My childhood home I see again,

        And sadden with the view;

    And still, as memory crowds my brain,

        There's pleasure in it too.

-Abraham Lincoln

As the beginning of year 12 approached I started to try to come up with an idea for my project topic. I couldn’t believe how quickly the years had come and gone, and now I was about to begin my final year of school. Looking back at my school journey and revisiting my old primary school gave me a sense of nostalgia as I reminisced about that part of my childhood. After changing ideas and creating many mind-maps (with various words likes “cats?”, “language?”, and “Baking?” as ideas) I finally began to form an idea. It was the feeling of bittersweet affection for the past that inspired my final topic question:

Nostalgia is a feeling that is both universal and important to humans. How does this deep reminiscing of the past impact our wellbeing?

Nostalgia was something I had heard of and knew the feeling, but I hadn’t ever thought twice about. When I began to research this topic, I was fascinated to learn more about it . Nostalgia is a deep longing and reminiscence of the past. The word “nostalgia” is derived from the Greek word “nostos”, which means “homecoming”, and the word “algos”, which translates to “pain” or “longing”. As I researched more, I was interested in the history of nostalgia, and the way the understanding of it has developed into the nostalgia we know today. Our view of nostalgia has changed and evolved over the past few centuries, with the term “nostalgia” first being used in the late 17^th Century.  Scholars speculated various ideas about nostalgia, many doctors thought nostalgia might be caused by the inability to move on from childhood and a dissatisfaction with the present. By the mid-20^th Century, nostalgia was seen as a mental illness, rather than a neurological disease. The understanding of the feeling itself evolved into nostalgia being a bittersweet emotion, not just a melancholic one. The emotion could be pleasurable and created a positive feeling when reminiscing fondly on the past. The understanding of nostalgia continued to evolve from that over many years, and now nostalgia is considered a general longing or reminiscence of the past, as opposed to a homesickness induced mental illness. I was surprised at the evolution of nostalgia, and how powerful the effects of nostalgia could be.

Nostalgia can be triggered by many different things, often sensory cues like smells or sound. I myself feel nostalgic when I smell one of my mum’s perfumes that she used to wear when going out, and when I hear a song that used to play on the radio when I was in primary school. Whenever I get a whiff of the perfume or hear that particular song, I am taken back to those days and am flooded with a sense of nostalgia.

As nostalgia is connected to memory, I discovered that nostalgia can be used as an aid for people with dementia. Dementia is a chronic or progressive syndrome that is characterised by the decline in cognitive functions such as language and memory. Nostalgia has been shown to be an effective resource to aid in cognitive decline, and to bring meaning and optimism into their lives.

I found that nostalgia can have a really positive impact on people, bringing a sense of meaning, optimism, and social connection into people’s lives. It can promote a sense of self-continuity, which is the feeling of connection that ties our past self to our current self.

The Class 12 project has been quite an enjoyable process for me so far. It has taken a while for me to get used to researching properly, as well as learning how to reference things in my essay. This experience has made me learn lots of new things, not only about my topic but about essay writing, planning, and time management. It has been interesting to research and learn about an entirely new topic, one which I barely knew of before. I shall leave you with a poem that I felt reflected the feeling of nostalgia written by Philip Vincent Sanders.

Last night, your long-lost memory came

Back to me as though

Spring stealthily should come to a

Forsaken wilderness

A gentle breeze it’s fragrance over burning

Deserts blow

Or, all at once be soothed somehow the

Sick soul’ distress.

-Philip Vincent Sanders

Lucia Papiccio

Hi, my name is Lucia, and for my Class 12 project, I want to know why sensory play is so important for a growing child’s development. My focus within this topic is specifically on children aged from newborn up to five years old.

I remember scrolling on a social media app one day and coming across this video of a mother putting her baby (who I think was around six months) in a jolly jumper. Underneath the baby’s feet, the mother had put water in a wide tray with stones so that the baby could put her feet in and feel around.  The first thing I thought was, what an interesting thing to do. This sparked my interest, and once I started looking, I found more videos that showed similar play activities to do that would be fun for the baby.  Aside from being fun, I also learned that play like this was very important for developing many other fundamental skills in young children such as cognitive, fine motor and gross motor skills. Once I learned about the value of this type of play, I came across the foundations of sensory play, and I realised that this would be a topic I’d like to do for my project this year.

