Whoa! What a weekend this has been.

Saturday the 7 November was they day many different emotions. Many of the SRC students were anxious, excited, worried, scared, happy and oh so much more as the time ticked away. The day started as usual with breakfast and the morning briefing at 9:00am. Then the parents started to arrive and the emotions came pouring out. As we said goodbye to our friends for the weekend, the number of students left was getting smaller and smaller 44, 43, 42… 10, 9 by this time it was 10:20am. Twenty minutes after the pick-up time, the final 8 were starting to get worried. At 10:25am another car showed up, it was my family. I was so happy! I couldn’t wait to spend time with my family, yet I felt bad for leaving my friends behind to play the waiting game.

This weekend was parent visiting weekend. We all got to see our parents for the first time in five weeks. We were all picked up by our parents and taken away for the weekend.  I was really excited about seeing my parents after not seeing them face to face for so long.

Everyone was really happy to see their families and I think everyone had a great weekend. Most of us went to Lakes Entrance and we saw a lot of people from the campus. Some of us were at the same hotel or going to the same restaurant. I went down to some shops and got some new shoes and stocked up on some Aeroguard.  I also went to the beach and had a look in the Pete’s shop who is one of our surf instructors. We went swimming and had some nice quiet time with my family. I called some of my friends as well to see how they were doing and what news was like back home.

Today SRC students presented our LLPs to Orbost and Marlo Primary School students. LLP stands for Local Learning Project. It is a smaller version of a CLP.

SRC students are required to complete a topic from the local area and present it to primary school students. In the morning when the students arrived, we played some games with the whole community and name games in our smaller groups before presenting our topics.

Today was the beginning of the fifth week for SRC students and what a better way to start it off with a sports round robin.

Today was meant to be SRC’s rest day, but we decided as a community to organise a day where we could all get out and have some fun. The group of 44 SRC students headed down to Cann River by coach to interact with students from Cann River P-12 College and Mallacoota P-12 College. We played a series of sports including netball, soccer, basketball and Volleyball. Even though the weather was hot everyone still gave it their best and in the end had a great time. It was great to see everyone offering to help serve and prepare lunch. It was also a good  chance for SRC, Mallacoota and Cann River to get to know each other and share stories with past students that came to SRC in term 4 2008. Thank you to everyone that helped organise today, especially the sports committee because we all had a great time making new friends out in the sun.

Here at SRC we have been very lucky. For the past few days David Tatnall, a very renowned photographer, has taken time to share a fraction of his extensive knowledge with us all.

David Tatnall has been a professional photographer for over 30 years and has been commissioned to take photographs all over the world for different organizations and companies. In our first photography class he shared his passion for work with us, by showing a number of photos he had taken throughout the years and explaining what makes a good photo. After that class everyone was inspired and raring to get out and take some great shots. We were given the opportunity over the following days. In our expo groups we had classes with David. He firstly he showed us all how to use the settings on a SLR camera such as the aperture, the shutter speed and the zoom. All this was very new to most of us, as we are not used to using film cameras, we are used to our automatic digital cameras.

To get some great shots we travelled a short distance to West Cape. The shores of West Cape were covered with interesting rock formations which made a great location for our newly discovered photography fetish. We were split into groups and given one roll of film and from then on, it was up to us to decide what we wanted to capture. We were spoilt for choice, with the magical blue sky, the sun shining off the rippled ocean, the rock pools and the amazing rock formations. I loved using film cameras as it really makes you think about what you want to take a photo of, instead of just snapping away and deleting anything you don’t like. We were very privileged to have such an experienced and enthusiastic teacher to help us and give us tips. I can’t wait to see our results when they get back from being developed!

On Sunday the 25th October, 2B set out on their first expo. It started off as a pretty good day and the weather was holding up for us, so we set out for Dock Inlet. We decided to go via the beach the first day, then bush the second.

We all woke up early before our alarms, as we were so excited for our first expedition to Dock Inlet. We had just spent the previous day preparing for our first expedition. 

2A decided in the morning to take the first route along the beach so we would have a tail wind on the way their and the walk back wouldn’t be as strenuous. It was an easy walk for everyone as we where all very strong and committed to completing our team and personal goals. We created our own acronym to remind us of our well thought out goals P.H.E.R.P- Positivity, Helpfulness, Encouragement, Respect and Patience.

This is Darcy and Tory. Today we had surfing at East Cape. The waves were not huge, but they were good for beginner like us. It was our second surf lesson of the term. In our lesson we learnt how to stand up. Everyone managed to get up at some stage and had heaps of fun. This time we only had one instructor, so it was a bit harder to learn things.

We saw Mr. Bourke, Mr. Porter and Miss Moore all down the beach riding the waves too. The water was rather cold, but we got use to it thanks to our wet suits. When we surf we have to wear helmets, lucky we did because I ran over Tory when I was surfing in and he was paddling out. We had a short break for morning tea which was a beautiful slice. Then we went back out to ride some more waves. Eventually the lesson was over, even though we didn’t want it to end. We would like to thank Mr. Pfanner and Mr. Conroy for taking us out.

After surfing we had our CLP class. Yarrawonga’s CLP is going great. We have got all the measurements for their veggie patch and have named it too. It is called ‘The Patch’.

Bright SC is organizing a triathlon to be held in town and is already looking for sponsors and people to help out.

Hey Steph here. Today has been a rest day. Some people went on bike rides earlier this morning whilst others took the chance to catch up on cleaning, emails and just being lazy.

I spent the day relaxing with a few friends, emailing friends and family and even had a HD link up with my home school, Wanganui Park SC. The HD link up was to find out information about some things for our CLP, so we used this to our advantage and asked for some student opinions. Our home school liaison teacher said sure, which meant everyone out of our Wanganui group chose one person (friend) to come into the HD link up. We all chose one of our closest friends, which even brought tears to some of our eyes seeing our friend’s faces for the first time in nearly 3 weeks. We also got to see a few of our teachers, which was so cool. At first we started asking a few questions about our CLP and then they asked us about our life here. Everyone back home had no idea of what type of life we are living here at SRC so they had many questions and we had many answers. My favorite part was the hellos and the worst part was the goodbyes, but aren’t they always?

Anyway other than our HD link up with Wanganui many of the others have been outside playing ball games, watching the movie called John Tucker Must Die, reading books, writing letters and even a couple of the girls baked cupcakes for afternoon tea. A few people have been working on their CLP’s and even their passports.
 
Our time here at SRC is going so fast. In less then 3 weeks it is Parent Visiting Weekend and then less then 4 weeks after that its time to go home.  Time surely does fly when your having fun. Good bye. Keep watching this space for more updates from others.

On 19 October 1A departed on our very first expo here at SRC. Some people were excited for this challenge whilst others were nervous and apprehensive about it, but by the end everybody had enjoyed the experience. The expo was a lot more difficult than what we had expected. It was far more difficult than the simple walk in the bush we had done during expo skills.

On our first day of expo we were all happy and cheery as we started to walk the bush track down to the beach. The beach was the most difficult part of our expo in my opinion because for those who have not experienced it, sand can be rather tricky to walk in. With each step we took our feet would sink into the sand , ultimately slowing us down and having to carry heavy packs didn’t help much either. We were all relieved when it was lunch time because it meant that we could take a long break and go for a swim.  I don’t think I have ever ran so fast from something when I realized that there were leeches in the very water we were swimming in after Ellie picked some sea weed for Mr. Pfanner to eat.