Mercy News

As a culmination of the Year 10 Love of Literature classes Red Suitcase Project, we were invited by the residents of 17 Penn Street, Rob and Lynne Robson, to visit their property during our lesson on Monday afternoon, 9 November. This was the setting chosen for the class novel that we have written and it was a wonderful opportunity for us to see the house that we have been imagining our characters interacting with.

Each of us were commissioned to write a chapter for the novel using stimulus found inside a red suitcase. The chapters explored the lives of different characters who had at some time lived or visited the house at 17 Penn Street. The stories were then woven together through a modern-day protagonist who finds the suitcase and must uncover the links between the artefacts. We all worked with enough zeal to produce 12 full-length chapters, giving our novel almost 400 pages.

The novel is currently at the publishers and we will all receive our own copy once it is ready in a couple of weeks. We would like to thank the Mr and Mrs Robson for being so gracious in allowing us to visit their home and have the opportunity to, just for the afternoon, live vicariously in the environment of our characters.

To acknowledge the sporting achievements of our students in what has been a challenging year for sports across all communities, a presentation was held during a special school assembly. Mercy has had over 400 students represent the College across 49 teams in 2020, which was a wonderful achievement considering at one stage all school sport was cancelled due to COVID-19 restrictions.

The many achievements of the students were announced at the presentation including the Caleb Woodland Award which is awarded in honour of Caleb who died in a tragic accident in 2011. The award went to the Ruby League player who has shown an outstanding attitude, sportsmanship and leadership both on and off the filed. It was presented to Patrick Vella.

This week we took the items we bought from Canelands' various stores to help Stella Maris fill Care Packages for the seafarers. Unfortunately, due to COVID this year, the Christmas Shoe Box appeal was postponed and Stella Maris has been sending care packages including toiletry items and lollies, to the ships for seafarers who are not able to leave the ships due to COVID restrictions. Stella Maris has been sending these care packages to the ships since April. We saw that there were over 5000 care packages ready to send to the ships. We hope to continue to support Stella Maris next year.

Justice@mercy joined with the environmental committee to participate in a beach clean up in Week 5. Town beach was chosen for our clean up where we collected many bags of rubbish from the beach and the park. Justice@mercy hope to continue to work with the environmental committee in 2021.

Congratulations to the following Homeroom Door Winners for 2020!

• ARG-6
• BAD-4
• MID-2
• ORA-6
• PIN-3
• TRI-4

The Homeroom Door competition highlights the importance of Habit 6 – Synergise… Working together we can create great things!

Winners announced via video presentation by Julianne Gilbert.