To conclude our Year 7 Science investigation of Cows Create Careers (CCC), our students participated in an interactive presentation and awards ceremony with John and Deanne via Webex. Despite some initial technical sound problems, our students worked on various fun tasks to help reinforce their understanding of the variety of careers available right across the dairy industry, from paddock to plate. We congratulate Martha and Taya for winning the Best Cartoon Design during the presentation event and Anna and Lucy who were members of the best Timboon team. Thanks for the great prize pack Deejay Events! During first semester the Year 9/10 Digital Technologies students explored the various types of technologies that have evolved and, as part of the TAP, we invited Dr Nikki Kelly from CQUniversity to help our students better understand Agri-tech. Students were introduced to the collaborative GPS Cows program that allows participants to develop skills and an understanding of GPS and its application in the collection of data and involves researchers, industry professionals and educators across Australia and USA. Nikki joined our students via Video link for three one hour sessions to introduce the GPS Cows program and our students learnt how to generate, clean and analyse GPS tracking data to make decisions that improve production efficiencies, sustainability and animal welfare. The aim of GPS Cows is to increase the knowledge and skills of secondary students in emerging Agri-tech options, specifically tools and systems which provide animal location and behaviour data, to encourage them to consider tertiary study and careers in the agricultural sector as highly skilled STEM-qualified agricultural workforce participants. Our student feedback about the pilot program was very positive and several students expressed interest in this as a potential career path that they hadn’t previously considered. We were fortunate to be able to introduce this component to our students this year as part of our Victorian Association of Agricultural and Horticulture Educators (VAAHE) membership, and look forward to furthering these skills next year when students will analyse, both their own data, and existing datasets to help understand and improve agricultural production locally and across the world. This term our Year 1/2 students have been discovering the wonderful world of water and to weave these experiences together we invited environmental educator, Debbie Dalziel from Curdies Valley Landcare Network (CVLN), to help students better understand this precious resource. Debbie took students on a journey consolidating and extending what students had explored in the classroom looking at the various states of water and where we find it. Despite the earth being a water based planet, Debbie illustrated the scarcity of fresh, usable water by cutting a quarter out of an apple to demonstrate the amount of fresh vs salty water then sliced a smidge of that quarter to depict the limited amount of useable water. After discussing our reliance on water and exploring local waterways, Debbie challenged the students to consider what happens when water hits the earth’s surface. The students crumbled pieces of paper and drew blue lines in the creases to depict waterway runoff then added drawings of crops, houses, animals and people in that environment. Spray bottles were used depict rain events in the catchment with water hitting the ridges then forming puddles, streams, creeks and rivers and carrying traces of what it passed through on it’s journey. To conclude, Debbie shared clips of her underwater diving experiences and of local platypus that used to be plentiful in the Curdies River catchment area. We are incredibly grateful for Debbie’s unravelling of this invaluable resource for our students and to demonstrate that we must all play a part in conserving and protecting these vital waterways. To conclude our Year 7 CCC - Cows Create Careers unit for this term, and to demonstrate the depth and breath of careers that directly or indirectly revolve around agriculture in our region, students undertook a walking tour of Timboon. At The Vet Group, veterinarian Erin Gardner outlined the various roles and career opportunities available in their mixed animal practice that has both production animals, including sheep and cattle and pets such as cats, dogs and horses as their patients. A focus on preventative options as well as emergency services means that a range of veterinarians, vet nurses, groomers technicians and office staff are employed by the clinic. Tim Nowell from Nutrien Ag Solutions, described his career pathway and the variety of careers including agronomy, horticulture, livestock, merchandise, property and agribusiness covered under the Nutrien banner. To conclude our tour, students visited Timboon Fine Ice Cream where students learnt about the career path of Caroline Simmons whose business targets the tourism and hospitality industries. Students heard about the creation of the 12 Apostles Artisan Trail and its role in promoting artisans in our region and gratefully sampled cones of dairy delights. Thank you Erin, Tim and Caroline for sharing your journey with us and for helping make students more aware of the myriad of careers available across agriculture in our region. To review the outcomes and produce of the vegetable gardens that our Year 9/10 AgHort students planted in first term, we welcomed The Place of Wonder and REAL Pizza and Pasta owner, Kylie Treble, into the classroom to introduce the students to regenerative horticulture. After introducing herself, her interests and her work history, Kylie involved the students in an activity that demonstrated how interconnected things are in the environment. The class was split in half and, after choosing an environment, they had to pick an element of that environment and pass a ball of wool between them if they thought there was a connection; eventually they ended up with a big spider web of wool. Kylie then took away one or two of the students to demonstrate how the web falls apart when things within the environment die or are destroyed. The class then examined the garden beds and Kylie spoke to the students about their crops and the pests they saw during the semester and how they could introduce perennials to ward off pests and revitalize the soil even further. Kylie explained that, at its core, regenerative gardening is about restoring soil health, nourishing the soil naturally, instead of depleting it or trying to fix it with artificial fertilisers and maintaining or improving gardens in an environmentally conscious way. As part of their animal production systems unit our Year 9/10 AgHort students wanted to learn about animal fertility, reproduction and AI so we reached out to local AI experts, Mike Waite from LIC and Ange and Luke Wilson from Southern Land Bovine Services. Our guests described their various career pathways and the role that AI (artificial insemination) plays in enabling farmers to gain the best genetics available from around the world to improve the production, health traits, fertility and