cont...Snowy River School for Student Leadership
Community Learning Project
Hello, my name is Alex Hayes and I am one of the six Snowy River Campus students sent from Frankston High School to complete the 10-week Leadership Program with SSL (School for Student Leadership). As a team we have set out to complete our CLP (Community Learning Project) in order to give back to our community in a way that we are all passionate about. For our Frankston team, we find our passion is about the members in our local area and being able to give back to them through our upcoming project.
Our aim is to brighten up the patient’s time at the hospital by including them in our project, which is to construct a mural at Frankston Hospital for families and patients to see when walking by it. Our team has been working hard together to come up with a master plan for this project and, after careful consideration, we have finalised the major details to get the project on the road. Our original plan was compromised as we were not able to run activities with the children in the hospital; however, we were later offered this opportunity to create the mural by the hospital.
We are still working through the minor details regarding the design of the artwork and we are all excited to get the project completed to achieve the final product. We all hope that this will be a great symbolisation of our appreciation to the hospital and for the people we would like to give back to, in a more direct way, with slight adjustments from the original plan. We are all extremely grateful for this opportunity and look forward to implementing our Community Learning Project back at Frankston.
After our CLP Presentation Day (when we present our plans) we will hopefully be visiting the hospital on weekends to complete the mural with senior art students from Frankston High School to help. For the rest of our time here at the Snowy River Campus we will bring all our work together and present it in our final CLP Presentation Day.
Alex Hayes
Year 9
Hi, my name is Amelie Rule, and I am another Frankston High School student currently located at the Snowy River Campus of the School for Student Leadership. For the past six weeks, I have had the brilliant opportunity to live among 44 other fantastic Year 9 students from across Victoria to learn about leadership and to participate in wondrous experiences from caving and surfing to overnight expeditions.
During our time here at the Snowy River Campus, we have had many eye-opening opportunities, including outdoor excursions and activities, and indoor classes. We have gone out for canoeing along the Yeerung River and spent a night out of campus for our first expedition. We have our second expedition coming up next week, in which we hike, canoe and spend two nights out camping. In terms of indoor classes, we focus a lot here on our F-10 strands with Questions and Possibilities, Cultural Diversity, Meta-cognition, Decision Making, Self-Awareness and Management, and Social- Awareness and Management. All these classes provide new outlooks on certain situations and teach us about practical things in life, like people’s thinking processes and why certain decisions can influence different outcomes. All this learning has shown us how to increase our awareness of ourselves and others around us, and how we can better act as global citizens.
Life at SSL is quite different to back home, with a set schedule for practically every hour while you are awake. This does help us in staying organised and certainly keeps us busy. We have one or two daily duties that we complete, varying from assisting with cleaning the bathrooms, washing the common room and dishes after meals and looking after our chooks. Unlike normal school, our classes are spread out over the duration of the day, with only one day free of classes on Saturday, “Rest Day”. We have our morning class from 9:00am-12noon, with morning tea in between, and afternoon class from 1:30-3:30pm. We also have an evening class from 7:30-8:30pm to finish off the day. Although, for some it took some getting used to, the schedule works well and makes sure we always have something to catch up, finish or work on.
Tess Rogers, Lucy Philpott, Alex Hayes, Matt Debenham, Jack Westley andI have slowly been creating and forming our Community Learning Project to bring back our learning to our home area and school. For our CLP, we will be collaborating with the Frankston Hospital to design and paint two murals in the Oncology and Acute Care of the Elderly wards to bring a little light to the two areas. Our vision has always been focused on the hospitals in our area, and assisting the patients being treated in them. Through a roller-coaster process we have managed to make our way to the CLP that it has become, with help from contacts at Frankston Hospital, our home liaison teacher and our SSL teacher. This project that we have created will be able to be viewed by all members of our community, and we hope it will be an example of what can be achieved by a determined group of like-minded individuals for the benefit of others. Additionally, it will be a lovely reminder for all of the people involved of what we have spent so much time on, especially the Frankston crew here at Snowy who have dedicated so much effort to this project.
Time has gone incredibly fast here at SRC, and we can’t wait to share all our achievements from our work at SSL. With only four weeks left to go, I don’t think any of us ever want to leave and have made many friends for life. Thanks for all the support we have received from family, friends and teachers back home at Frankston. We are so grateful for everything that has helped us to get here and assisted us throughout the program.
Amelie Rule
Year 9
Hello, I’m Lucy. I am from Frankston High School in Year 9 and currently I am attending the Snowy River School for Student Leadership. Late last year I applied to attend the School for Student Leadership because I felt it was a great opportunity to meet new people and build on my leadership skills to become a better leader. Snowy River Campus is based on making Year 9 students better leaders; we stay at the campus for 10 weeks and take part in many outdoor activities, as well as learning inside class about things like social awareness. So far, Snowy has been one of the best experiences I have ever had. Some of the highlights so far would have to be surfing, expo & 2, yoga and relaxation. I have now been here for 8 ½ weeks and had class every day except Saturdays. We do three classes plus silent reflection each day. We have our morning class which runs from 9-12 with a 30-minute morning tea break, afternoon class from 1:30-3:30 and then evening class from 7:30-8:30. At 5:00pm each night we do reflections of the day and then on Saturdays we walk over to the sand dunes and do reflections while watching the sunset.
I am here alongside five other Frankston High School students (Tess Rogers, Alex Hayes, Matt Debenham, Jack Westley and Amelie Rule) and 39 others from schools all over Victoria. In each expo team there are 10-12 students with two teachers except our team have three because we have a student teacher. 2A is made up of the six Frankston Students and the six Swifts Creek students with three amazing teachers, Miss Patterson, Mr Dooley and Miss Gubb. We do most classes in our expo teams and our team gets along like no other team. We are always singing and laughing together, and they make expos and other activities so much fun.
As part of being here as a school group, we are required to plan a CLP (Community Learning Project) that is to be completed when we arrive home. As a team we have faced a few challenges, as our original plan with going to local hospital and brightening the day of the children didn’t work out. After speaking to our home liaison teacher over the phone, we had the opportunity to create a new CLP but stay on the same topic of brightening hospitals. We will be painting a mural at the Frankston Hospitals to enhance the days for visitors and patients. We have been in contact with Frankston Hospital, and running it pasted Miss Burgess (our home liaison teacher) for the past few weeks, making sure everything will go to plan. We are currently in the process of completing our presentation for CLP day where Miss Burgess, Mrs Bahramis and Mr Albiston from Frankston High School will come and watch our presentation and spend the day with us.
Lucy Philpott
Year 9