All students of Years 3A & 3B (Melton) excitedly set off for Day Camp to Sovereign Hill on Thursday 20th November, accompanied by their teachers Mr Hunter and Mrs Dixon, and Learning Assistants Mrs Beale and Miss Markovski. Having sweltered through an almost 40-degree day last year, we were relieved that the weather was much kinder to us this year!
After a quick morning snack upon arrival, we all meandered up Main Street and visited the shops including the sweet shop (of course), drapery store and the blacksmiths. We then headed to the steam and mining precinct which afforded us with fabulous birds-eye views of Sovereign Hill and Ballarat.
Our first educational session was highly interactive. Having been formally greeted by Ma’am, we learnt just what life was like in the 1850s. With a focus on clothing from the past, we discovered that new clothes were only for the very wealthy, with most wearing poorly fitted cast-off clothes and boots. All students had fun dressing mannequins in olden day clothes, determining whether their model was likely to be poor (lower class), middle class or wealthy (upper class). Ma’am had to make some serious adjustments to our efforts, as we had bonnets on back-to-front and men’s neck ties worn as ladies’ belts.
We all spent the rest of the morning panning for gold in the goldfields, hoping to strike it rich. Quite a few of our students actually found some gold specks and were taught how to expertly transfer these into a small tube of water. Given our successes in the panning creek, we were keen to then head down the mine and experience the conditions of striking it rich big time! We were all impacted by just how dark and dangerous it was back in the 1850s in the mines. Flooding was common, as were underground collapses. The hologram re-enactment we viewed really brought it all to life for us.
After lunch and a play in the playground (Mrs Dixon revisited her childhood by going down the enclosed slide with students), we then marvelled at the gold pour demonstration. It was fascinating to watch pure gold being melted, poured and then set into an ingot. The gold ingot weighed 3kgs, being valued at around $355,000. We learnt that the largest piece of gold discovered in Ballarat during the 1850s was the Welcome Nugget, found in 1858. It weighed almost 69 kgs, making it the largest gold nugget in the world at the time and still the second largest ever found in Australia. Gold is still mined in and around Ballarat today.
Back at school (with some spotted having a wee snooze on the bus ride home), we all enjoyed owning the playground for a pre-dinner play with no other students present! Then it was a delicious dinner of pizza, garlic bread, a juice box, chips, chocolate and a Zooper Dooper while watching a Lilo and Stitch movie together. With parent pick-up at 7:00pm, everyone voted Day Camp “THE BEST DAY EVER!”