Nerae Preece Principal

From the Principal

What a whirlwind of a week!?! There have been some pretty interesting learning experiences going on this week. One I am particularly curious about is what the ¾ students have been up to. This week they made their way over to the Sanctuary to start creating a Treasure Hunt for other students to try. They have been working on their skills in location (mathematics), ICT skills and writing to develop a series of clues to share with students from other classes. A big thank you to ALL of the parents who were able to help out, you made the day really successful for our students.

Buildings and Grounds Subcommittee

The School Council are going to re-establish some subcommittees and we are seeking people to join them to offer ideas. The first one we are going to reform is the Building and Grounds Subcommittee. If you are interested in joining this group please send me an email. Responsibilities may include helping to organise working bees, as well as offering ideas to planning of the school grounds and also ensuring that buildings and grounds schedules are being met.

Athletics Sports

A huge big well done for all of our students for participating in last weeks Athletics Sports Day. We had such a good turn out and I must say we were pretty happy that such a large number of our students participated. Once again, we also had many parents come a long and help us, from the bottom of our hearts, Thank you.

Thank you also to our students for setting a great example for others!

Education Week

Our Learning Teams are starting to pull together a great afternoon of sharing and building connections from our community. We are having some special activities from Thursday 27^th of May from 3:00-5:30pm. We look forward to giving you more clues next week as to what will be going on for our open afternoon.

Lost Property

We have a lot of lost property at the office at the moment. So if you are missing things be sure to come to the office and have a look through the clothes pile. The other thing we are about to do is open the cupboard of lost things. In the next fortnight we are going to making a table at the office with all of the things that have been found in the school. We are hoping that parents can come and check through this little collection. Any toys and items that are unclaimed will be donated if they are in good condition.

NAPLAN

This is just a gentle reminder that if your child is doing NAPLAN next week (Grade 3 and Grade 5 students) please help us by encouraging your child to get to bed early, and ensure that they drink plenty of water. We will make sure they get active breaks after each assessment and of course encouragement. If your child is worried or concerned please let their teacher know as soon as possible, that way we will be able to support and encourage them through the week. In many cases most kids actually think it’s fun, but occasionally we have students that have worries and often with a bit of help from parents and the school we help them overcome their worries.

That’s about it for this week. I hope you have a lovely weekend.

Nerae Preece

IMPORTANT SCHOOL DATES

Important school dates to remember:

School colour run – 17th May – 2.30pm

Junior Photo trail / Expo tabloid sports – Tuesday 18th May (Junior School)

AROUND THE GROUNDS

This week in Music…

Greetings to our wonderful school community,

We have had a lot of fun in music this week and we have much more to come this term!

Our prep students have been playing the chime bars and learning to sing the African song, Funga Alafia. We have been practicing keeping the beat of the song and moving to the music.

Grade 1 & 2 are preparing for a performance for NADOC week by learning the song Yananha by Indigenous composer, Eric Avery. This is a song about the good feelings you get when you walk around your home country. We look forward to singing it for you on Friday the 4^th of June.

Our grade 3&4 students are learning to play chords and to read rhythms. We are making great progress and each class is learning to play a different song. We hope to play them for you in assembly as well.

The grade 5/6 students are creating a percussion piece using body percussion and basketballs! Through this activity we are learning about tempo and keeping a steady beat. We are also exploring composition and keeping a steady beat.

School choir will be staring over in the coming weeks. I can’t wait to get our choir out and about again over the course of the year.

If you would like your child to learn a musical instrument at Badger Creek, please email me via the school email or on my personal email: Jennifer.legg@education.vic.gov.au

Have a great week,

Jenny Legg

This week in P.E…

Colour fun run!

We are excited to announce that we have booked our Colour Run 4 Fun for Monday 17^th May and invite all parents and children to participate !

Stay tuned for more details to come!

This week in Art…

Hello Badger Creek Families,

This week in the art room our students have been very busy creating and making gifts for their Mum or the special person in their lives. With Mother’s Day celebrations happening this Sunday, I don’t want to give away too much! Just know that your lovely children have worked with great care and love to make an artwork that I’m sure you will cherish.

Enjoy your week and have a happy Mother’s Day.

Vanessa Imberger

Art Teacher

Mother’s day lettering design with beautiful blossom flower

This week in Prep…

P reps have been busy writing, using the sentence starter “We went… ”

R eading our ‘good fit’ books has been. wonderful, as was sharing a story under a tree

E xercising in the sunshine on the ninja warrior course was enjoyable

P laying with our ‘tens facts’ and ‘teen numbers’ has been terrific

S chool sure is fun!

Things to remember:

Just for next week we will be having Art, Music and Sport on Wednesday.

For Show and Share next week please do a drawing and bring it to share.

Have a wonderful week!

This week in Grade 3 / 4…

How can we not start with the highlight of our week – yesterday’s excursion to Healesville Sanctuary. We set off in the morning armed with a clipboard, map and iPad with the purpose of creating a scavenger hunt. Students had to choose locations within the Sanctuary to photograph, with the challenge being set for groups to write cryptic clues about these locations. All groups met the challenge head-on and had a lovely day. We feel so grateful to have a special relationship with the Sanctuary. The same must be said for our incredible parent volunteers. Thank you!

Back to the classroom, reading sessions have seen students brushing up on their summarising skills. It’s a great skill to be developing as students will continuing honing their summarising craft throughout their entire life in education. The more complex a text, the more difficult it is to summarise. Next week we will continue to look at summarising fiction texts.

If your children have been a little argumentative of late, written you a letter to try and weasel their way out of chores or even put forward some compelling arguments as to why they simply must have a new pet, we apologise. Yes, we are continuing to explore persuasive writing, with this week’s focus seeing students investigating how to add weight to their arguments through the use of evidence. Persuasive writing is fun and we look forward to continuing this unit through the coming weeks.

Our maths unit exploring addition is under way, with students revising their addition skills to help building their automaticity – ability to add numbers automatically. We’ll continue to explore these skills in coming weeks as they are essential for students’ future learning in maths.

Keep up the tremendous work, 3/4s!

This week in Grade 5 / 6…

Hi To All Our Amazing Families.

It’s been another big week for the Grade 5/6 students as they continue working on their enterprise inquiry tasks.

This week in maths, students learned about Market Research, by creating and completing surveys amongst the younger classes to help them decide which products would have the greatest demand in their upcoming expo. Working in their business groups, students analysed their results and selected the products which they felt would be most successful. They then proceeded to research which materials would be necessary to create their products, as well as source suppliers and create budgets to ensure they would be able to meet their inquiry brief.

In writing, we’ve been focusing on improving our understanding of persuasive writing through the use of powerful emotive language, which the students will look to utilise in the next few weeks as they write some persuasive advertisements for their products.

Finally, our Grade 5 students have been helping their prep buddies build their language and communication skills, whilst our Grade 6 leaders have been working collaboratively on ideas to help improve the school in a number of ways.

We’re all incredibly proud of the hard work, creativity and effort they’ve been displaying, and can’t wait for the opportunity to have them show the results of this to the entire community in the next few weeks.

Best Regards

The Grade 5/6 Teaching Team