City Experience

CITY EXPERIENCE WRAP UP

Well done to all Year 9 students who attended the City Experience weeklong excursion last week, from Monday 26th to Friday 30st August!  It was great to see so many students acting as ambassadors for the College, showing respect and courtesy to the range of people that they met as they undertook their scheduled activities.

Over the course of the week we saw students build their independence, overcome fears, further develop and fine tune their team work skills, develop some important foundational knowledge of Melbourne, and build a more clear understanding of Melbourne as a society.  Students also met and interacted with a range of people whilst engaged in the program, which assisted them in collecting data to be able to respond to their big question: To what extent is Melbourne a well-functioning city that meets the needs of all Melbournians? 

Besides collecting information to assist them with their big question, students were actively engaged in their home group scavenger hunt, getting to know the city and developing their organisational and research skills by finding obscure things such as, ‘Melbourne’s version of Diagon Alley’ aka Centre Place, ‘the three businessmen who forgot their lunch’ and ‘a forest of bells’.  Class teachers are currently working out who the winning team in their home group is, and prizes for them and an overall year level prize will be issued by the end of term.

Whilst in the city, students visited the MCG and took a tour around the grounds and through the coaching and media rooms.  Some were lucky enough to run out onto the MCG grounds as well just like AFL players!  Students visited the Magistrates Court and came back with stories of crazy things that they’d heard people do that they were now paying the price for.  Students visited Eureka Skydeck and many conquered their fear of heights by undertaking the Edge experience.  Classes were introduced to real social issues by visiting Melbourne City Mission and their Front Yard Youth Services team.  A lot of walking was completed, as they went outside the boundaries of the CBD grid to visit the Shrine of Remembrance, the Queen Victoria Market and tour through the many hidden and not so hidden laneways of Melbourne.  Lastly, they strengthened their knowledge of democracy and our government processes through visiting Parliament House.

Now that everyone is back in the classroom, students are hard at work refreshing their knowledge of writing an essay, so that they can put all their data into a clear argument that answers their big question.  Having put their knowledge and learning in classrooms earlier this term into context by visiting the city, students are now much more confidently able to build an opinion and an argument on the nature of Melbourne as a city that functions to meet our needs.

Well done on a successful week Year 9s! 

Ms Joanna Karanikolopoulos

Humanities