Physical Education

We have lots to look forward to this Semester in Health and PE. Our PE classes have many great opportunities coming up with instructors coming into the school to run a Cheerleading program at Year 8, a Self-Defence program at Year 9 and a range of fitness related sessions at Year 10.

St Kilda Football Club

Our two Unit 1&2 VCE PE classes had an amazing opportunity last term to go to St. Kilda Football Club and speak to the AFLW captain, Hannah Priest, about what a day in the life of a professional football player looks like. They toured the facilities and had a look at all the strength and conditioning, rehab and recovery facilities that are available to them. Hannah then took them for a recovery and stretching session.

Hopefully our Unit 3&4 VCE PE class will get a similar opportunity this term. However, this time with a session focusing on training programs which is the main area covered in Unit 4 PE.

Health

Our Junior Health classes aim to cover topics that are current and relevant to our students and therefore age appropriate. During Semester 2, these include harm minimisation and safety, relationships, gender and identity, sex education, all aiming to empower our young students to make informed, positive and safe decisions about sexuality, relationships and growing up.

Elephant Ed

This semester, our Year 7 and 9 Health classes will have an incursion with Elephant Ed. We have used Elephant Ed, an organisation that run sex education workshops, for a number of years now and always receive great feedback from the students. They deliver the workshops to individual classes rather than the whole year level, to ensure our students feel comfortable and safe in the environment and confident enough to ask questions and engage in the discussions around the topics that are being delivered.

Our Year 7 classes will have a session on ‘Identity’, as part of the ‘Relationships, Gender and Identity’ unit and our Year 9 classes will have a session on ‘Sexual Relationships’, as part of the ‘Respectful Relationships’ unit.

Last term, our Year 8 classes had a session on ‘Porn V Reality’, as part of the ‘Safety / Cyber Safety’ unit. Throughout this unit, the classes looked at e-safety, social media safety and sexting. A part of this unit also focused on pornography and exploring how people’s exposure to pornography has increased, along with violence and sexism in mainstream pornography. These are very important topics for our young students to understand the negative influence pornography can have on people’s sexual knowledge, attitudes and behaviours.

We received some great feedback from our Year 8 students about these sessions:

“The Elephant Ed presentation was informative and educational. Our instructor Nissa, was enthusiastic and engaging. Everyone in the class got the opportunity to participate and have their own input in the conversation. I would definitely recommend this presentation to the future Year 8 students at Kilbreda”.

“I would recommend this for future Year 8 students as it really made me aware of the in-depth definition of consent and how it’s more than just saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to something. The presenter made it a very comfortable experience for everyone and it was very engaging. Body image was also a good topic to discuss as many teenagers struggle with their own body image and it isn’t openly talked about nearly as much as it should be. It felt like a very safe space and further educated me on topics I thought I knew well enough when in reality I didn’t.“

“I loved that workshop. I learnt a lot and felt really comfortable to ask questions and speak up.“

“The teacher and the presenter made the workshop a really safe space for us to be in. We could ask questions without feeling embarrassed. And I learnt things that I didn’t already know.”

“That was a very informative workshop and I really liked that we were in our class and safe environment to learn really important stuff.“

Natalie Burke
Learning Leader: Health and Physical Education