> Character and Wellbeing Program Character and Connection Days at Kilvington Year 7 – Building Friendships SINCLAIR MCCLIMONT, YEAR 7 We had our first Character and Connection Day for Year 7 in Term 1. Throughout this day we had fun doing lots of different activities: listening to a talk about ‘thinking traps’ from the Toolbox presentation, playing games, making new friends (many of them new to the School), and learning about ourselves. The presentation on ‘thinking traps’ made me think about my mindset and what I should change about it. I also found the
Perseverance Pays Off: A Personal Reflection HENRY KIOSOGLOUS, YEAR 9 For the past few months, I’ve been struggling to improve my swimming times. I was 0.01 seconds off qualifying for the state championships, and I was not able to improve early enough to enter. This was extremely frustrating as I was so unbelievably close. Not only did I not improve, I also started getting slower. Instead of giving up, I realised that to get faster, I would need to train harder. I started focusing more on what I did during my training sessions and staying consistent with the frequency of my sessions. After about a month of training like this, I had the opportunity to race three days in a row. In those three days, I managed to drop enough time to not only qualify for the next state championships, but another one after that. This experience demonstrated to me the importance of hard work. While I am pleased with the results of my work, I am more proud of my efforts and perseverance to get to that point.
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extended time in our Mentor groups to be a bonus as it helped us to learn more about who we’d be in a small group with for the next two years. We also talked about what we would like to see in our year level, and it was interesting to find out that many of the other students had the same thoughts as me. Overall, I think we learnt new things about ourselves and our friends, both old and new.
Year 10 – Learning Leadership ANTHEA DIPLARIS, YEAR 10 We held the Year 10 Character and Connection Day, ‘Leadershift’, on Wednesday 16 March. Themed on the topic of leadership, we started the day off with a get-to-know-each-other activity, as well as some other little pair activities which broke up the talking. Off the bat, I felt like the speakers (Amy, Faye and Cearle) were incredibly engaging and cared a lot about what they were doing. Throughout the day, we engaged in fun games such as Jenga, but everything we did always had a deeper meaning. This aspect really stood out to me. The games allowed us to create a link between the content and our everyday lives. Seemingly meaningless games were used to help us understand and recognise the importance of persistence and motivation, while keeping us interactive and engaged. I feel like this day strengthened and added to my perception of leadership. My main takeaways were that leadership isn’t a shiny badge. It’s not just one person making decisions and instructing others on what to do. Leadership is a quality everyone possesses, and there are many ways to harness it. It encouraged me to re-evaluate my approach to certain tasks and deepened my understanding of what’s helpful and what’s not when it comes to achieving my goals, in and out of School. I can confidently say I enjoyed the Y-Lead Workshop; it allowed me to think about leadership and the influence I can have. I’m glad I had this opportunity!
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