Nerae Preece Principal

From the Principal

A few years ago I read The Resilience Project by Hugh van Cuylenburg. It really resonated with me (as some of you would know I love a good self-help book, especially those that are evidence based). Hugh talks about 3 predictors that help with resilience, gratitude, empathy and mindfulness. When these are a part of your daily life, it provides perspective, which helps you through the rough times. Today I wanted to share the things that we do at school to support this in our wellbeing work. We have worked for many years to refine this at Badger, and our teachers work so hard to ensure that our students are practicing these as often as possible….

Gratitude

At school

Some of you may have heard about our Classroom Meetings. These meetings are a great way to hear what students have to say. The meetings are based around deBono’s Thinking Hats, and one of my favourite hats is the white hat, this hat provides students to show gratitude to other students in the class for things they may have done. Listening to children appreciate others is really heart warming.

At home

At the end of our day we ask just before bed “What are you grateful for?” It’s a simple way to end the day on a positive note. On a personal note, I have a gratitude buddy, every morning my friend Sue and I message each other to share 3 things we are grateful for. We have been doing this for nearly 5 years!!! I look forward to that message everyday.

Empathy

At school

One of our really important parts of learning is around Restorative Practices. This approach to solving conflict and disagreement is evidence based, and when it works well, really strengthens relationships. They take a bit of time, but really help children develop empathy. It is based around asking the people involved in the conflict…

What happened?

How did that make you feel?

How do you think it made the other person feel?

How do you think we could solve the problem?

We often use the term to students who have hurt others that they need to take responsibility to “fix” things, because that person needs to feel safe and respected.

At home

One thing I am always trying to get better at is listening. When I listen to others carefully I start to see their point of view. I am a bit of a blurter, so one strategy I do when I start interrupting others is put my hand over my mouth to remind me to let the other person share their ideas. I get strange looks, but that’s okay because it is helping me listen with empathy.

Mindfulness

At school

Some of you may have heard about “Calm Start”. This is the time from 8:45am until 9am where the classroom doors are open for our students to come in and do mindfulness activities to help their day start calmly. This has many benefits to the classroom. It gives teachers time to check in with students to see how their day is going, it also means that goals can be set, and students can start to calm their bodies so they are ready for learning.

At home

This is something I find really difficult as there is so many things going on in my brain, but some ways that help my brain relax are by going for a walk in the bush, trying to count to 50 without thinking a thought (I’ve got to 11!!! And I can only do it when I count my breaths), crafting also helps me move into what some people call the flow state, at the moment I have been doing paint by numbers. I didn’t realise how relaxing it is.

At the moment our resilience is being tested. There is a level of fatigue sweeping over us. It is hard to keep getting up. With these practices that we bring into our students lives every week we hope that they can start to develop the resilience muscle to help them get through the tough times.

In other news, we have some new team mates joining us over the next 2 years. Sally Naylor and Michelle Turner will be working with us. They have joined us from the region to work with us on coaching our educators. Coaching teachers can often be limited by timetables, we are so excited that Sally and Michelle will be working with our teachers to help them be the best teachers they can be.

A gentle reminder that the second box of Rapid Antigen Tests are ready to be collected from the office. If you are unable to collect them, please do not hesitate to reach out to Brogan or Mel who will send them home in your child’s bag.

That’s about it for this week. I hope you have a lovely weekend and find lots of things you feel grateful for.

Stay curious, Nerae

IMPORTANT SCHOOL DATES

Important school dates to remember:

21/2 – Welcome Morning Tea

21/2 – 3 Way Interviews (Information to be available soon)

23/2 – Grade 5 / 6 kayaking

24/2 – Prep Body Safety Parent session

1/3 – Prep Body safety incursion

3/3 – 9.30am – Assembly

14/3 – Labour Day public holiday

24/3 – 9.30am – Assembly

28/3 – School curriculum Day

8/4 – 1.30pm – Assembly

8/4 – Last day of term 1 – School concludes at 2.30pm

3 Way Interviews

3 Way interviews will be held via webex on Monday 21st February.

Interview times will go live from today (Friday 11/2) and can be booked through the Compass portal.

Booking availability will be from 3:45pm – 8.30pm

If you have any issues organising a booking time, please do not hesitate to contact the office.

AROUND THE GROUNDS

MUSIC

Our first weeks of music have been a lot of fun. The grades 1-6 students are learning about Celtic folk music. We are covering Scottish and Irish music past and present, Sea Shanties and also the influence Celtic music has had on current pop and rock music.

The Grade 1/2 students are leaning some Scottish and Irish dance steps to the traditional song, Marie’s Wedding. Grade 3/4 are learning some Sea Shanties, The Wellerman and South Australia and the grade 5/6 students are leaning to play Nancy Mulligan by Ed Sheeran.

The response to this music has been really positive amongst the students. It is such a pleasure to introduce new sounds and styles of music and to see the students so open to listening and taking in different ideas.

I have included a couple of the music examples we have been listening to for your interest.

Grade Prep

So far grade prep have settled into music really well. We have been playing some musical games and listening to The Carnival of the Animals by Saint Seans. This music is so fantastic for young children with the brilliant short compositions inspired by different animals. We had a bunch of roaring lions last week, Next week, chickens!

Have a great week

Jenny Legg

Music Teacher

YAE Project – Youth Art Exhibition

Last year YAVA gallery invited some of our Badger Creek Primary School students to create an artwork as part of the YAE Project – Youth Art Exhibition. Seven Primary and Secondary Schools in the Yarra Valley participated in the project with over 70 students submitting artworks.

A panel of judges were chosen to award prizes to the participants and to my delight, two of our Badger Creek Primary School students were recognised for their excellence. Last week they were presented with their awards at an event held at YAVA Gallery. Congratulations Isla and Eden.

