Thornlie Senior High began 2022 with three transition days for our new year 7 students. Students, staff and a parent from the Your Move committee volunteered their time and took 8 classes over the three days and conducted the student led - Your Move transition activities.

We broke each class into groups of 4 and then they did an activity for 10 minutes and the groups rotated to the next activity. The groups went through 4 different activities, "a sensory journey to school", "our environmental travel footprint", "making friends on the way" and "getting there by bus".

Some of our challenges were staying on time and everyone moving at once and having enough adults to assist with behaviour management. We did reward our volunteers with canteen vouchers but they did not know there was a reward until after the transition days were over.

Our new year 7 students appeared engaged and interested in the different activities. Feedback from the year 7 coordinator was very positive and he is wanting us to repeat this in 2023. A number of students said that they would think about riding or walking to school instead of coming by car.

Numbers in the bike compound for the first couple of weeks were larger than than they were last year, getting up to 75 bikes and scooters a day, last year we would normally have about 57 or 58 a day. We wonder if the increased numbers are our year 7 students....

We think that we will trial this activity in term 4 with some of our feeder primary schools so that our students don't miss out on their own lessons. Stay tuned to see how those lessons work.

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James (Your Move)

Hi Sue - it sounds very likely that your transition activity has resulted in at least some of that increase. Well done 😀. Thanks so much for sharing all those details of how the activity worked for you - that has earned you an extra 20 points on top of the 50 points for the initiative. I have also given you 65 points for the "Volunteer Power" activity for getting others involved to help out - hopefully this is an aspect that can keep growing! I look forward to hearing how it goes in Term 4.

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