Indigenous Education
Reconciliation Week
Last week we celebrated Reconciliation Week! Reconciliation Week is a week where we explore the Indigenous culture! This year's Reconciliation Week theme was 'Be the Voice', meaning how can we be a voice to stand up for Indigenous rights and learn and spread what we know about Indigenous culture?
We had an absolutely fantastic week and completed a different activity each day with a prayer reflection each morning led by our grade 6 leaders.
On Monday, we started by looking at National Sorry Day and together created a piece of art that celebrates Indigenous culture and art! In the classes, each class did a few different things, like looking at the history of Indigenous peoples, the importance of land care, and different Indigenous seasons.
On Tuesday, we had a jam-packed day with more individual classroom exploration into Indigenous history and culture and a fundraiser for Opening the Doors Foundation, which ties into our FIRE Carrier program. The Opening the Doors Foundation supports Victorian Indigenous students attending school and provides them with different resources. Our FIRE Carrier leaders and our grade 6's helped bake and decorate around 140 cupcakes! We made nearly $200, which is fantastic, so thank you for all your support!
On Wednesday, each class decorated a wooded gum leaf, gum nut or gum blossom using special paint pens. We used Indigenous-approved symbols and dot-inspired art to decorate their chosen wooden material. Next week we will be putting them together to create a piece of artwork that will be hung within the main school building!
On Thursday, each class read a different Indigenous story! Whilst looking at the stories the students completed an activity that they then shared during Friday morning's assembly! It was fantastic to learn lots of new things!
On Friday, every student decorated a rock and again used dot-inspired art and approved Indigenous symbols to decorate their rocks. We have now started to put them out the front of the office, near the school sign! Thank you to the FIRE Carrier team and Anthony for cleaning that area up and making it look fantastic again!! There is still a bit more work to do for it next week.
Overall it was a fantastic week! It is so wonderful to see how much the students learn, and it's so essential for our students to learn about Australia's first peoples!
NAIDOC WEEK
In the first week of Term 3, we will celebrate NAIDOC Week. NAIDOC week is actually in the second week of the school holidays. The theme for NAIDOC Week is 'For our Elders'. We are really excited to do lots more learning about our Indigenous elders that have had a significant impact around the Yarra Valley and Victoria! If you have any ideas or want to get involved/know someone that would love to get involved, please email Bec at rbeveridge@sjyarrajunction.catholic.edu.au
