This ultimate class blog has been completely prepared by students in 16-1, describing their responsibilities and experiences shared as a class in 2022.
You can casually scroll and read, or jump ahead to any section by clicking a heading below:
Gardening Crew
Ms McMillan’s class has a small group of green-thumb students involving Beau, Reece, Miller, Josh, and Eli. They are helping out Nathan and Travis (the groundsmen) around the school doing jobs like cleaning out areas, mulching and planting new plants to help the environment.
We’ve moved a big bark pile and done many other things to help the school. The gardening crew have been helping for about term 3, week 5 and we take away our free time to help out the school in the gardens.
This is us working in the garden near the french room. We work very hard to help out the school.
These are some of the tools we use.
- Pitchforks
- Spade
- Long handle spade
- Shovels
- Rake
- Leaf rakes
- Wheelbarrows
- Double wheeled wheelbarrow
- Sack trucks
Sandpit and Bike Shed
By Mikah, Eli, and Josh
The bike shed is the place where people put their bikes so they don’t get stolen and broken because people here don’t get stolen because someone bike got stolen a a few years ago.
The sandpit
The sandpit toys are for little kids so they don’t have to use their hands and they can make things easy for them so they don’t get told off and dirty in lunchtime and recess time.
Still Minds
By Mason Solm and Darcy Elliott
Still Minds is a five week program that teaches students to meditate, be mindful, and improve emotional regulation. It is structured that teachers can integrate meditation, relaxation and mindfulness into their lesson schedule. We had a lady called Allie for a 5 week program, then the next term we did it ourselves.
I think we all loved it. It was really relaxing and we try to do it everyday but sometimes we don’t have the opportunity because we are doing different activities.
After Allie gave us some relaxing activities like laying on the floor listening to a calming instrumental music, we will get up and write 3 things we were grateful for in our graduate diary.
Allie usually asked us what our favourite hobbies were and where we felt happy and calm.
Flag Monitors
by Ted and Josh
In the morning we hang up the Australian and the Aboriginal flag. Most days we get up in our learning time and quickly go and put the flags up and in the afternoon we put them back down. It is really important to put them up because it shows respect to Aboriginal people, Australians and the Torres Strait Islander people.
At the start of the year we pick the monitors. It is a special job. We don’t ever let it touch the ground because it is disrespectful to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
The black colour on the top is the black night sky, the yellow circle in the middle is the big bright yellow sun and last but not least the red at the bottom is the land and represents the ochre used in their ceremonies. It’s personality is through it’s form and colour. It is very important to all people.
The purple one is to remember the animals that have died. And the red one is for remembrance and a peaceful future. The white one is a symbol for peace. At our local Port Noarlunga RSL all the people who work there have survived the war. We pay our respect by doing the ode and paying respect to the people who have died in the world. We do it for one minute and you are not allowed to talk because it is very disrespectful for the people who have died and to their family.
Rock and Water
By April
Rock and Water is a psychophysical program to focus on the awareness of students’ strengths and capabilities, they’re ability to play together, work together and live together with other people.
I love rock and water. It’s a time of peace. It teaches us to stay calm when we’re angry. There are two symbols in rock and water.
There’s your rock symbol that represents shutting off from people. The other symbol is your water symbol that represents going with the flow.
Community Circle
by Hunter and Riley
What we do
In our class we have this meeting called “Community Circle” before lunch on Friday’s. It is a meeting that gets us all together to make democratic choices about what we do in our class. We can vote for people to sit out of the Community Circle for a week if they just need to be more respectful or be more calm before they can come back into the circle. We also talk about what we have done well in the week, what we need to improve on, and we also set learning goals.
ATSI Thursday
On Thursdays we listen to the ATSI artist of the week. The songs we listen to are from all parts of Australia. The songs we listen to are cool and a lot of people enjoy them. They are also all Aboriginal.
I think one of our favourite songs are by Baker Boy, Good Trouble, and King Stingray. Normally they all have a beat and we can’t help ourselves. We normally always groove to the songs with the beats like Baker Boy his song was Marryna.
Child Protection Curriculum (CPC)
The CPC is something we do on Fridays after health. We quite enjoy it most of the time. It’s called CPC because it stands for child protection curriculum.
Nude Food
Nude food is a healthy challenge that helps the environment and is a good source of collecting data and working out percentages. If there are draws in the challenge they will both have to eat somewhere we are all happy. It is a competitive competition and it is also fun to figure out.
It helps the environment because we try not to bring in things that are rubbish and we mean that when we say nude food we mean food that isn’t in packages.
The teams we compete against are:
- Team Ehlers
- Team Parkes
- And Team Bianca
We sat outside with the winning team. Team Ehlers is really really hard to beat.
We collect the data by making a graph on a piece of paper. Then we choose a person that comes early to collect all the data that we use in the nude food competition.
THE END By Narrah and Ethan
Gems For Success
By Darcy and Bodhi
The gems are a reward for people who are doing a good job in class, usually earning gems by bringing in homework.
Opportunities
There are different varieties and options for what we do. These are the usual choices: Bodhi club, Physical Education with little buddies, Outside time, Ipads, Chess, Lego, and Drawing.
Time Frame
Success time usually occurs Friday after geography at 2:20, and we have to pack up and earn success time before everyone has the opportunity to choose what they are going to do.
How to earn gems
Job well done
Kind deeds
Listening, learning
Rules
- Miss McMillan starts at the person who has the most gems.
- You give your gems back to Miss McMillan when your number of gems is called.
- You can make games on scratch but you can’t play games on scratch.
What you can do on technology
- You’re allowed to play learning games, the usual one is prodigy.
- You’re allowed to watch art hub on youtube if you want to join.
- You can search for something you wanna learn about which is appropriate content.
- You can go on google maps.
How much time in success time
The average amount that we have is approximately 40-45 minutes every Friday. Sometimes we overlap the amount and have 50 minutes. The reason we come inside so we can be dismissed rather than running away after the bell has gone.
What you can do in Bodhi club
Bodhi club is usually for creating creations with resources and materials like boxes, cardboard, paint, and sticky tape.You can’t use some of the materials from your classroom, you have to get it from the early years unit.
Aboriginal Dancing
We are practicing some songs and dances with an Aboriginal theme with our buddies for assembly. We are using the song Happy To Be Me by Aunt Wendy’s Mob.
Every Monday and Wednesday we practice our dances with our buddies. Then sometimes we practice twice so we know what to do for the performance at assembly.
The songs stand for the Aboriginal people and the culture.
It’s only the buddies’ first time going up in front of people.
But they are trying their best to practice.
The two songs we are doing are Happy To Be Me and The Ridgy Didge.
Today are practicing with our little buddies and we are learning the dance so fast.
Ask Me
By Steele and Oliver
The ask me person is allowed to send other students to the toilets if it is a sensible time to go to the toilet.
The ask me person is allowed to hand out gems if the teacher allows them to hand the gems out.
You have the ask me necklace for one day and the computer will pick a student randomly and then the next day a different person will have the necklace.
At the end of the day Ms. McMillan will say who the person is.
The ask me person is kind of the boss of the class although not the actual boss of the class.
Sometimes the same person will get picked twice before the whole class has had a turn as the ask me person. If it is a person’s birthday they are ask me.
Thanks for reading our class blog!!
