Related Links
2005 Travel Scholarship Report - Georgina Bolton
_.jpg)
Georgina & Helen BoltonG'day from a not-so-sunny Melbourne Down Under!
This is Georgina Bolton, winner of the 2005 Dorothy Lester Travel Scholarship. I've now been in Australia for 3 1/2 months, with only 6weeks left at my school placement in Melbourne. I'm at a grammar school called Carey Baptist Grammar School, a co-ed school of around 2000 students, ranging from kindergarten up to Year 12, so it's a very large and busy school!
I've been spending alot of my time in the junior school with classes ranging from prep - Year 4, mainly as a classroom assistant, helping students with their work or doing odd jobs for the teacher. I also do alot of work in the middle school - mainly in PE lessons. I really enjoy PE lessons, as I take more of an 'active role', though sometimes it can prove quite challenging. Only last week I had to teach a group of Year 9 kids how to high jump although never having done it myself and only having seen one short 5min video on it! The kids seemed to understand what I was talking about luckily!
In middle school I also work with a few Year 7 boys in the Learning Skills Unit, where specific kids will come and get help with their work if they are struggling. This work I find particularly enjoyable as I'm working on a one-to-one basis with them and it's very rewarding helping them with things they don't understand or find difficult and suddenly once you've explained it to them a different way they start to understand whatever it might be! I've had to try and recall as much GCSE maths as I can remember and pythagorases theorem seems to crop up alot!
Another major aspect of school life at Carey is extra curricular activities. The school is very strict in making sure every Year 7-12 student takes part in extra curricular sport activities, something I think every school should really implement! Last year I helped with the Year 10 tennis team and this year I am helping to coach one of the Year 10 netball teams.
Australia is so big on being outdoors, and participating in sports etc. Outdoor Camps play a large part of school at Carey, and in fact in alot of schools in Australia from what I have gathered. The school has a camp in the Gippsland Lakes in eastern Victoria, about 4hours east of Melbourne.
Students ranging from Years 4-10 all take part in some sort of camp each year, which all emphasise outdoor activities and the appreciation of the surrounding environment. Particularly in junior school, camps build up the students skills in camping and living in the outdoors in preparation for middle/senior school camps. So far, I have been on 2 Year 7 camps, one in February and the other recently in April. Some of the activities include sailing, canoeing and raft building/racing. For 3days we went on expedition - 'expo' and started off by canoeing across Lake Victoria, a distance of about 8km to get to our first campsite. The kids are all taught how to set up their tents, how to waterproof and pack their backpacks effectively, how to build a fire and cook their food using billys and trangeas and most importantly, 'eco-friendlyness' and the consequences of camping and human impact on the environment. We also had a hike along 90 Mile Beach, the longest beach in Australia, to get to our 2nd nights campsite. On that night we had to be up at 4am to pack up our tents and backpacks so we could get the boat back to camp in time to watch the sunrise - a beautiful experience! I rather think the kids would have preferred to sleep in though!
I have found going on these camps by far my favourite part of my time at school so far, being such an outdoors person myself! In about 2weeks I'm going on a Year 4 camp to Sovereign Hill, a country town in north east Victoria. Camps I find are a great way to get to know the kids better, something that is otherwise quite hard to do in the classroom environment.
The school holidays gave me a chance to get away from Melbourne for a couple of weeks. I went up to Adelaide for a short time then across to Sydney, the hi-light of which was definitely seeing circular quay and the harbour front (where the opera house and bridge are) for the first time at night all lit up - it was so beautiful! Also another hi-light was actually climbing Sydney Harbour Bridge, a truly unforgettable experience and very high!
I returned to Melbourne just in time to see the end weekend of the Commonwealth Games, managing to see the penultimate night of the athletics and the closing ceremony which was absolutely fantastic! I was also lucky to be able to get over to Western Australia to Perth on the Easter weekend, a few weeks later after the holidays, - a very long way for such a short period of time, but make the most of your opportunities I say!
Just think how far you can get from the UK in Europe on a 4 1/2 hour plane trip and id only just made it to the west coast of Australia! It just goes to show how incredibly vast Australia is! Melbourne is such an awesome city, it has so much to do and see and there's always something going on here, whether it be the Australian Open tennis, the Australian Grand Prix or the Commonwealth Games. At the moment the city is full of funny people as its the Melbourne International Comedy festival, so the city is once again buzzing! I feel very lucky to have been placed at such a great school and area and Carey and Melbourne both feel very much like home to me now, I shall be extremely sad to leave. Although, I do have 8weeks of further travelling after to look forward to, stops being made at Ayers Rock/Alice Springs, Darwin, Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef and various places down the east coast of Australia back to Melbourne.
So far my time in Australia has been fantastic and I feel very lucky to have been welcomed so much into the community at Carey, not dissimilar to the feel of BGS. I would like to thank the Old Girls Association once again for helping me achieve my gap year in Australia, though it is very much far from over.
Georgina Bolton [BGS '05]
17/05/2006