One thing I was surprised about when researching the senses is that babies see all in black and white for the first three months of their life.  It is important to know because you can buy baby toys that are black and white which send stronger signals to the brain and build their visual development. This is interesting because when I look around at the toys which are in shops for babies, many of them are brightly coloured.

For my practical, I am going to playgroup at PWS, to share a story I'm creating by including sensory play. I’m thinking of using some of the natural things that are found in the playgroup garden to tell the story. Maybe something like a gumnut, where a little fairy lives.  That’s where the story is developing at the moment.

I am also planning on spending some time in Kindy 4 and Playgroup to see how early childhood in our school incorporates sensory play for the kindy kids.

One of the most difficult parts so far has been the research, but it has helped me get a better understanding of my topic, especially in terms of child development in children aged 0-5.  This information is also helping me think about what I might like to pursue after PWS and the more I learn, the more interested I am in working with kids in the future.

Poppy Ritchie

“I looked around for the new age and saw the old faces once more.” – Heinz Kamnitzer.

Reading has always been an interest of mine since I was first able to read and even before. I can remember at the age of four or five, picking up the books lying around the house and pretending to read them. It was a favoured pastime of mine. When it came time to choose a project topic, I was entirely unsure of what I wanted to do until I kept coming across the term ‘modern classic’. This term was intriguing to me as it seemed to be an oxymoron. From this curiosity, the idea that would become my project was formed.

“Does such a thing as a contemporary classic novel exist?”.

By this I mean, can a contemporary book hold the same esteem as a socially agreed upon classic? I began to do some rudimentary research and found that there was a lot of underground talk about ‘modern classics’ but not so much in the academic sphere. This was a red flag I should have picked up on but decided to persevere.

What surprised me most about the research aspect of this project was the fact that there was little or no understanding of how a book becomes a classic or a way in which to predict this. With this knowledge on board, I decided to create a series of criteria based upon books that have extensive reputations as classics and use that to see if a book that has not claimed this status yet can fit into these criteria. I acknowledge that this angle is perhaps somewhat surgical and direct and that is contradictory to the artform I am attempting to understand, but that seemed the only way to achieve my desired outcome. The main ideas I decided that could lead to a book becoming a classic were:

1) The book must contain archetypal themes, the kinds that we can find in any piece of literature.

2) The book is deemed good enough to be taught in schools.

3) The book has won a prize, therefore has been elected by a panel of experts.

4) An element of difference must be present, for if it weren’t, we would be reading the same stories over and over again.

What I found throughout the application of this rubric was that it all boiled down to one idea, that being the human condition. This seems to be the main link between all great works of literature; how a book is relatable to the reader. I have found that this idea is also very heavily linked to the definition of literature, that being any piece of writing that a person chooses to place their high regard.

This process so far has been a somewhat frustrating and challenging one but that is not to say that it does not hold reward for its participants also. I have not fully completed any aspect of the project, yet I am truly surprised that I have been able to achieve what I have. Back in year 8 when this project seemed to be a whole lifetime away, I never would have thought myself capable of writing a four-thousand-word essay or remaining interested in one topic for so long.

The aspect of the project for which I hold the most concern is the practical. Originally, I was feeling rather helpless as I believed I had chosen a topic which held no practical potential. This was until one sunny day my wonderful supervisor stopped me on the veranda to tell me that she had thought of the perfect practical for me to do. The idea was to create reviews of classic books that children may read. Whether these reviews were for the children themselves or their parents was debated, and I decided to do both. The idea is to have classic literature integrated into contemporary learning. Or to inspire something to that effect. From some conversations I’ve had with a relative who works as a teaching assistant and from my own experience growing up as an avid reader, I know that there comes a time in a young person’s life where they feel there are no more good books out there, that they’ve read them all and I hope that my practical will aid someone who feels this way. Studies have shown that reading is an important, some would say vital, participant in empathetic development in people of all ages. Bearing this in mind I hope that the underlying message of my entire years work will be shown in my practical, that being: read good literature. Or perhaps Sylvia Plath said it better, “Read a thousand books and your word will flow like a river”.