21 November 2023
Thank you God for bringing out the sunshine this morning for the Official Opening of K Block Precinct! Students from Years 5 to 11, staff, the College Board, architects and consultants and founding families of the College all gathered together to celebrate the opening of the new facility and the countless opportunities and blessings it will bring to our community. Thank you to the Baker family, a College Founding family, for officially cutting the red ribbon and declaring the building open. Poems which reflected on the nature of buildings, the impact they have on our learning and the opportunities they provide, were read by Year 5 teacher, Miss Brooke Scriven and Year 5 student, Greta Tait. It is great to take the time to offer our learning spaces to our Lord Jesus asking for His protection and wisdom for the people who gather there.
Metal & Brick
by Greta Tait, Year 5
Here is a castle of metal and brick,
It stands there all alone.
One of the many, yet one of its own.
A reminder of the hands, young, old, smooth, bristled,
Creators, creating, day after day.
Do you ever think about the ground that lies beneath your feet?
Or about the walls that shelter you from the draught, hail and heat?
The rhythmic flow of the drip,
drip,
drip,
bending through pipes and taps you know.
It does us more than we know,
This castle of metal and brick.
For Generations
by Miss Brooke Scriven, Year 5 Teacher
These boundary gates
hold more than would-be floors and fingers-crossed pinboard walls
and a COVID outbreak pausing work for weeks
while students stand and imagine themselves driving the diggers and trucks
from their make-do classrooms where sun-stained walls mark the passing of time.
These fossilised footprints
hold more than a few inches from a wet Spring
as a foundation becomes a cubby becomes a two-storey mansion
with progress noted by faces pressed against wire in Fruit break and
yet another handball is returned at lunchtime by obliging tradies.
These pristine shells
hold more than half-emptied boxes from moving day
as in military precision we snaked a now well-padded track and
cheered for built-in cupboards and a wet area and enough room for a cartwheel
and a home for our towering Tournament of Minds cardboard props.
These adorned walls
hold more than a cabaret of sound Monday to Friday
and drained thoughts some odd weekend during report writing
where small hands scrawl subordinate clauses and shake after chess tournaments
and photographed learning reminds us of how small we were in February.
These year-old corridors
hold more than raspberry-flavoured slushie stains over fanned-out cement
where we tested big ideas in egg-drops and flew our paper planes into the wind,
and sugary lemonade-making stuck our shoes to the floor
and reminded us that our footsteps here are the first of many generations.
