WE WANT OUR PARENTS/CAREGIVERS/GUARDIANS TO TELL US WHAT THEY THINK!

Our school is conducting a survey to find out what parents/caregivers/guardians think of our school. The Parent/Caregiver/Guardian Opinion Survey is an annual survey offered by the Department of Education and Training that is conducted amongst a sample of randomly selected parents/caregivers/guardians (previously known as the Parent Opinion Survey). It is designed to assist schools in gaining an understanding of families’ perceptions of school climate, student behaviour, student engagement and experiences of remote and flexible learning. Our school will use the survey results to help inform and direct future school planning and improvement strategies. We use the information to make improvements and to celebrate acheivements.

Approximately 30 per cent of parents will be invited to participate in this year’s survey. All responses to the survey are anonymous. This year, the Parent/Caregiver/Guardian Opinion Survey will be conducted from Friday 6^th August to Friday 3^rd September, 2021.

The survey will be conducted online, only takes 20 minutes to complete, and can be accessed at any convenient time within the fieldwork period on desktop computers, laptops, tablets or smartphones. The online survey will be available in a range of languages other than English. These include: Arabic, Vietnamese, Mandarin, Chin (Hakha), Hindi, Japanese, Somali, Turkish, Punjabi and Greek.

Please speak to or email Erin Murphy (erin.murphy@education.vic.gov.au ) if you would like more information.

Thank you for your anticipated participation.

IMPORTANT SCHOOL DATES

Important school dates to remember:

TarraWarra Museum of Art – Friday 20th August

Celebrating Book week – Friday 27th August

Grade 3/4 swimming program – Monday August 23rd – Friday August 27th

Grade 1/2 swimming program – Monday 30th August – September 3rd

Prep swimming program – Monday September 6th – Friday September 10th

Grade 5/6 Aussie sports expo – Postponed until Term 3 or 4 (Date to be confirmed)

Grade 5/6 Ski trip – Postponed until further notice

Hello Everyone,

It has been so lovely to see all of our students in the art room this week. We have been busy creating and making with a range of materials from glazing clay to painting and collage.

The preps have just begun a new unit looking at the Illustrator Eric Carle. Inspired by his book Mister Seahorse students explored Eric’s paper making techniques and created a background for their artwork. This coming week they will decorate their paper ready to collage.

Our Grade 1/2 cohort have been looking at Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and practicing some greetings in Spanish. They looked at his drawing ‘Le Coq’ and did a guided drawing of a rooster. Next class they will explore the art elements of line and colour to add details to their drawing using oil pastel.

In grade 3/4 this week, students glazed their flower bowls ready to go back into the kiln. The kiln is on and the students will be able to take their masterpieces home next week. They learnt how to apply the glaze and how to create vibrancy by doing two coats.

The grade 5/6 students have finally finished their self-portraits and they look amazing! There were so many different techniques involved from collage through to detailed painting and our students have mastered them all! I’ve put some of the artwork in the attached gallery for you to enjoy.

Have a great weekend.

Vanessa Imberger

Art Teacher

We finally  made 100! The Preps were so excited to have had 100 days of learning and we celebrated on Friday with all things 100! Thanks to Tara who helped the preps create their 100 tshirts, they were amazing!

This week we have been stretching out our sounds and writing lots of ‘silly’ rhyming sentences. Our Smart spelling sentence this week is ‘I like her hands’. It is wonderful to see our preps finger spelling and building up a bank of high frequency words to use in their reading and writing.

We have been exploring hundreds charts and tens frames to help us with our problem solving in maths.

We enjoyed some ball games with our grade 5 Buddies on Tuesday. Tunnel ball was lots of fun!

Thanks for another great week,

The Prep Team

We were thrilled to be together at school for a whole week of learning! We have our fingers crossed that it will remain this way from now on!!

This week in Year 1/2, we have been learning about the letter ‘y’ and how it can make the /I/ sound as in try, butterfly or apply. We have also been learning about the ‘Author’s Purpose’ in Reading (e.g. to entertain, inform or persuade), and practising our skills of ‘Reading to Someone’ – take a look at our photos! We now know that ‘Reading to Someone’ involves putting the book in the middle so we can both see, choosing a good learning partner, offering ‘coaching or time’ when our partner is stuck or needs our help, and providing feedback that may help our partner to improve their reading. In Writing, we have begun a unit on Persuasive Writing. We had a lot of fun presenting our own opinions on a variety of topics. Students even tried to persuade their teachers to get a class pet but I’m not sure we were convinced… YET! In Maths, we have been moved on from Time, and into Multiplication (groups of).

Next week, we look forward to learning about Summarising in Reading and continuing our own written persuasive piece, and work on multiplication. We are particularly interested in our Inquiry Unit about ‘Power’ this term, that helps us to think about gender equality and fairness. We are practising our skills of thinking about others’ feelings and how our actions can affect others.

We look forward to another fun week in 1/2 Land next week! We wish our families a wonderful and safe weekend!

This week in Grade 3/4 we have been learning about what a fraction is and how to represent a fraction. We have also learned about how to place fractions on a number-line. The students have been representing fractions as portions of shapes, exploring the concept of equal parts or portions and what a numerator and denominator is. We have been using the reminder that “D starts the word DOWN and D starts the word DENOMINATOR.” The denominator tells us the total number that the whole is broken down into and the numerator tells us how many out of the total we are focusing on.

We have also been thinking about re-reading as a strategy to build fluency as when we re-read we build to a point where we can feel confident that we know what language and ideas are coming. We are also exploring the concept of making inferences, by combining text clues with our schema of the world and gaining greater insight into what the author is trying to tell us.

In Writing, we have been working on our word choice in developing our personal narratives, and how the words we choose can help the reader to create a picture in their minds. This is proving to be a fun challenge for our level.

Hello to all our fantastic families!

It’s been a busy week for our Grade Five and Six students in the classroom.

In reading, we have been delving more deeply into texts by identifying the events and occurrences that form the plot, then using our pre-existing knowledge to infer the themes of different stories. Additionally, we have started examining characters and their impact on the story from our perspective as readers.

In writing, students have been continuing to focus on building up our skills and confidence in improving our writing through focusing on verbs and adverbial phrases, and examining how utilising and improving these sharpens our writing and improves the experience for our audience.

For maths, we have been continuing with our PONT groups to provide students the support they need as they work on developing strategies to improve their understanding and confidence in using addition to solve challenging equations.

Finally, as part of our Respectful Relationships and Resilience studies, students have engaged in some deep level discussions around the changes that occur during puberty, and the different experiences of each gender. As part of our focus, we’ve examined negative gender based comments that students have either heard or experienced, and formulated ideas for how to create change in our classroom to become more cognisant and supportive of one another.

Great job to all our students on their efforts throughout the week, we hope you all have some time to relax and recharge during the weekend.

Regards

The Grade Five/Six Teaching Team