground. Start collecting your odd socks - remember, socks need to be accompanied by the donations otherwise they can’t be included!

School shoes for the Philippines
Please send donations to Room 15 - shoes will be sent soon!

The Knox Social Justice Club - all invited to participate
There are opportunities for service at community events both within the School and in the wider community and immersions to overseas and regional areas. Everyone across Years 7-12 is invited to participate and bring a friend. 

Parents for Justice (Just Parents)
If you would like to join up and offer support, please contact Mrs Clarke.

The study was conducted at Northwestern University and found that the recipe for success includes good ideas, hard work, imagination, perseverance and sometimes a bit of luck, as well as failure; and that failure is ‘the essential prerequisite for success’. They discovered that ‘every winner begins a loser’, but not every loser becomes a winner. Whilst we often tell our children that they just need to keep on trying until they succeed, it seems that ultimately, persistence is not what separates the winners from the losers. It is, however, what individuals and groups learnt from their failures, understanding the changes they need to make to see improvement, and then strategically making only these improvements, to experience success; rather than changing everything!Persistence is important but the strategic implementation of improvement steps, with persistence, is the key. The researchers found that those who continued to fail didn’t necessarily work less hard than others, but their work was less purposely driven.

The lesson in this for our boys, and for us all, is the understanding that failure and mistakes are, indeed, important, but not on their own. It is the analysis of these failures, or mistakes, and the planning for how improvements can be made moving forward, and then the plan that we strategically enact that will help us to succeed in our endeavours, whether they be in the classroom, on the sporting field, or even in our social interactions with others.

It is great to have all of our boys home from camp and back to school this week. There are so many fabulous camp stories, some of which reflect the points made above! Camp truly is one of the best places to try, fail, adapt and try again, all in quick succession.

Congratulations to Nick Williams, who has been selected to represent Knox Prep in the CIS team that will compete at the State Basketball Championships later this term. Our IPSHA representative swimmers are at SOPAC today for the IPSHA Championships. We look  forward to sharing their results with you next week.

In addition to the online course, Bravehearts provides information and resources to parents and caregivers. These resources offer practical suggestions for: Keeping your child safe online; facts about sexual assault and exploitation; FAQs; and resources for parents to teach their child about personal safety. To access these resources please click on this link.

Dates for the diary
• Thursday 5 March - Assembly 2F
• Monday 9 March - Kindergarten Fire Brigade Visit
• Thursday 12 March - Assembly 1D
• Wednesday 18 March - Year 1 Celebration of Learning
• Thursday 19 March - Assembly 1E
• Friday 20 March - Year 6 Bake Sale
• Thursday 26 March - Assembly 1S
• Wednesday 1 April - Year 1 Excursion -Global Change Makers
• Thursday 2 April - Assembly: Kindergarten combined
• Friday 3 April - Year 2 Narrabeen excursion
• Week 11 - Years 1/Yr 2 Swimming

Throughout our discussions and discoveries we have found to have more questions and wonderings about families. Such as:

·         Do families live in the bush?

·         Do families go running together?

·         How do you make a family?

·         Why do mums have babies and dads don’t?

·         Does everyone have a family?

·         Why do some families have dogs and some families don’t?

·         Why don’t all grandparents live together with their families?

·         Why do parents go to work?

We hope that through our explorations about families we will be able to answer our wonderings.

The boys will begin designing their own celebration. This will focus on a personal interest and they will identify traditions that are important to the special event.

Some of the key skills the boys are developing and learning to independently apply include:

Research Skills - collecting, recording and organising data, asking questions, making observations, planning using the Venn Diagram and using headings, analysing data from the interview and presenting their findings after comparing and contrasting.

Communication Skills - listening to directions, listening and responding to others, understanding non-verbal communication, sharing facts and knowledge and asking questions about the key concepts - celebration, culture and connection.

These are essential life skills and we are looking forward to the boys demonstrating how these skills have improved due to their perseverance and determination to succeed during their Celebration of Learning in Term 1 Week 8.

If you haven’t already done so, please logon to the Seesaw account for your son. The teachers have been posting the boys' amazing work so far. Please let your classroom teacher know if you are having difficulty connecting to Seesaw.

On another note, students were recently given a Typing Tournament login in order to access the website (https://www.typingtournament.com/) which allows the boys to practise their ten-finger typing skills. Otherwise known as touch-typing, this important life skill will become an invaluable tool for students as they get older, allowing them to complete keyboard work faster and more accurately when mastered. The Typing Tournament website has been specially created to give students maximum flexibility in establishing and reaching their typing goals. As the boys progress through the different levels the required typing speed increases and muscle memory critical for typing success is ultimately developed. All students are encouraged to continue practising their touch-typing skills on a regular basis.

Dates for the diary:

•        Tuesday 10 March – Year 3 Commemorations Excursion
•        Thursday 19 March – Years 3-6 House Cross Country Carnival

It was also wonderful to both see and hear the boys being good ambassadors of the School. They even managed to keep their rooms tidy throughout the entire camp! Following on from these positive experiences, we will continue to focus on the good progress made by encouraging the boys to always listen respectfully and follow instructions.

Thank you to all the Year 4 parents for suitably preparing the boys for camp. We loved spending time with them and we trust that they have shared many wonderful stories with you.

