We are so grateful for the support we have received from of our school community during this time, with 98% of students now back at Cedar for face-to-face teaching. The transition back has been a great success and we are so thankful for the efforts of our parents, caregivers, students and staff over the last few months.

The New “Normal”

While South Australia is currently experiencing relatively low infections, around the world there are still very major concerns regarding COVID19, and rightly so. Along with this comes the issue of mental health and wellbeing, as we count the economic and social costs, and our television screens continue to show unimaginable repercussions worldwide.

During this time, there are still a wide range of restrictions and practices that have been put in place for the safety of the school community. Please remember to maintain physical distancing from other parents and teachers when attending school, including when dropping off and picking up your children.

Please Remember

• Don’t send your child to school if they are sick
• Parents of unwell children will be contacted by the school nurse and asked to arrange collection of their child.
• Where possible, parents are asked not to walk their students to and from the classroom, to minimise the number of people moving about the property
• The normal social distancing rules apply if parents/adults are on the property
• Classrooms remain for students and Cedar staff only until advised otherwise
• In order to minimise the number of people from the school community on the property parents are encouraged to contact the Front Office by phone or email.

Mr Peter Thomson, Principal

Josh’s LEGO skills have made their way into the Primary School Chapel videos this term, and there’s even the opportunity to win Josh and Trent’s “Bull Rider” by entering the competition on the LEGO Masters AU Facebook page!

After their recent underwater build, Josh and Trent have headed into Finals Week, and all Cedar eyes will be glue to their screens to see just how far they can go.

A Cedar Exclusive

This week, we’ve managed to secure an exclusive interview with Josh, to find out more about what it takes to be a LEGO Master.

Josh, we’ve been watching you come up with some amazing winning creations on LEGO Masters. How do you come up with the ideas for your builds, and have you ever been worried that your ideas wouldn’t work?

What you see on TV obviously has been edited so that only snippets of what actually happens make it to air. For nearly every single build, Trent and I had committed to one idea for sometimes as long as a full hour before we changed tactics. We knew the idea wouldn’t work if we weren’t enjoying ourselves or we couldn’t think of an easy way to engineer the idea. The ones that we were most successful at were the ones we were having a lot of fun and knew it would meet the brief if we could pull it off. We always began the process writing down our ideas and brainstorming until we both landed on something we were excited about creating. For our style of building, we wanted to make sure it pushed our ability, it was fun, and we would be able to divide up the tasks according to our strengths.

Some of your builds go for 14 or more hours. We assume you get some breaks, but do you get exhausted working with LEGO for that amount of time?

We do get breaks, for sure, and we are well looked after! Some builds even happen over multiple days. In saying that, there were some pretty long days and you can be building for quite a few hours before you get to stop. This definitely takes its toll as you can go a bit “brain dead” working on the same thing for too long. A good tactic that we used, if we were getting frustrated or tired with one thing, was to put it down and do something else and then come back to it later, which really helped.

It seems that a big part of the show is using LEGO in unusual ways, and thinking outside the box. What are some skills that students can develop through LEGO?

LEGO is such a great tool to teach us lots of things! Building on the show really pushed us to think creatively and to use the bits in weird and wonderful ways, and it pushed us to think with an engineering mindset. Building with LEGO at home does this too! If you set yourself a challenge with LEGO (or copy one from the show), you will see that you have to use a lot of different parts of your brain! What’s your idea? – creativity. How are you going to achieve it? – problem solving. What if you don’t have the pieces you want? – resourcefulness. Now try and do it with a friend or family member – teamwork!

Finally, now that you’re a LEGO celebrity, what things can we expect to see you doing around the Cedar College campus, and with the Primary School classes this year? 

Since LEGO has become a bit of a craze now, especially because the students are excited to see me on the show, it makes sense to use it within my role. It’s a great way to connect with students in class or one-on-one, which is always a big part of my role. We have already started to use LEGO in Chapel and devotions and maybe we will see some cool LEGO competitions happening in the near future too!