Year 6 Leadership News

This week, the Year 6s went to the GRIP Leadership conference held at the Melbourne Conference Centre. GRIP Leadership is an interactive program where we were learning to be true leaders. They shared strategies and tips through fun games and activities, to keep everyone interested.

The first part of the conference was a “Would You Rather” game. We all wrote down our answers to the questions, then it was time to find six people from different schools with the same answers. This was extremely difficult as there were 3000+ students in complete chaos. We had to search through dozens of people, but in the end we all found out ‘what we like best may not match the rest’.

After a quick break, we swiftly moved on to leadership through friendship. We learned a series of techniques, for example ‘conversations are more effective than instructions’, and they showed us videos of leaders in action. One video was about a group of leaders who wanted kids to put plastic in the right bin. 

They tried putting up posters and speaking at assembly, but nothing worked. In the end, they came to the conclusion that they needed to take a new approach; each day when they saw a kid holding plastic they said “can we have that to build our spaceship?” 

Most of the kids were confused but ended up handing over their trash. To their surprise, they ended up making a massive spaceship out of the children's rubbish - it was so big that it could only fit in the school's hallway! This taught the students to think twice where to put their trash, as it can be used as something beautiful.

The next session we did was called “Achieving your idea before the end of the year”. They taught us that you have to be realistic from the start, consider your actions and break down your ideas into phases so you can always achieve something. For example, if you planned to plant twenty trees, and you decide to plant five a term, then you would at least have planted five if something came up in Term Two.

One of the Year 6s favourite activities was “Loud Noises”. In this game, you have a chance to go on stage and represent our school. Some of our outstanding participants were Olive Bingham, Bea Mara and Archie Paine. We are so proud of them!

We all had a great time and hoped you did too while reading this awesome article.

By Poppy H, Batel G and Olive B (Year 6)