Yarra Week 3 2017
What a great local week the third week of the program was! We started off at Yarra Youth Services doing a music workshop with Motley. Motley is a really fabulous rap artist and producer who as well as writing and performing his own music and touring around the world, spends a lot of time working with young people to give them a taste of what it's like to write and record your own songs. Our workshop started out learning the basics of hip hop, the structure of the beat and how to make a solid rhyming verse. After we knew all of this the students had a go at writing their own verses. We were incredibly impressed how quickly they were able to do this, with everyone writing quite a few lines about what a day in their life is like. It was a great way of learning more about each other through expressing some personal thoughts and feelings. Once everything was written the students went individually into the studio with Motley to record their piece over a backing track. The end product sounded amazing and everyone should be really proud of their efforts for the day.
Thursday was again about learning what resources are available to young people in the area. We headed down to Headspace Collingwood to meet Jess and learn a bit about what Headspace do. They're an organisation that works with young people on any issues they may have. They provide support with not only mental health but also issues at school, physical and sexual health, and employment, to name a few. At headspace we learnt about this as well as doing a few activities about stress.
Thursday afternoon we visited another of our great local TAFEs. we headed out to Melbourne Poytechnic Heidelberg campus to visit a few different departments and have an engineering taster. We were able to chat to the staff at both plumbing and bricklaying to get more of an idea of what it's like to be a student doing these courses. Afterwards we had the taster where all the students made a junior hacksaw. This is a fun activity and we learnt a lot about metal work.
We rounded out the week with a visit to South Melbourne Life Saving Club. Dinah, the club president, taught our students how to perform CPR, a fantastic skill for anyone to have. After we'd all learnt and remembered the process for helping someone in need, we changed into wetsuits to spend a few hours out in the water. We took out the surf rescue boards and had a go at paddling, trying to catch waves and practicing water safety signals. It was a great way to end the week and a good exercise to undertake before surf camp next week.
