Yarra week 7 2018 - Graduation!
Its our final week for the Yarra term and it has just flown! This week is all about reflection and celebration as we look at what the young people have achieved.
We started the week by returning to Richmond gym to retest our fitness components. With special thanks to Andrew we were able to work up a sweat and get through our sprints, sit ups and stretching to record our results. It was great to see that each young person had made a noticeable improvement in one or more elements of their fitness, proving how hard they have worked through this term. From here we went back to this terms main workspace, Yarra Youth Services. Here we completed reflection activities and worked on closing this term as a group. It
was touching to hear all the great stories that everyone had taken out of this term and the insights that they had learnt about themselves. After this we sorted our graduation order and got stuck into writing our speeches for Friday.
Thursday saw us head back down to Yarra Youth to work with Good Cycles to repair bikes that we would be later donating to other students in the Yarra community. The bike repair involved focusing on the most important parts of the bike including the tyres, brakes and gears. This session gave the young people a great opportunity to refine their bike knowledge and pick up some handy bike repair skills from a highly skilled bike mechanic. Once the bikes were up to scratch we went to Collingwood alternative school to donate the bikes to a family from the Collingwood English Language School. During this time the young people not only donated the bikes but delivered some some useful information about bike riding, safety, and a quick how to in how to ride a bike. It was a rewarding day which saw both groups of students get a lot out of the experience.
Friday was our most exciting day as it was our graduation. Today is a day that the young people have been working towards for a long time. All the students were amazing as they delivered their heartfelt speeches with pride. They spoke about a particular activity and highlighted how its influenced them and their time at school. After watching the term video the young people were presented with their graduation certificates and reports and were applauded for their time with us.
I'd like to give a huge congratulations and thank you to our Yarra students for their dedication and achievements over this term. They have done so much over the last seven weeks and were really looking forward to checking back in with them to see how they're travelling at school.
Another big thank you goes out to all the supported of the program. There are many different service providers who support the program by providing venues, instructors and experiences and without them this wouldn't be the same. We would also like to thank the generous support of the Yarra City Council as we couldn't be able to run the program without their financial support. Their grant contribution enables the program to run at no cost to schools or families, making it more equitable and accessible to all young people.
