Banyule/Nillumbik 2016 Week Seven

Term 4 has flown by and we are almost at the end of another Operation Newstart program. We started our second last week with a very busy local day in Eltham. We headed to the YMCA first up for a quick boxing session with Jordan to get our bodies moving. From there we headed to HealthAbility to meet with Roz and Luke from Reconnect. They gave the students some great information about the brain and emotions, and had a range of fun activities to help learn the concepts we were talking about. From HealthAbility we headed to Edendale Farm for our community project. This was a great afternoon spent doing something something that benefits our wider community. We worked with Jo at the farm to clean out a chicken coup and some other activities to assist the care and health of the chickens. After this we were lucky enough to hand bottle feed the baby goats, which was a really lovely way to finish off the day despite the rain!

The rest of the week was spent out on our last camp, the expedition. This was a fantastic two days and we're incredibly proud of how all the students conducted themselves. The students are assessed on this camp in the areas of organisation, team work, behaviour, respect and participation. It's safe to say they all aced the assessment, and had a lot of fun along the way. We started the trip in Alexandra on Thursday, where we rode along the Great Victorial Rail Trail to Molesworth, our destination for the day. The students all worked well together on the ride- taking turns in a leadership role, supporting each other and learning to use the map to check our distances. Once we got to Molesworth we set up camp and had plenty of time to check out the Goulbourn river running just behind our camp and to play a whole bunch of soccer games. We finished off the day with a delicious BBQ and marshmallows around the fire.

Our second day of riding took us from Moleworth (after a quick camp pack up and bacon & egg roll breakfast) to Yea. This ride has a fairly long uphill, which the group pushed through in good time. We were rewarded at the top with a ride through Cheviot Tunnel, an old railway tunnel, and then a really speedy downhill on the other side. Everyone finished off the ride strong with a cruise into Yea, where we stopped and had our final lunch. From here we drove back into Collingwood for a final unpack before dropping everyone off for a well deserved relaxing weekend before our final week.