AEON Issue One June 2011
“ ur Place: All O these different ways of understanding... A year or so ago the Good Weekend in the Sydney Morning Herald had as its guest in the regular Your Time Starts Now column someone called Adrian Keating. There is always one question which goes: Your earliest memory is… and Adrian’s answer was “Playing in the bush at Glenaeon”. What a pleasant surprise to find our school mentioned in the national press. I followed up and found that Adrian had been a student at Glenaeon in the 80’s and is now a professional violinist.
was reminded of Adrian’s note last week when teacher Catherine Pilko showed me some of the writings from her class about their current Main Lesson, Our Place: An introduction to the Geography of our local area. In this main lesson the children are introduced to the subject of Geography through a study of the school grounds, then extending out to look at the local area of Willoughby. Here is what student Julian Kopkas wrote describing his appreciation of the Glenaeon grounds… ‘Our little school is an amazing place… birds humming in the trees, brush turkeys tapping at the classroom door, blue tongue lizards scuttling around the rocks and kookaburras laughing for no particular reason at all. But the really amazing thing about the school is the Bush… silent creeks, noisy waterfalls, damp grass, ticklish ferns and a clear blue sky. So it is the perfect place for a bushwalk…’ The children learn their first mapping skills and Lindsay Sherrot,
I
Lindsay Sherrott and Wincki Chevalier, our long term bush regenerators and friends of the Middle Cove grounds.
Page
10
our esteemed groundsman who knows literally every tree on the site, takes them on guided walks to introduce them to the secrets of the Glenaeon grounds. They see the three waterfalls that adorn our property, walk down to Scotts Creek as it curves through mangroves out to Middle Harbour, and follow the foreshore around to both Castle Cove and Castlecrag. There are many magnificent trees on the grounds, and some outstanding sandstone formations, including a number with indigenous significance. There are birds and animals that use the grounds as a corridor between adjacent bush areas. The finale of this intensive study of our site is an overnight camp on the oval where some parents join the class for the first step in the outdoor component of the Active Wilderness Program which runs through the whole school. As the students grow older we study the grounds in a more sophisticated way, and their appreciation deepens. Here is the comment from a Year 12 student