There are many opportunities in a wide range of extra curricular activities to be involved and to belong! Whatever your passion, there is sure to be something for you.
The College offers many opportunities for your daughter to be involved in a variety of activities which can enrich and stimulate her, enhance her skills and broaden her horizons. New friendships can be made where she can share similar interests and also have lots of fun.
The College is renowned for the many clubs, committees and variety of activities in which your daughter could be a part of such as choir, orchestra, Amnesty International, St Vincent de Paul, debating, public speaking, Shakespeare Festival, Tournament of Minds, Future Problem Solving, Art Club and Mathematics Challenge and a myriad of sporting opportunities. There is much more!
Why not book a tour and come and talk to staff and students about the many opportunities open to your daughter?
Creative and Performing Arts
Junior and Senior Dance Ensembles meet before school and extend and enrich our students’ dance skills and performance opportunities. Students learn team work and leadership, different dance styles, and build towards performances at school, for evening performances and productions and in the community.
College Choir encourages all singers to join, experienced or not, whether you think you can sing or not. You practise before school once a week, preparing for College Masses and special events: it’s fun, you make friends and you make beautiful music from all genres.
Chamber Choir is for selected singers and is a smaller ensemble where you practice before school and learn more about harmony and singing styles, and perform at College events and in the wider community.
College orchestra is a marvellous group opportunity to play a range of instruments and to experience the wide world of great music. It’s after school once a week and it often entertains the school or wider community at special events and celebrations.
Concert Band is a smaller ensemble that bounces along with great band numbers and explores jazz, pop and film music. It rehearses before school.
Beginner Band invites all those who have begun to learn to play an instrument, or those who want to start, to meet once a week before school. In a supportive and fun team, you learn how to play as an ensemble, get used to reading music and conjure up some great sounds together.
Rock Band lets its hair down during lunch times with access to electric lead guitars, bass, drums, keyboards and microphones.
Drama Club is a weekly lunchtime club where students of all ages play drama games, read short play scripts and have theatrical fun.
Theatresports is an extension of group improvisation where students enact stories on the spot in a variety of dramatic styles and hilarious performance games. It’s part of Drama Club and can involve playing with other schools from the Illawarra and NSW.
Opera Express is a new form of Wotopera where students may wish to apply for and subscribe to a yearly four-week project where they make up a short opera with professional writers and composer, and present it at the Illawarra Performing Arts Centre.
Peripatetic music lessons are where you get to leave class once a week to learn one of fifteen instruments or to learn singing. These are paid lessons with visiting regular music teachers beyond our full-time team.
We also put aside practice rooms and equipment where students can come up with their own musical ideas in Music Club or simply play with a friend, write a song or practice their new instrument.
Art Club brings art lovers together, practitioners as well as those with artistic ideas, to take on special projects such as community murals or to sketch and paint together or to create outside sculptural installations or to invent imaginative performance art. Teachers help but students do the leading and creating.
“Groovin’ The Terrace”, an informal but very popular concert at lunchtime on our Scholastica Terrace when student soloists and bands entertain their peers with original, contemporary or classical music and songs.
The Production. The College mounts a large musical production (usually every second year) where over two hundred students and staff take on a classic musical such as Aladdin or Godspell, or re-invent Shakespeare (A Bollywood Night’s Dream). All are welcome to contribute and we aim to have both a polished, entertaining show as well as a significant community event. It’s a heap of fun and something you won’t easily forget.
Academic Enrichment
HSIE
- NSW Youth Parliament / NSW Law Society – Mock Trial (Year 11)
- Mock Mediation (Year 10)
- Elective History – National History Challenge (Year 9)
- Geography – NSW Geography Teachers Association – Senior Geography Project (Year 11)
- Legal Studies - "Legal Lounge" (lunchtime support for senior Legal Studies students)
Tournament of Minds
Students attend weekly during lunch in Terms 2 & 3 to enjoy the challenge of the Tournament's aim to enhance the potential of students by developing diverse skills, enterprise, time management, and the discipline to work collaboratively within a challenging and competitive environment. This is a problem solving programme for teams of students. They are required to solve demanding, open-ended challenges from one of the following disciplines:
- Applied Technology
- Language Literature
- Maths Engineering
- Social Sciences
The team is selected from a group of interested students and we compete annually in the South Coast Regional Semi Finals usually held in August.
Mathematics Enrichment Club
The Mathematics Enrichment Club provides students with a high aptitude and strong interest in mathematics.
The aims of the Mathematics Enrichment Club include encouraging and fostering:
- A greater interest in and awareness of the power of mathematics.
- A desire to succeed in solving stimulating mathematics problems individually and in groups.
- A discovery of the joy of problem solving in mathematics.
da Vinci Decathlon
The da Vinci Decathlon is an academic competition designed to challenge and stimulate the minds of school students.
Students compete in teams of eight across ten disciplines: engineering, mathematics and chess, code breaking, art and poetry, science, English, philosophy, creative producers, cartography and general knowledge.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was one of the world’s greatest thinkers and scholars. da Vinci demonstrated an ability to perceive the interconnected nature of knowledge and embraced learning with a lifelong passion and determination to uncover the unknown. The Decathlon competition places a particular emphasis on higher order thinking skills, problem solving and creativity.
UOW Learning Labs
The Learning Labs program is offered by the University of Wollongong during the winter and summer school holidays.
Learning Labs is an enrichment program for gifted and talented students who are currently in Year 7 to 10. There are many diverse and innovative workshops in the fields of Video Game Making, Medical Sciences, Law, History, English Literature, Psychology, Robotics, Digital Media, Visual Arts, Creative Writing, Drama and more. Curriculum is pitched at a flexible Year 11/12 level. This program suits those students who are working within the top 10% in any subject area. The workshop content is both rigorous and challenging, and is designed to stimulate the interest and curiosity of the academically gifted.
Sport
There many sports in which your daughter can participate and excel.
Explore the sport pages and see for yourself the variety and levels of sporting opportunities.
