Year 12 Camp

Our Students experienced a range of activities including raft building, the giant swing and some workshop sessions led by the Senior School team.

During their first session we challenged students on thinking deeper about their purpose, we were really impressed with level of student aspiration and the selflessness of their sense of purpose. Being open and brave enough to share ‘who you are’ and ‘what your purpose is’ is quite intimidating and empowering. 

A couple of examples include:

          ‘help make people happy’,

          ‘to be my weird and wonderful self’, 

          ‘to build a family and own a business and have a beautiful wife’, 

          ‘finding something that makes me feel happy and proud of myself’ and 

          ‘make the lives of others better and spread happiness’.

Using their identified purpose students then developed a SMART goal to work toward, throughout their year 12 year.  All year 12's spent a period of introspection thinking sincerely about their future.  After writing a goal they stored this in their resources booklet.  It would be meaningful and create a sense of accountability if year 12 teachers (particularly homegroup teachers) could check in the students throughout the year to revisit their SMART goals and their purpose.

On our second day at camp the cohort were split into VCE and VCAL groupings. 

The VCAL students took part in a range of team building, problem solving and communication activities. It was interesting, albeit funny watching the students working together to communicate without talking to arrange themselves in groups. Jess worked with the students to determine how these transferable skills can prepare students for employment and their futures.

The VCE session was an intensive Study Skills program. Students were taken through a range of methods for effective study including Cornell note taking, preparing a study area and revision strategies. These strategies will prepare VCE students for the expected rigor of the year. Please remind students of these approaches to study that they were introduced to. Homegroup classes will be extending on these Study Skills throughout the year and with a further focus on annotating, paraphrasing, summarizing, how to answer questions and visual methods of studying which were all skills the students identified as areas they would like to explore in more detail.

We encourage you to take time to chat to the students that attended camp and ask them what they took away from the experience, not just the bonding moments and the fun adventure activities but what they learnt about themselves, their purpose and what motivates them to achieve.  

Thank you to the Senior School team for putting so much time and energy in preparing engaging these important sessions. I am sure that the learning from these experiences were meaningful, relevant and resonated strongly with the year 12's.

Cheers,

Tegan Crosbie