VCAL & VET Music Meet The Primary School 

By Mickayla Jeanes

On the 9th of June my group (Andrew, Elmira, Dung and I) took some students from Mr Orchard’s  VET music class to travel with us to St Albans Primary School. We travelled there by the school bus along with the trailer for the music equipment. Mr Crocker was our bus driver and the teacher who accompanied us and helped set up the music equipment was Mr Orchard. We left the school grounds at 1:00pm and started performing at the primary school at 2:30pm.

When we arrived we got the music equipment set up in their hall. Then at 2:30 we started to get the first group to perform who were called “Lux Harmony” which Andrew featured in along with another group called “Mr Orchards music class”. Andrew did a solo of Titanium. While Mr Orchards music class performed “Rude” and other sets of songs.  We performed to the grade 5 and 6’s. They loved the performance and sang along to the songs they knew. 

Lung Cancer Information Session

On Wednesday Year 12 students were given the opportunity to learn more about Lung Cancer (one of the leading killers of Australians) in a presentation given by Mary Duffey, a Cancer patient nurse from Peter Mac Hospital.

She spoke to the Year 12 VCAL class about the need to raise awareness and money for research in to this deadly disease.

Leading this project were Kelly, Nardia, Anastasia and Grace who have so far raised money to go towards this worthy cause. They produced a pamphlet that also gave information about the disease and how it is treated.

VC Delights  

The goals of VC DELIGHTS are to:

• Provide an alternative to the school canteen where students can purchase their lunch
• Raise the profile of the Year 12 VCAL, class raise funds to go towards the VCAL camp, build teamwork, managerial and leadership skills while learning how to run a successful business.

The students buy, prepare and cook a variety of foods to sell to students each Wednesday at lunch time.

Immigration Museum & RMIT University

On Friday the 5th of June 2015, the Year 12 VCAL students went on a full-day excursion to Immigration Museum and RMIT University that was organised by two complex project groups Kayla, Linda, Cindy, Janice and Rosanna.

We all met up at St Albans train station approximately 8:45am. We caught the 9:00am train and got off at Flinders Street station at 9:32am and walked to the Immigration Museum from there (which only took us 10 minutes). The museum was huge, with lots of photographs that were olden European style. We were on one floor which had two separate rooms, Identity Exhibition and Freedom Exhibition. Our host for the day was Alex the program officer. We all sat in the Identity room and listened to her talk about what Immigration Museum is, how immigrants would always talk about their stories/journeys arriving into Australia, explained why people left home, how people came here into Australia by boat, what they do once they have arrived into Australia and then explained about the two exhibition rooms and what they’re about. We then spent around 35 minutes in the Identity Exhibition “first impressions” with an activity to do (Identity & Belonging booklet). 

After that we went to the Freedom Exhibition where it’s almost like an art gallery of Andy Drewitt’s photographs of people’s stories living happily in Australia. After 10 minutes of looking/reading the photos, one of the group members Cindy made a thank-you speech for coming to the excursion and enjoying the time there.

RMIT

By Dung Tran

We all arrived in front of one of the university’s buildings. Connie, our RMIT representative and speaker for the afternoon spoke about a few things: “Today we will be going on a little tour around this building, talk about options and pathways to RMIT, the SNAP (Schools Network Access Program) program, showed us a 30-second video and an overview slideshow/PowerPoint of RMIT. After that, we had two RMIT SNAP champions speaking to us and we got to ask them as many questions about RMIT as we wanted.

The “RMIT Race” begins.  This was our activity and tour of the day. It went for 25 minutes and in my group were Michael Tran, Andrew, Charles, Mickayla and I. The race was fun and I wished that it would go longer but we didn’t have much time. After the race we met up and Tea’s group won. I forget what the prize was. Then Janice, one of the group members made the final thank-you speech and we thanked them for the amazing and interesting excursion we had. We were dismissed with our teachers at 2:43pm, Melbourne Central. We took the 3:00pm train back to St Albans.