longevity of their dairy cattle. Students rotated through a series of workshops on the role of AI in a dairy business, the AI technician, loading AI guns with bull semen and artificially inseminating LIC’s model cow. Mike, Ange and Luke have offered to run a more extensive workshop next next that we may can offer as a (Common Assessment Task (CAT). Thanks to Mike, the District Manager of LIC, who collected the cow from Melbourne for us and Ange and Luke for their expertise to provide such an interesting and very unique task for our students. A highlight of the TAP is its ability to ‘tap’ into the expertise and experience available in our local community. To this end, as our Year 8 Science classes have been learning about the digestive system as part of their investigation of body systems, we invited Erin Gardner from The Vet Group to describe and contrast the difference between a cow and human stomach and their respective structures. Erin explained that cows, like most ruminants, have four stomachs that each play a role enabling cows to ruminate and regurgitate previously consumed feed and chew it further to help it ferment and be absorbed. Students learned that the four chambers, the rumen, reticulum, omasum, and abomasum varied in function and structure and helped move the cow’s feed through the digestive system. Erin clarified that calves’ stomachs are initially like humans and only the abomasum is functional as milk bypasses the rumen when they are on a milk only diet. Various types of cow feeds and their importance in a balanced diet were discussed and Erin described digestive diseases and problems in calves and cows. Then, armed with gloves, students examined four stomach examples and had to indicate what each chamber was, where it was placed in a cow digestive system and which stomach was the most similar to ours. Definitely something to ruminate on!! To further their studies of micro-organisms the Year 5/6 students hosted baker and owner of Jane Dough, Will Jane. Will described his career path from work experience in Melbourne to learning from and working with bakers in France, England, Italy, India, Byron Bay and other parts of Australia before setting up his own wholesale bakery in Warrnambool. Will’s bakery produces breads, pastries and doughnuts. He described the importance of the sourdough starter in the baking of his sourdough loaves and students could see what a live starter looked like as opposed to a commercially used dry starter. Students learnt that while the dry yeast was quicker to use, the starter had more flavour as it contains a fermented mixture of flour and water, and a colony of micro-organisms including yeast and lactobacillus bacteria which is a bacteria also found in yoghurt. Will’s bread takes 3 days to make. On the first day Will feeds the starter and on the second day, he mixes it, adds salt, proves it for 4 to 5 hours, shapes it then leaves it in the fridge overnight before baking it on the third day. We were surprised to learn that Will had kept this starter going for 6½ years. Each day Will must feed the starter 4 litres of water and 4 kgs of flour which results in approximately 100 kg of bread dough. That is 120 loaves a day! As they examined and tasted the sour dough, doughnuts and pastries, students could see the holes in the bread that were the result of the yeast feeding off the sugar that was produced by the yeast microbes. They even took part in a role play to illustrate the process of bread making. Jane Dough products are available from the bakery in the Coles carpark in Warrnambool (soon to move to a new premises on Raglan Parade), regional markets and local retailers. Will was an enthusiastic presenter and the students asked many questions which Will was only too happy to oblige. What a delicious way to learn about micro-organisms, thanks Will for making micro-organisms in the bread making process come alive! Our semester of Year 9/10 AgHort activities is drawing to a close but our students wanted to investigate agricultural contracting and services so we visited the Glenfyne depot of Michael Lyne, from Lyne Contacting. Mick described his job progression from leaving Timboon P-12 School to owning and managing a contracting business that provides year round services to southwest district farmers including raking, baling, wrapping, spraying, drilling, power and disc harrowing. Students heard about the types of gear and equipment that Mick uses including John Deere tractors and the reasons behind the various purchase and business decisions when considering his apparatus, gear and managing the seasonal workload. At the yard, Kyle Delaney spoke about his career pathway, why he chose contracting and provided an overview of the plane drill including what it does, how it works, technicalities and setting up the drill. Jason Stevenson from Airdeter introduced the new drone component of the business and outlined why drones are used, their purposes, potential, drone services, how drones are set up including the mapping drone, programming, the differences between tractor vs drone guidance and drone legislation. The class investigated the hydraulic drone trailer office and workspace and observed the drones in action and could compare this with tractor capabilities. Mick was generous enough to let our students even fly a drone worth $75,000 that is used for spraying and fertilizer and operates from it’s own drone trailer. Thanks Mick, Kyle and Jason for a wonderful opportunity to investigate Agri tech in our own backyard. As part of their Civics and Citizenship unit, the Year 3/4 students are looking at the differences between a rule and a law with a sustainable focus on littering and rubbish dumping laws and recommended practices such as recycling. So, we called in the experts, Corangamite Shire’s, Jess Maxwell, the Waste and Recycling Officer and Taylor Bonin, the Youth Engagement Officer who spoke to the students about the Shire’s recycling and rubbish collection rules, policies, processes and why such laws exist. Jess referred to the role of waste transfer station sites across the shire and the Corangamite Regional Landfill site at Naroghid. The students were surprised to learn that each cell is at least four times the size of the red brick building that they we were in and that Corangamite Shire residents fill one cell every two years. After categorizing different types of waste, the students were challenged with some ‘Deadly Resource Games’ to sort waste correctly. Like most of us, the students were good with the straight forward items such as cans and glass but some items were tricky. Electrical items have to be taken to the transfer station with soft plastics going to general waste. If ever you’re not sure, then it goes into general waste. Jess then talked about the green bin and the composting process that turns food scraps and garden waste into usable compost. What an interactive and sustainable way to learn about our civic responsibilities and effective recycling! |
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March 2024
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