Tinkering Towards Tomorrow
Our Year 5 boys are starting to finalise our first Knoxigations domain inquiry this week. The first domain (Tinkering Towards Tomorrow) is all about building a city of the future with our big idea ‘Inclusive design, sustainable cities'. This domain relates to the concepts of cause and effect, inclusion, sustainability and change. This first domain will take us to the end of Week 7 where we look at specific examples of cities and building around the world. Towards the end of the unit, the boys will apply this knowledge in the creation of an innovation which will assist inclusivity or sustainability within a new city. We will be presenting these ideas in a shark tank style presentation in our classes at the end of next week.

To assist the boys with their inquiry, we were privileged to have a guest speaker Mr Prasad, present to Year 5 on Tuesday morning. He is an expert in this field and showed us the focus of Sydney in the next few years and how they are going to tackle the issues of traffic, energy use, population growth and sustainability. On behalf of the Year 5 team, I would like to thank Mr Prasad for taking the time to come and visit our boys.

In Week 8, we will start our next unit of inquiry under the domain Interconnected Systems. On the Year 5 page of the portal, you can find an overview of all subjects and the content that we will be studying within that time period. If you wish to see the content for Maths we are covering, for instance, it can be found there. The current content overview is found in the Tinkering Towards Tomorrow selection on the portal, and information is found in terms of novels, and other subject areas. These content overviews will be available one week prior to the start of each new domain. 

On Monday, The Deputy Head of St Lucy’s, Susan Jones, came to speak with the boys about their upcoming visits to St Lucy’s. The boys asked some very knowledgeable questions and were very inquisitive about some the of things the boys and girls at St Lucy’s do each day. The boys are very much looking forward to spending some time at St Lucy’s throughout the year. 6F will be the first class to head over in Week 7.

PREP GALLERY CHOIR

One of the pillars of the School’s Choirs, and a core aspect of our School’s worship life, the Gallery Choir has been supporting the Knox Chapel for over 35 years, all the while singing beautiful music from the English Cathedral tradition. The Choir provides music for all major services at Knox, including Easter and Christmas Services, Yr 12 Presentation Day, the ANZAC Service, and the Passing Out service for departing Cadets among others.

Much of our treble line is made up of the best singers from Years 5 and 6 at Knox Prep and Wahroonga Prep. Prep Gallery Choir singers also sing in their campus’s senior vocal ensemble.

There is a sectional rehearsal for prep students each Tuesday afternoon from 3:30pm to 4:15pm at St John’s Wahroonga. Boys from Knox Prep walk from school with staff, but are released directly from the rehearsal to parents, or as arranged. In addition, there is the option of joining the full choir each week on Friday mornings in the Senior School Chapel, 7:15am to 8am. Entry into the choir is by invitation after a trial rehearsal.

To express interest in joining the group, or for further information please contact Mr. Warren Fisher. 

Battle of boards
Last Saturday our surfers had their big 'end-of-season' battle with Shore and were aiming for another victory – but not to be this year and Shore won in a thriller 62.5 to 60 in very tricky tough surf conditions. Good effort boys and something to aim for in 2021.

Waterpolo this Friday
A huge night is planned this Friday where our Waterpolo Firsts aim to make history and win the first CAS/GPS title ever for the school. They are unbeaten but will face stiff opposition from Trinity Grammar and a great finale to an incredible season. Win, lose or draw this has been a magnificent season for this squad of players who will only get better from this experience.

CAS premierships
A number of teams will be playing Barker this weekend to try and secure some CAS premierships. Our Basketball Firsts have one hand on the shield and are keen to secure the title on their own with a big game this Saturday whilst our Tennis Firsts also sit atop of the CAS ladder with just one game remaining. Barker always prove to be great opposition and it will be a great experience for all of our teams. Our Cricket and Volleyball are also looking to finish a memorable season and send the Year 12s out on a winning note.  

CAS Swimming and Dive Championships
All parents should have received a note late last week asking to give permission on the Parent Lounge for any students wanting to travel to Homebush next Thursday and support our Swim & Dive team at the CAS Championships. It promises to be a huge night and a tight battle so every extra bit of support is much appreciated and may be the difference in helping secure our fourth straight CAS Swim title. Our Tartan Army will be on full show; however, we cannot take boys without your permission.

Congratulations
Sean Williams (Yr. 8) and Mitch Westhuizen (Yr. 12) who both took out the Individual NSW All Schools Triathlon Championships for their respective age groups – Mitch in Seniors (Yr. 11 & 12) and Sean in Juniors (Yr. 7 & 8) last week in Penrith. These are outstanding results and there were many more great performances in the teams event on the following day.

  

Four boys have been selected into the CIS Waterpolo U17 squad:
• Gabe Carmody
• Tyler Krenkels
• Aiden O'Neill
• Lucas Banfield

Three boys represented the CAS Tennis team this week and defeated the ISA:
• Nick Bigeni
• Aston Bloom
• Leo Phijidvijan

Two boys played for the CAS Cricket team last week and defeated the GPS:
• Dan Hardyman
• Lachie Donaldson

Next week
Boys in the Senior School will begin the transition into their winter sport program next week which will include information sessions in Week 7 (next week) then footy boots will be laced up and training will begin from Week 8. All boys will be given information and training detail and trials can also be found on the school app. Reminder to ensure you subscribe to notifications for your son’s new winter sport. 

Have a great week. Go the Black & Blue!