Nerae Preece Principal

From the Principal’s Office…

Another week has flown by. This week I’ve been thinking a lot about my wellbeing. From my latest book that I am reading (See below), I read a chapter on “Leisure”. Aristotle believed that to be a well-rounded person you had to have a balanced life. Balance includes physical activity, social and emotional, mental and spiritual wellbeing… (You may have made a connection with the 7 habits “Sharpen the saw”)

So let me tell you what I have been up to in keeping my wellbeing in check this week…

Physical activity has been a walk every morning for 20 minutes. It’s not too exerting, but it helps me reset my brain and body and gives me some fresh air.

Social/emotional has been a bit hard at the moment, but I have tried to make 4 phone calls or texts to special people in my life to help me stay connected.

Mental, I have been trying to learn about assessing spelling this week. Mr Moore and I are reading a chapter from “Spelling it Out” and we are going to talk about it next week to see what we have discovered.

Spiritual (I also like to think that this is something that you do to help you get into flow) wellbeing has been crochet for me. I received a voucher from Crumbz for my birthday and I bought some beautiful yarn to make a cowl. Crochet really helps me just focus on one thing and my brain just relaxes and enjoys being in the moment.

What are you doing to look after your wellbeing at the moment?

Results from COVID-19 testing

This is just a gentle reminder that if you happen to be getting tested for COVID-19 due to being unwell, we ask that you ring the office to let me know your results, especially if your child is being supervised on site. We also encourage you to get tested if you are unwell, just in case…

Hopefully we don’t have to do this, but if you or someone in your family do test positive for COVID-19 we ask that you ring the office and ask to speak to me as soon as possible. This information will be treated with the highest of confidentiality, but allows me to determine what I need to do next to help protect our community from the illness. Your support in this will be greatly appreciated.

Literacy Common Assessment Task

Next week we will be asking all of our students to write from a prompt. They will do this without your help. We want to know how they are writing by themselves. So, that means we need to see their spelling mistakes, grammatical and punctuation errors. Why do we need to see these things? Because it is really useful and helps us understand what we need to teach them next.

So look out next week for the writing prompt, and have a look at the risks they take in their writing. Watching a child learn how to write is a truly amazing experience!

Prep enrolments

Time is creeping closer for Kinder parents to finalise their choices for school in 2021. If you know anyone that is in the Badger Creek area that needs to enrol their prep, give them a nudge to remind them to enrol by Friday the 7^th of August. At this stage we have 36 prep enrolments, we are so excited to be welcoming some new families into our Badger community.

How’s your “Be Safe” goal going Ms Preece?

Yeah, it’s going pretty well. This week we created a phone tree for emergencies. So if for some reason there is an emergency out of hours and all staff are at home we know how to get the message to everyone. If for some reason the school ever has to close you can expect to receive a text message to inform you. It is really important that if you have changed your mobile number, let the office know so we can update it.

My other safe project was working with Mel this week to create a maintenance schedule. We really want to make sure we look after our buildings and grounds and this schedule will really help us take care of our beautiful school. It’s been something we have wanted to do for a while now, and it feels great to have that started.

Next week I am doing some learning around Risk Management. I can’t wait to share what I learn from this with you next week.

Before I sign off this week I really want to thank our amazing Education Support Staff who are working tirelessly to help our onsite supervision program. Thank you Belinda, Brogan, Janet, Liz C, Liz K and Sue for caring for our kids and our community. We are so lucky to have you!

That’s it for this week… till next week stay safe and stay at home!

From Nerae Preece

MUSIC NEWS

Greetings to our Wonderful School Community,

I love teaching music at Badger Creek! Even though we cannot see each other in person, I know that so many of you are engaging with music at home which is more than wonderful.

This week, our Junior School played their soundscape compositions with instruments that they found or made at home. I have included some lovely videos and photos of their work. I was very impressed by how carefully students were listening and the creative way they chose to make their sounds! Well done Badger Creek.

Next week, the senior school will be writing their own Rap lyrics and the Junior School will be having fun with rhythm.

STUDENT PERFORMANCES

We have so many people who love playing music at Badger Creek and I would love to include some music in Assembly and in the newsletter. Feel free to record some of your music and send it to me and I will share it. Please give me a call at school if you would like to have a chat about this.

Have a great week everyone!

Jenny Legg

Music Teacher

Anneke’s Soundscape

Emily’s Soundscape

Sanna’a Soundscape

Vedra’a Soundscape

Lexie and the Runners

John and Robert

THIS WEEK IN ART

Hi Everyone,

Every week I’m blown away at how creative and committed our students are at Badger Creek Primary School. It’s lovely to receive so much artwork and to be able to share it with our community. Keep up the good work.

