Our Year 3 students embarked on the long bus ride to Ballarat's "Sovereign Hill" on 2nd September 2015, and swapped their comfortable new class room in the Junior School Building for dusty roads, filled with horse carriages and the hard wooden benches of a yesterday's world Old School room.
Upon their arrival at Sovereign Hill, our students could first freshen up with their homemade breakfasts before exploring the precinct filled with traditional early 20th century buildings and shops before trying their hands on some gold washing. Unfortunately, none of them came back home rich, although enriched with lots of new information about the hard life in Australia's Gold Rush era.
The students were fascinated by sweet making the olden way and were also able to try some freshly made candy apples after watching a demonstration on how they are being made.
The highlight of the day by far was attending school, all strict classroom procedures included. Their teacher of the day also educated them the correct standing and sitting attire before showing them traditional games kids in the early 20th century used to play, like horse show throwing and playing with homemade simple dolls. They could also try their hands on cleaning clothes without the comfort of a washing machine and learnt that it was indeed a long process full of hard physical work to scrub the clothes clean and iron them afterwards.
Zainab and Tarek attracted many laughs from their fellow students when they were dressed up in traditional clothes as a young lady and gentleman.
After so much laughter and engaging input, all students, parent volunteers and teachers were hungry and happily tucked into their brought along lunches.
It was a greatly enjoyable and highly educational day. Thank you to our lovely parent helpers for coming along and assisting Ms Safeera and Ms Amera looking after the students.