St Ypomoni Family and Friends Ministry is a new initiative set up four weeks ago with the support of His Eminence Archbishop Makarios and His Grace Bishop Emilianos, and it’s kick-started its community work just in time for the upcoming Higher School Certificate (HSC) exams!
The HSC is a credential awarded to students in NSW who successfully complete their studies in Year 11 and 12. It also involves a series of final exams which run for about four weeks from October to November.
To help out, the Ministry is holding five free HSC support sessions via Zoom for students, and one special session for parents who want to learn how to support their children during the exams.
Mr Asterios Zouriakis, who will be running the parents session, tells The Greek Herald that these classes are important as parents will learn how they can help their child manage stress.
“The parents session will be like a wellbeing program. We will start to think of students as athletes moving towards their final race and then ask ourselves how we can help them,” Mr Zouriakas says.
“From there we will provide parents with the tools to help their child move away from automatic negative thoughts to positive enhancing thoughts. It’s all about reframing.”
For the student sessions themselves, Mr Zouriakas stresses that they will be taught by volunteer teachers with experience in the HSC syllabus for English, HSIE, Ancient History and Modern History.
“We will be looking at the syllabus points of each subject and answer any last minute questions the students might have,” Mr Zouriakas says.
“With English, for example, we will look at specific texts, discuss how to answer questions with specific HSC verbs and we will also look at the PEEL technique.”
If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, you can attend any of the following classes once you register via this link.
- English: Tuesday, September 29, 10-11am.
- HSIE (Society and Culture): Wednesday, October 30, 10-11am.
- English: Tuesday, October 6, 10-11am.
- Ancient History: Wednesday, October 7, 10-11am.
- Modern History: Thursday, October 8, 10-11am.
- Parents Session: Thursday, October 1, 7.30pm.
