Our learning support and mentoring programs in 90 Australian communities directly help children in need achieve their goals through education.
View all programs Holly’s counting her achievements
16 January 2025
Finishing primary school is a big milestone for any student. Their world is about to open, with new opportunities to learn, discover, and grow. And with these experiences, students begin to understand all that they’re capable of.
For Holly in Year 6, she is delighted with what she’s learning and discovering at primary school. She’s especially proud of her abilities in maths and loves hands-on activities. Cooking and gardening are some of her favourites.
But overcoming the barriers of poverty was an extra challenge in her early school years. Financial difficulties put her at risk of falling behind her peers.
Your support helps provide students like Holly with access to learning activities and mentorship through our out-of-school learning and mentoring programs. They're a safe, supportive space to get extra support.
For Holly in Year 6, she is delighted with what she’s learning and discovering at primary school. She’s especially proud of her abilities in maths and loves hands-on activities. Cooking and gardening are some of her favourites.
But overcoming the barriers of poverty was an extra challenge in her early school years. Financial difficulties put her at risk of falling behind her peers.
Your support helps provide students like Holly with access to learning activities and mentorship through our out-of-school learning and mentoring programs. They're a safe, supportive space to get extra support.
One program Holly enjoys is student2student. “I like student2student because I got to read with someone a little bit older than me and got to read interesting books,” Holly says.
Student2student supports students to improve their reading outside of school. The program pairs students with a buddy to read with, two to three times a week. This has set Holly up with life-long literacy skills that will carry on far beyond school. Curious Holly beams about learning new facts from books as she practices her reading.
It helped me read words that I wasn't able to read before. I liked the dog books because one of them had a fact that dogs can only see yellow and blue.
In Learning Club, you can do different activities, such as cooking. I liked making fruit kebabs. When we were doing measurements in school, it helped me because, in cooking, we have to measure how much of the ingredients we put in.
Holly has built a lot of confidence during the learning and mentoring programs you support. Learning Clubs is another program that will help Holly transition into Year 7 and keep engaged at high school.
Your generous support for Learning Clubs provides students with activities and tutors to help develop academic skills, like homework, maths and reading. At Learning Clubs, Holly builds the skills needed to get the most from her education. As a maths enthusiast, she especially enjoyed pairing cooking with counting.
With high school on the horizon, Holly will use a computer more often for her school work. Through our Digital Learning Essentials program, Holly has been provided with a laptop. Using the computer, she can engage with schoolwork, at the same level as her peers. She’s especially enjoyed testing herself with the calculator function.
“We received a laptop from The Smith Family, and it's helped with a lot of schoolwork,” says Holly. “When I was doing maths the other day, I was calculating what I was doing. And then tried to work it out so that I had it on a calculator in front of me, as well as a paper. The laptop also helps us participate in programs such as student2student.”
With your support for our programs, students can access resources and mentors to keep learning and enjoying school. Thank you for being a Champion for students like Holly, so she can keep her maths passion going (and hopefully growing) into her next phase of the school journey.
