Year 11 With many things happening throughout the year, the highlight of the 2014 for Year 11 students was Activities Week. The opportunity to go out into the community and serve proved a real winner amongst the boys, with many coming back to school discussing the people they met, the stories they heard and the work they did to make other people’s lives better. ACTIVITIES WEEK – COMMUNITY SERVICE During activities week, as part of community service, we went out to Batesford to the Dogrocks Sanctuary. We were on the bus in our dirtiest clothes not knowing what was going to happen that day. First we went on a tour around the beautiful lake then it was down to business. Over the week hundreds of Year 11 students pulled out thousands of boneseed plants that were suffocating the important native plants of the area. The barbeque was legendary!! There were sausages, lamingtons and drinks for all. It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience and a hard day’s work. It was also amazing to see how much boneseed had been cleared by previous years of St Joseph’s students and to see how much of a positive effect on the environment we had. - Liam Dixon Throughout activities week, the Year 11 boys took part in a community service program which saw us complete a range of activities to help our local community. One of the activities was visiting local primary schools including; Northern Bay, St Francis Xavier, Newcomb, Christ the King and Whittington. During our time at the schools we were able to partake in a wide variety of tasks from being in the classroom, working with and mentoring individual students and giving them assistance in the areas they found difficult, and even gardening. Being at the schools highlighted just how well off us boys, here at St Joseph’s, are and gave a real sense of pride and achievement to many of us as we were able to help out young kids who really needed it. - Nathan Dillon In activities week we had a day of ‘Disability Awareness’ and we had the opportunity to do activities like volleyball, goalball, soccer and a time trial to find the most accessible way to get to different parts of the College whilst being ‘disabled’ in someway. Whether we were blindfolded or having impairments on different parts of our body, all activities had us being disabled in
some way to authenticate the experience. Another aspect of this day included a guest speaker named Zane. He had cerebral palsy and he spoke about his life experiences and what it was like for him at a normal, everyday school like ours. He taught us a lot of life lessons and having a disability hasn’t impacted on his life like most of us thought it would. He has been a football coach, is married and is currently expecting his first child. Zane forced us to think about our own definition of ‘normal’ and how our stereotypes of disabled people can be very far from reality. Nicholas Lodge ACHIEVEMENTS THROUGHOUT 2014: We have many talented students in Year 11 who have represented SJC, Victoria and even Australia in a variety of sports and have even seen one talented student on the TV in a popular series. Some of the achievements include: Sam Atkins - winning the Element Skate comp held in Geelong and going on to represent Australia in a month of skate comps and tours around Los Angeles and surrounding areas. Will McCaskill – Triple Junior Club champion at 13th Beach Golf Club and being part of the Victorian U/18 Squad. Aiden Edwards – Junior Club Champion at Point Lonsdale Golf Club. Ben Cotter – was a vital member of the U/18 Victorian Lawn Bowls team who won Gold and Silver at the National Championships in Darwin. Jay Dalli – winning his first Victorian Amateur Boxing Association fight. Eamon Anderson – winning silver and bronze representing Victoria Country in Cross Country. Class of 11 H – who could forget their win in the Indoor Soccer competition... Congratulations! Jack Scarlett, Jackson McLachlan and Ben McNamara - representing the Geelong Falcons U/16 team. Thomas Vlamis – for his appearance as Tony Mokbel’s son in the hit TV series “Underbelly”.
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