This week our students have been focusing on different techniques they can practice to improve their drawing ability.

The Junior School learnt about observational drawing and set-up a still life using their toys. They then used their imaginative drawing skills to place their toys in a creative setting. Pearl from Grade 1/2 A shared that she did an observational drawing of a turtle and placed it in front of a volcano.

Our senior school has been focusing on how to draw realistically. They looked at images of animals and found the geometric shapes that made the structure of the animal. They then used these shapes as the base of their drawing. This task was challenging for our senior artists, but they worked hard and the results show just how committed they are to learning new skills.

Check out our student gallery below!

Have a great week,

Ms. Imberger

Art Teacher

Around the Year Levels

IN PREP THIS WEEK

This week the Preps have used a range of picture prompts and are using ‘Sentence Starters’ in their writing!

Keep up the Amazing work!

Check out a few samples:

IN GRADE 1 / 2 THIS WEEK

The grade 1/2’s have been thinking about the Author’s Purpose this week. Is the author trying to persuade me to do something? Or are they writing to inform me or teach me something? Perhaps they just want me to laugh at the story. Here is a snapshot of some of the learning.

IN GRADE 3 / 4 THIS WEEK

Here are our work samples for the week 🙂

IN GRADE 5 / 6 THIS WEEK

This week in 5/6 has seen students tuning into the questions that they naturally ask whilst reading, and distinguishing between literal (answers can be found in the text), inferential (meaning is implied) and evaluative questions (seeking an opinion). Writing sessions have continued our focus on word choice, with students exploring the roles adverbs play in modifying verbs, adjectives and other adverbs. In maths we have been calculating the area of rectangles, parallelograms and irregular shape as we move towards exploring the relationship between the area of quadrilaterals and triangles. We have continued our Global Village investigation into the wide world by completing a mapping exercise exploring the countries and capital cities of North and Central America, and the Caribbean. We hope you enjoy some of our students’ persuasive writing samples on the topic of letting a pigeon drive the school bus to the athletics!

You SHOULD let the pigeon drive the bus

The pigeon driving the bus is a very tough topic to cover, with lives at stake, but, I think there is a way to not kill everyone AND keep the pigeons dreams intact (at least for a while). Here is my reasoning

the pigeon is physically not tall enough

The pigeon is about half a metre tall (very tall pigeon by the way) but still not tall enough to drive a bus. So the least you can do is let him find out by himself that he physically can not drive the bus. If he tries to pull a ratatouille on you than jump in the nearest river. Although, he has probably not watched ratatouille before so you needn’t worry about that one too much

2.He cannot use the steering wheel.

Now I know what you are thinking, he will ask to steer the bus. Well here is some good news. It is proven by the institute of banana that pigeons cannot grip the steering wheel of a bus. His hands are coated in feathers that will slip and slide around and he wont be able to turn it. If he goes to buy extra grip gloves then cover the wheel in butter. If he licks it off than cover it in duck fat. If he licks that off he is a cannibal and you can turn him into the police.

(P.S. do not have the acceleration pedal pressed while doing this)

3.He will want to use the pedals.

Never fear! I have done the math and I have worked out that our pigeon here cannot peck on wheel hard enough to make it press down. He may sit on it but a quick solution to this is putting a thumbtack on the pedal when he isn’t looking. He will probably not have the intelligence to suspect you because he is a pigeon. Don’t let his smart word choice fool you.

Now you know that he cannot drive bus you can tell him that he is allowed to. Simple. An easy way to let him crush his own dreams. The only problem with this method is that there will be a bit of a mess on the floor but that can be remedied, much easier than uncrushing a pigeons dreams. I hope you were convinced by this text.

Review of this text.

*****

0/5 stars.

This text stinks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. Pigeons should be able to drive buses if they want!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Pigeon936

Sean’s garden philosophies

SCHOOL NEWS

UPDATING OF INFORMATION:

Badger Creek Families, please be aware an email has been sent through in regards to updating of information.

We understand not everyone had the chance to return the forms at the end of last term and so thought an email would hopefully be as affective.

We want to ensure our records are true, so please respond to the email to confirm if there are any updates, or just to confirm all information is correct.

If you do have any queries please do not hesitate to contact the office via phone or email.

P: 59 624 019 E: badger.creek.ps@education.vic.gov.au

School uniform orders:

Please find below the link for the school uniform orders.

http://www.aplusschoolwear.com.au/SearchResult.aspx?Labels=BADGER%20CREEK

All orders are to be completed through the website.