Today, a small group of about thirty children from my kids’ school were invited to breakfast with the Premier of NSW followed by an excursion to the Sydney Aquarium. This was completely free for the children, with the costs being covered by Foodbank Australia. Foodbank provides food for distribution by charitable organisations as well as running various other programs throughout Australia.
This year, Foodbank has been running a Breakfast Club at my childrens’ school. It was the kids who show up to the Breakfast Club that were invited along to today’s excursion. As frequent visitors to Breakfast Club, both of my children also attended today’s excursion. The children had to be at school by 5am, so it was a very early morning for them, but they seem to have had a good day and they came home tired, but happy.
Rather than just narrate their experiences, I have decided to format this blog post a little differently. I will present their day as a couple of short interviews. The first, Storm’s will be posted today, with Yasmine’s being posted on Monday. I was actually quite fascinated by how very different their answers were, with Storm being far more verbose, allowing me to ask a few extra questions based on his answers.
So here is Storm’s (age 11) interview:
Me: So, tell me about your breakfast with the Premier. What did it involve?
Storm: Um…how do I explain it? A bunch of people did speeches and at the start we had cereal with lemon flavoured yoghurt.
Me: Lemon flavoured?
Storm: Yes. And after that we had a bit of free time to roam around, look at the food they had there, get some cereal…
Me: So you had the cereal after the speeches?
Storm: No, no, no, no, no. We had it before it.
Me: Did you get to ask any questions?
Storm: Yes, you were allowed but lots of people met the Premier guy but I never got to ‘cos I couldn’t find him.
Me: So you didn’t ask anything then?
Storm: No, I didn’t.
Me: What did you do after breakfast?
Storm: We went to the Aquarium!
Me: What was your favourite part of the Aquarium?
Storm: Looking at the animals. Just basically the whole thing. No, wait there, we did bits of Science experiments and I answered a whole bunch of questions. The guy asked where I got my information from and I said documentaries and books, which is the truth.
Me: What science experiments did you do?
Storm: The guy had sea water he put in a small jug thing, then he put this red liquid in. If it went red it means there is a whole lot of oxygen but if it went orange it meant that there is no oxygen, it’s just carbon dioxide, and he got me to use a little black straw to blow bubbles in it and it was red and after I blowed [sic] bubbles into it, it became a half orange, half red colour ‘cos of the carbon dioxide. And he did another experiment and he chose two other people and it was a citric acid thing. And that’s basically all I remember.
Me: What was the best part of the day?
Storm: The Aquarium. I love animals.
Me: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Storm: Not really. Oh yeah – walking under the little bridge thing under the water and you could see all the fish and sharks around you. And at the gift shop there was a cute little seal and it was so cute!
Me: Thanks very much for that, Storm. I’m glad you had fun.
Storm: Yes, it was really fun!
Well, that is it. Don’t forget to come back on Monday to read Yasmine’s, somewhat shorter, interview.
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