Natte Yallock Primary School: Victoria, Australia

Dear Participants,

We come from the Natte Yallock Primary School in Victoria Australia. There are forty students in our whole school. We have 23 children in grade 3-6 which we call the big room and there are 17 children in the prep to two which we call the little room. We have three teachers in our school. All the children in our school live on farms or come from small rural towns. Most of the children travel on bus to school.

The farming in our area is mostly sheep and cattle farming with a small amount of cereal cropping. The farms vary in size from about 2000 to 7000 acres.

We have a variety of beautiful creatures in our area, there are many kangaroos, possums, lizards, snakes, echidinas and birds. Our country can be very green in winter but dries in the summer time.

Most of the children in our area play tennis during the summer months and a lot of the boys play Australian rules football and the girls play netball in the winter months. Other sports also played are rounders, basketball, athletics, swimming, badminton and cricket. Our school has been very competitive in the athletic inter-school sports.

Some of the subjects we do at school include Indonesian, maths, language music, art, technology, science, reading, library, phys-ed and much more. We begin school at 9:15am and finish at 3:20pm and attend Monday to Friday. One of the areas we have been involved in for the past two years is the Waterwatch program. We test ten sites along the Avoca river for oxygen, temperature, phosphorus, p.H, salinity, turbidity and macro-invertabrates. We record our results and are able to graph them on a computer. We have already discovered a low oxygen level in the river water and we are in the process of finding out why.

In the middle of October we are going to the National Kids Congress for Catchment Care which is held in Adelaide during National Water Week and we are making a major presentation to about 400 people about our involvement in Waterwatch. We are really looking foward to being involved with the Global Water Sampling Project and hearing from others around the globe.

From the grade five and six students at the Natte Yallock P.S.
Please note our e-mail address has changed and is now: natteps@goldnet.com.au