Term 1 2025

Wednesday 5th February - Friday 11th April 

Pupil Free Day – Friday 28th February

Public Holiday – Monday 3rd March

The full 2025 calendar is available via this link: Calendar - Parkerville Steiner College

“The poetry of earth is ceasing never.” – John Keats, 1816. 

Poetry is more than just words on a page—it’s a way of breathing life into emotions, ideas, and experiences in a creative and meaningful way. This term, our Class 8 students have dived into the world of poetry, exploring its beauty and depth through both reading and writing. 

Throughout the first few weeks of Term 1, students have examined poems from different cultures and historical contexts, uncovering the layers of meaning created through poetic techniques and broadening their own perspectives. They’ve learnt how tools like onomatopoeia (words that imitate sounds), alliteration (repeating the first letter of words), and sensory imagery (descriptions that engage the five senses) work together to bring poetry to life. Figurative language, rhythm, and rhyme have also played a key role in their learning, helping them understand how poets can craft vivid and powerful messages through language choices. 

A central theme of this unit has been humanity’s connection to nature. Through techniques like personification (giving human qualities to non-human things) and sensory imagery, students have explored how poetry can make nature feel alive and relatable. They have observed their own natural surroundings, recording the sights, sounds, and feelings evoked by everyday elements, for example, the earth, sun, rain, and shadows. This has deepened their appreciation for the natural world and its symbolic meanings. These symbols often have universal resonance – the earth to represent grounding and stability, the sun to represent optimism and happiness, the rain for both melancholy and renewal, and shadows for fears, challenges and hardships.    

Students have also experimented with different types of poetry, including haikus, limericks, sonnets, and free verse. They have readily embraced the challenging puzzle of creating patterns through rhythm and rhyme, using language to reflect their own thoughts and emotions. The results have been impressive—thoughtful, creative pieces that showcase their unique perspectives and growing confidence as poets. 

This unit has certainly enhanced students’ writing skills, but it has also encouraged them to see poetry as a powerful tool for self-expression and connection with the world around them. 

Chiara Corbet

English & Humanities Teacher 

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view …. …. Until you climb inside his skin and walk around in it.” – Atticus Finch 

This week, Class 9 are finishing up with the novel study of, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’. We have spent the past three weeks, taking a deep dive into the world of Harper Lee’s iconic novel set during the Great Depression and the tumultuous times of racial inequality, segregation, and burgeoning social change that was the Civil Rights Movement of 1930s America. 

It took a bit of time for students to become engaged in this classic novel, which is narrated by six-year-old Scout Finch, who recounts her childhood in Maycomb, a fictional town in Alabama, based on the authors own hometown, Monroeville. The trial of Tom Robinson, which is loosely based on the infamous ‘Scottsboro Boys’ trial, is where the students' interest was really piqued. The challenging topics and themes of the novel are interspersed with many moments of hilarity as Scout and her brother Jem, get into all sorts of trouble and do, well the things that young children do. The beauty and power of this story is in the way Scout sees the world as a six to almost eight-year-old, and how she tries to understand and come to terms with the rampant racism and intolerance of many of the people within the closeknit community of Maycomb. As her father, Atticus, takes on the defence in the case of Tom Robinson, Scout and Jem come face-to-face with the extent of the intolerance and injustice of their small southern town and are forced to quickly grow up.  

Throughout this Main Lesson, students were tasked with a range of creative responses in order to demonstrate their understanding of the novel’s characters, settings, symbols and the plot. While the novel is not always easy to read as Lee’s narrative style can be quite complex at times and of course due to the subject matter, I think students did take some key messages away from the story. ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ is thematically an important text for the Class 9 child as they begin to grapple with the injustices and inconsistencies of our world.  

Ethna Brave

English & Humanities Teacher

Nour Tohamy

Maths & Science Teacher

Germany Trip 2024 - Part 1

We departed on December 1st for an exciting three-week journey in Germany. For most of the students, it was their first trip overseas, and many were eager to leave Perth for a new experience.

After arriving in Frankfurt, we travelled to Marburg, located 100km to the north, where the exchange families picked up the students. While in Marburg, we had the opportunity to visit a local Steiner School and explore their classrooms. Both students and staff were incredibly welcoming, and we greatly appreciated the time spent there. As the students were placed with families across the city, they became quite familiar with the public transportation system.

During our stay in Marburg, we spent our afternoons exploring the city and even took a day trip to Frankfurt to visit the Goethe Haus and take in the sights.

Stay tuned to the next issue, where we'll share our adventures from Hamburg and Berlin!

Jo Doernberg & Liesl Barnett
HS German and English Teachers

Class 11/12 Astronomy: Astrophotography 101

During the past two weeks, students form the Class 11/12 Astronomy class have been visited by SPIRIT program coordinator Tim Young. During this time, the students have learnt how to use the robotic telescopes and created stunning images of objects from the night sky.

The SPIRIT program is part of the education and outreach done by the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), in WA. It has four fully robotic telescopes that are used for education and research. Stationed in Mardella, south of Perth, the observatory offers students the opportunity to have hands-on involvement with astronomy and learn about the science that can be done. You can see three of the telescopes in the image below, including the newest telescope, a 1m reflector.

Across the two weeks, students have planned what objects they want to image and used the online interface with the telescopes to schedule their observing. After taking the observations through a range of colour filters, they used software to turn the black-and-white images into stunning colour images.

Students will continue to work with the SPIRIT telescopes to continue taking better and more breathtaking images, then explore the science that can be conducted with the telescopes.

Brett Kranz-Little
Physics Teacher

2025 Fees

Invoices for 2025 will be issued shortly. Please keep an eye on your emails for them. If you haven’t received anything by Friday 21st February, please contact Kathryn on account@pws.wa.edu.au.

The school fees are invoiced annually, so please divide the invoice total by four to determine the termly payments. Payment of term 1 fees will be due two weeks after the invoice date. Payment of subsequent terms will be due by the second Friday of each term. Payment can be made by the following options, please include your Invoice Number OR Family Code as reference, thank you.

A late payment fee will apply to all accounts not paid by the due date. This does not apply if you have a payment plan arrangement in place.
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The Red Tails Coffee Shack lunch service has returned in 2025, providing a wholesome school lunch service to PSC families. 

Lunch Service will be available Wednesday and Fridays in 2025.

All orders will need to be placed through the below site preferably the night before or by 8am on lunch order days.

Please take time to peruse the site below: Canteen-Parkerville Steiner College (square.site)

Password: steiner 

Please make sure you put your childs name, class and order day/date in the 'Add a note for the seller' section of the website at the checkout.

We were very excited to be provide this to our families and have found a wonderful service in Red Tails, thank you for your support.