Book Review: Shift

Author:  Em Bailey

Shift is a psychological thriller that shifts between two possible worlds. 

It is about a teenage girl named Olive who has just turned her life around; she ditched her old friends and her old life. Now she goes to school, goes to work and hangs out with her best friend Ami like a good girl - but when a new girl, Miranda, comes to her town, she threatens to turn her life back around again.  

 I loved this book even though it’s really high on the creepiness factor.

Reviewed by Emma Vipond

Year 8

Sports Day

On Friday, Barkly College celebrated our annual Sports carnival, with lots of friendly competition between the Houses. 

There were lots of students and staff with red, green and blue costumes and warpaint, including painted hair and nails just to make sure that everyone knows which team they were supporting.

The red team, Stuart, won the day - which was no suprise to those of us in the know.  (Any guesses as to which team we belong to?)

Go Stuart!

Book Review: The Virals

In this story, we meet Tori, Temperance Brennan’s great-niece who has just moved to an isolated island of the coast of South Carolina.  The island only houses about 10 other families who all work on nearby Loggerhead Island.

The friends she makes here are all smart kids who love science and adventure but often are not part of the popular crowd.  Together they find themselves on the adventure of their lives!  It all starts with an old, illegible dog tag they find while exploring Loggerhead which leads them to dead bodies, a kidnapped wolfdog with a deadly virus, breaking and entering and running from people with guns that are out to kill them.

As if that isn’t enough, they all catch the virus from the wolfdog, and it is not just a simple flu.  The virus changes them – alters their DNA – forever.

Some parts of the story are a little bit of a stretch, but if you just let that go, you are in for an absolute roller-coaster ride of a story.  Tori is the star of the story, but the others – Hi, Ben and Shelton are well developed characters and each has their own personalities that contribute to the plot.  And if you like dogs at all, Coop will just steal your heart. He is adorable.

The Virals, as they call themselves, have a battle in front of them although they have some unexpected secret weapons.  The twists and turns keep you on your toes and you are never sure just what is coming next.

This book crosses a lot of genres – science-fiction, adventure, suspense and fantasy – but manages to cover them all extremely well.

The second one in the series is due to be released at the beginning of November– and I can thoroughly recommend this book to anyone – teen or adult – who likes a great mystery or action story.  The sci-fi and the fantasy are just a bonus as far as I am concerned.

Shelagh Walsh

Library Technician

Barkly College

Book Review: All I Ever Wanted

Author: Vikki Wakefield

'Rule Number One:

I will not turn out like my mother.

Mim wants to be anywhere but home- in a dead suburb and with a mother who won't get off the couch.

She's set herself rules to live by, but she's starting to break them.

In nine days she'll turn seventeen. What she doesn't know is that her life is about to change forever. and when it does, the same things will look entirely different.'

This book is so descriptively written that the author literally takes you into the life of 16 year old Mim who struggles with her 'depressive surroundings' and her turbulent relationship with her mother.

Follow her journey as she sets out on a quest to better her life with surprising outcomes. A must read for teenagers. I can thoroughly recommend this book.

Helen Majewski

Support Staff

Poem in your Pocket Day

Poem in a Pocket day was on Thursday 1st September here at Barkly College  - and staff and students were challenged to write or read a poem on any topic of their choice. 

Below is an entry from the Year 11 pathways group about our main street at night.  Great work year 11s!

TENNANT CREEK mainstreet

Where in the middle of Tennant Creek is where them heart is people walking from that end of the street to the other end of the street cars driving from South to East North to West

  

Smells of Spinifex burning smoke Fireries running red and blue light people cooking feed when people spill grog anywhere around town fire burning in the distance and the smell of the smoke travelling through thin air 

Sounds

People fighting Dogs barking kids making noise drunk make noise when they walk pass hostel cars go pass trucks make noise having great time partying having disco singing songs playing band music playing loud and old cars passing by with big sounds, people cheering and shouting

  

When i walk down the street at night i see people fighting, screaming, singing, people driving around the street listening to music, trucks kids running around happy  

street lights glowing golden orange umbrellas staging friends talking warm. Dark skies with stars twitching stories of old stories.

I see new people coming in Tennant Creek from other places.

  

How do the people feel? sometimes the peoples feel sad and other times people feel happy homeless hungry sometimes happy sometimes people feel weak and tired 

  

How do you feel? worried, sad, lonely, scared for them warrungu men in their loud broken cars, scared sometimes boring feeling sorry for other kids wondering around the street sad sometimes happy bored 

Year 11 English Pathways

Leroy, Kelisha, Alisha, Jacinta, Magdaline and Natalia.

Barkly Writers Blog

If you are a writer, interested in writing - or planning to become a published author - you may like to check out the link below.

There has been a new blog started for Barkly writers which gives you the opportunity to keep up with what is happening here in the Barkly in the writing world, meet some of the writers and check out some examples of their writing.

The link is:  http://thebarklywritersink.wordpress.com/

For any further information call Ktima at Barkly Arts and have a chat to her. I'm sure she would love to hear from you.

Have a great weekend, one and all!

Websites of Interest

Listed below are some interesting websites that we have come across in our prowls through the web just lately.

We think that some of these could really useful within classes and a couple would be great professional development tools.

Check them out and see what you think.

http://www.awesomestories.com/

AwesomeStories is a gathering place of primary-source information. Its purpose - since the site was first launched in 1999 - is to help educators and individuals find original sources, located at national archives, libraries, universities, museums, historical societies and government-created web sites.
AwesomeStories is about primary sources. The stories exist as a way to place original materials in context and to hold those links together in an interesting, cohesive way (thereby encouraging people to look at them). It is a totally different kind of web site in that its purpose is to place primary sources at the forefront - not the opinions of a writer. Its objective is to take the site's users to places where those primary sources are located.

http://www.greenlanediary.org/

This curriculum linked education program helps 8-13 yr olds to become aware of the stresses our planet confronts & how sustainable living can make a difference. Learning about the environment & what part our actions play is important so that we can make wise choices & take positive action!

http://www.macquarieonline.com.au/

Australia's premier reference publisher now offers a variety of quality resources online. Our range of services includes the Macquarie Dictionary Online, the Macquarie Thesaurus Online, MacquarieNet, the Macquarie Spellchecker and the Macquarie Atlas of Indigenous Australia.

http://www.glogster.com/

Simply put, a Glog is a kind of poster —fully designed by you! A Glog is a unique creation made up of text, images, music, and video. It can be colorful, edgy, emo, or rock—it’s up to you to make your Glog stand out. Glogs are a perfect way to express who YOU are!  Glog stands for Graphical Blog.

http://www.digizen.org/

The Digizen website provides information for educators, parents, carers, and young people. It is used to strengthen their awareness and understanding of what digital citizenship is and encourages users of technology to be and become responsible DIGItal citiZENS. It shares specific advice and resources on issues such as social networking and cyberbullying and how these relate to and affect their own and other people's online experiences and behaviours.

http://livebinders.com/

LiveBinders is your 3-ring binder for the Web

·  Collect your resources

·  Organize them neatly and easily

·  Present them with pride

http://www.wordle.net/

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

And our favourite – for the moment at least:

http://www.scoop.it/

Be the curator of your favourite topic.  Create your topic centric media by collecting gems from relevant streams. Publish it to your favourite social media or your blog.  Scoop.it lets users follow topics, not people. Scoop.it brings you content on topics you’ve decided to follow and shared with other people.  People we meet are users who are willing to talk about the same subjects. What gathers people together are their passions!

Hope you enjoy checking out these sites and let us know what you think - or of any other good ones that you know.