Enhance Term 3 2025 Week 4

Hello everyone and welcome to our final blog of the term!

This term has absolutely flown past, completing 2 intense camps and lots of community workshops in between.

We started the week off on Wednesday with our long awaited aquarium excursion. After travelling into the CBD, students met up with their buddies from previous weeks and begun our tour through the aquarium. Students gave their buddies worksheets to complete throughout the day, earning stars each time they correctly identified an animal. We saw everything from fish to a huge crocodile. Our leaders were big standouts today, really encompassing their leadership values, helping each other and acting as important role models to their young CELS students. Everyone had a great time, especially finishing off the tour at the penguins and watching Happy Feet in 4D! It was sad to say goodbye to their buddies but was a fun and insightful day!

On Thursday we started off completing some journal work from the previous weeks before heading off to our celebration activity. Students chose to go ice skating in Docklands! We received a lesson from instructor Ella before having free reign to skate. It was challenging for most, but practicing a safe way to fall definitely eased some nerves. Once our training was up it was time to hit to public ice. Ollie and Lily lead the way with their previous ice skating experience, encouraging and mentoring the others as they tried to remain balanced. Students ice skated for a couple of hours with many funny falls and lots of laughs shared. Following this we had some lunch at the ice house and begun working on their gradation speeches!

On Friday we had our Graduation! It is crazy to think students were already graduating from Operation Newstart. We had a great turn out from parents, teachers and service providers. The students had practiced and practiced their speeches and everyone absolutely smashed it. Students reflected on their time on the program and their leadership values, including how they can use these in the future. We then watched the term movie of all the funny and memorable moments before students were awarded their certificates and booklets. Following this, it was great to hear from Kieran West, the Youth Development Coordinator with the city of Whittlesea, informing students of the impact they can make within their community and the programs they have on offer. Afterwards everyone stayed around for come lunch and chats before heading home for the day.

Brendon and I are so thrilled with how this term went, students excelled in every activity and really embodied the leadership values we set at the beginning of the program. We hope they enjoyed it as much as we did and continue to use these skills back in the classroom. Thank you to parents and teachers for you on going support this term, we couldn’t run our program without you! And to our service providers for taking the time and effort to host our students and teach them about your organisations, we are truly grateful.