Gōng Xǐ Fā Cái - Welcome The Year Of The Rabbit

Dajia Hao and welcome back to school everyone. Here we are again at lawleylanguages for 2011, the Year of the Rabbit and what a start it's been ! We had teachers and students from our sister school in China, the Hangzhou No. 14 Middle School visit us from the Zhejiang province. Our teachers and students have visited No. 14 every 2 years since the first signing of our Memorandum Of Understanding in 1999. This is the longest sister school relationship in WA.

Xie xie to the teachers Derek Xu and Catherine Yu for bringing over their students to visit us. Xie xie to their hosts, Jessica Ho, Max Owen, Louise Kim, Matt Parry and the teacher hosts Ms Keen and the Tate family for their wonderful hospitality.

Our first whole school assembly was an outstanding success with 38 of our students from last year receiving a certificate for their achievements in last year's WACE. They were inducted into our 90 club because of their excellent results.

We were treated to a fantastic cultural event with the Lion Dancers and musicians from the Chung Wah Association performing and enthralling us all to welcome the Year Of The Rabbit. We thank them most graciously for their incredible performance which inspired us all.

Many thanks also to our Secretary of the Languages Parent Support Group, Sondra Tate for hand making our Languages For Life banner. She is one of our many wonderful parents that do incredible things for our students, a truly valued community group that makes our school so special.

Have a great year everyone !

Here's a link to more information about Chinese Lion Dances:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_dance

Elena - Studentessa Di Scambio

Ciao a tutti!

Sono Elena, una studentessa di scambio, e vengo dall’Italia. La cittá da cui provengo si chiama Trento e si trova a nord, vicino al confine con l’Austria.

Trento ha una popolazione di 100 mila abitanti ed é situata sulla riva del fiume Adige. É circondata dalle montagne, che in inverno vengono coperte dalla neve, certe volte anche la cittá.

Ho 17 anni e frequento il liceo scientifico della mia cittá. Nel pomeriggio suono il clarinetto in conservatorio e pratico sport. In inverno mi piace sciare, visto che abito molto vicino alle montagne.

Sono molto contenta di avere avuto la possibilitá di venire qui in Australia, paese stupendo sia per la sua fantastica natura, sia per le persone che lo abitano. Ho scelto di venire per poter conoscere una cultura nuova e abitudini diverse dalle mie. Mi ha molto colpito la presenza di persone da tutto il mondo, che fanno questo paese veramente multiculturale, con le piú varie abitudini alimentari.

Staró qui per cinque mesi e spero di divertirmi il piú possible!

Gong Xi To Our Chinese Competition Winners !

Chinese Language Teachers' Association Speaking Competition 2010

On Saturday 11th September,  five Mount Lawley Chinese students participated in the Chinese Speaking Competition. Aaron O'Neil (Year 8) won first prize, Sarah Van Halen (Year 8) won fifth prize, Oliver Logan (Year 9) won fifth prize and Matt Parry (Year 10) won fourth prize. Each student competed in the category of their year group. Parents, teachers and of course the students themselves should be very proud of the efforts and achievements they demonstrated in the competition. I saw how much dedication and motivation you all put into this and I am very happy with your results, gong xi ! We have some very talented Language students with a wonderful future ahead of them and it is a credit to their parents and teachers for the support and encouragement they offer but especially to the participants for their willingness to work hard. I congratulate all our competitors and advise them to enter again in 2011. It is a pleasure to have them represent our school. They demonstrate that when you are prepared to work hard, there is nothing you cannot achieve. Keep up the great work. You epitomise our motto, "Languages For Life."

Chinese Language Teachers' Association Writing Competition 2010

Gong xi to Henry Lam for winning first prize, Jayde Wilson for winning second prize and Maddy Dennis for winning fourth prize in the Year 8 category. You should be very proud of your efforts, the work you produced is outstanding.

Evviva La Tecnologia !!!

Hooray for the magnificent Macbooks ! Our Year 8 GATE Italian students really enjoy using them in our language classes. Each student is creating a blog to publish their Italian writing. We used the interactive whiteboard to demonstrate how to utilise online technology to enrich their language learning experiences. An ability to adapt information and communication technologies into our classroom learning is an important component of our GATE language classes.

Native Speakers Program

Speaking and having conversations is an integral component of the language learning process. Through the Department's Native Speaker Program, the teachers of our five languages organise for school community members that are native speakers of each language to visit our language classrooms and have conversations in the target language on the topics our students are currently studying.  Thank you to all our native speakers for the wonderful work they do enriching our students' linguistic landscape and providing multicultural perspectives on our global community.

Arrivano I Tiranesi !!!

The students from our sister school L'Istituto Pinchetti in Tirano Italy have departed for our shores to complete the reciprocal component of our sister school arrangement. They have created a blog to track their progress, located at:

http://www.pinchetti.net/blog/

The adventure begins ! (again...) Here's their first post:

Scambio con l’Australia

agosto 21st, 2010

Giovedì 26 agosto inizia la seconda fase dello scambio con l’Australia che vedrà impegnati un gruppo di studenti del nostro Istituto.
Il blog della scuola sarà il modo più semplice per rimanere in contatto con gli altri studenti, con le famiglie, con gli insegnanti e tutto il personale della scuola.
Istruzioni per gli studenti coinvolti nello scambio.
Prima di partire provvedete a registrare il vostro account, ricordandovi di usare una e-mail valida alla quale saranno inviati i dati per l’accesso. Una volta effettuata l’iscrizione e verificata mediante un primo accesso, comunicando al gestore del blog la vostra registrazione verrete abilitati a scrivere gli articoli e a inserire le immagini nel blog.

French Language Assistant - Joelle

We are very pleased to have Joelle with us from Belgium. She is our French Language Assistant and she is helping our students in so many ways. Thank you so much to Sondra Tate's family for hosting Joelle during her stay at Mount Lawley. Without parental support such as this many of the extras we offer our students would not be possible. Merci bien Sondra, ta famille et naturellement Joelle.

Hi everyone,

My name’s Joelle and I’m from Belgium, not very far from Brussels. I arrived the 16^th July in Perth where I’m going to spend 2 months teaching French at Mount Lawley Senior High School. I’m very happy to share the aussie everyday life with my host family, Sondra and Michael Tate and their children.

This term I’m helping years 8 to 10 to improve on their French. As a native speaker, it’s a real pleasure to share my mother tongue and my cultural background with the students.

French is an important language and it’s a real challenge to teach it. As a teacher, you need to use all kinds of tricks to make students understand how important it is to be able to communicate in an appropriate way.

Being at MLSHS is an opportunity for me to learn different ways of teaching and that’s just fantastic!

I’d like to thank everyone for their help and their kindness.

Joelle Poelman.