Nine take the plunge
Lily Crossingham, Year 6, Gordonvale State School
NINE Excelsior students from Gordonvale State School – including Ameilya McIntyre-Parisi, Bailey Wilkinson, Lily Crossingham and Thomas Sterling – attended the Future Leader’s Eco-Challenge run by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. Activities included a trip to Cairns Aquarium and learning about Reef zones and coral health.
ON September 20, nine Excelsior students, including myself, attended the Future Leader’s Eco-Challenge run by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.
We gathered on the Cairns Esplanade to have a morning tea of fruit and muesli bars.
Afterwards the instructor, Phil, gave us a quick safety briefing and explained what activities were happening that day. At that point, we were split in to two groups.
The Gordonvale SS students started at the Cairns Aquarium with some other schools including Mt Molloy, School of Distance Education and Kewarra Beach TAS.
At the aquarium, we were divided again into two smaller groups.
Gordonvale and St Michael’s went with aquarium worker, Oscar, as well as the two students from School of Distance Education.
Oscar told us how the barramundi’s mouth is tilted upwards to get their food from up high. He continued to give us other fascinating information throughout the tour.
We petted a frill-necked lizard and a blue tongue lizard to see the difference of skin texture, even though they were both reptiles.
Before long the tour was over and we thanked the aquarium staff before walking back to the Esplanade for lunch. After a big lunch of delicious wraps and sandwiches we switched to the Reef Ranger activities.
We started with an activity about zoning and all the different parts of the Reef.
Each school broke in two groups — one half were the Reef Rangers and the others were the reef users.
The reef users were assigned an activity like diving or fishing and asked to stand on one of the areas, performing that activity on the huge maps that were laid out.
The rangers got a list of the reef rules and three cards to issue saying “have a nice day”, or “licence”, or “fine”. The challenge of the day was inventing a machine that could help reefs recover from bleaching by either shading or cooling the section of the reef.
We used recycled materials such as cardboard tubes, felt and paddle pop sticks. It was difficult at first but everyone did a good job and I bet some students that participated will be great inventors.