Isla Larkin-Flood from Grade 2 was awarded the Founder’s award for her artwork as well as receiving the Canson Awards – Highly Commended.

Eden Freer from Grade 1 won second place in the Canson Awards – Primary School category.

This week in Art…

The art room has been bustling with excitement and energy as our classes return for a new year of creativity and exploration. We are focusing on printmaking this term, with each year level exploring different printmaking techniques.

Grade 5/6 are looking at relief printing using foam. Inspired by contemporary artist/illustrator Emma Lees, students have drawn a range of fish or underwater creatures with a focus on the art elements line and pattern. They will transfer these drawings onto foam and print them in the coming weeks.

The 3/4 cohort have been making their own printed papers using a variety of printmaking techniques including stamping, stencilling and relief printing. They are using artist Clare Youngs as inspiration and focussing on repetition, pattern and layering. They will use these papers to make an animal collage.

Our 1/2 students learnt how to make a monoprint this week. With a focus on line and pattern, students created 5 different prints in a range of colours that they will use as a background for their artwork.

Finally, our wonderful preps have been experimenting with mark-making using a range of printmaking tools. Their focus has been creating textured papers that they will use in a collaborative artwork inspired by Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers.

This week in P.E…

Dear Badger Creek Community

It’s been fantastic to see all our students return in the last few weeks in their PE sessions.

A quick reminder, all students need to ensure that they bring their hat and wear appropriate footwear for active movement on their scheduled PE lesson days.

3-6 District Swimming carnival.

ON Friday 18^th February, approx. 18 of our grades 3-6 students will be participating in the District Swimming Carnival at Healesville outdoor pools. We are so proud of them already for putting their hand up to compete against other schools.

A big thank you to Ms Emma Griffiths who will be attending the event to support our students.

5.6 Kayaking

Next Wednesday 23^rd February, some of the 5.6 students will be venturing down to Lilydale Lake to participate in an engaging Kayaking session. A very exciting opportunity that our district offers all interested 5.6 students each year. Stay tuned for some action photos from our district events!

Mr David Pitts

This week in Prep…

The Preps have officially counted 12 days of Prep. Although after watching this group of learners in the classroom, you’d think they’ve had 12 weeks of school!

Across Literacy, we have been doing all things reading, spotting sounds, spelling, writing, counting syllables and brainstorming words with a specific first sound in mind.

We were pretty proud of the n..n..name n..n..necklaces we made when learning about the letter /n/.

Our word of the week was ant. We practised learning this word within the sentence, That ant had a hat.

By the time we finished marching like ants, breaking down and investigating the different sounds in the word and building the word back together again, we were feeling like real ‘ant experts!’

In Numeracy, we have been counting, matching numbers to quantities and monitoring our 1:1 correspondence when counting groups of objects, as we continue to build our number sense. What does this look like? Basically lots of game-based number games! Such as memory match, bingo, hopscotch, counting while balancing beanbags and colouring- just to name a few. (Oh and lots of counting with our favourite friends, Pevan and Sarah!)

Some other amazing learning opportunities we experienced this week include crafting with our buddies and borrowing from the school library.

A big thank you from the prep team to the community for helping make our first few weeks at school beyond successful. We’re feeling extremely grateful for the school/home partnerships that have already been established.

To say we’ve all earnt a restful weekend would be a bit of an understatement. Wishing everyone a calm and kind weekend.

A few final reminders from us:

-Next week will be the final Wednesday the Preps have off.

-Body Safe Program will take place in school on the 1^st of March while the parent information session will be online on the 24^th of February

–The school nurse will begin visiting as of the 25^th of February. We kindly ask that all forms are returned before this date.

-Please return blue communication folders to our classroom tub on Mondays only. Everyone is welcome to change their take home books during the week as required (see green tubs at classroom entrance) However, we will check the children’s learning folders each Monday.

Thank you for your help in setting this routine up.

-Please check your child’s learning folder weekly as we will be consistently updating learning resources which target concepts explored at school and which are differentiated to your child’s needs.

This week in Grade 1 / 2…

Dear Families,

What an amazing week of learning we have had this week. The students have been working hard to establish their learning routines and to think about what ‘Zone’ they are in for their learning.

Thank you to everyone for bringing your ‘Take Home Reading Satchels’ on Monday. It was fabulous to see the reading you have been doing at home in the reading diaries.

This week in Reading, we have focused on comprehension and accuracy, with the strategies of ‘Check for Understanding’ and ‘Cross Check’.

For Writing, we have been using our Writer’s Notebooks to gather information, planned, drafted, edited and revised, then published a piece of writing that was inspired by a special artefact from home.

In Maths, we’ve been exploring collecting data and representing the data on a graph. The students were challenged to create their own graphs in their books. There was a strong focus on accuracy and being able to discuss what their graphs show.

In Inquiry, we are continuing a unit of work on ‘History’. The students learnt about Coranderrk, William Barak, Simon Wonga and discovered some Woiwurrung names for some local Australian animals.

The 1/2 team wish everyone a safe and happy weekend! We are ooking forward to seeing you all on WebEx on Monday evening for the 3 way conferences.

This week in Grade 3 / 4…

As Week 3 draws to a close we can safely say that the 3/4 classes have settled into their routines and are digging into learning.

Reading sessions are in full swing as the children read both independently and with a partner to explore the topic of Making Text-to-Self Connections. This is where students connect their own knowledge and experiences to what they read in a text, which helps them to gain a deeper understanding.

Talk to any writer and they will tell you that an idea can be found anywhere, if you only know how to look for it! This has been our focus for this week, as we have looked at generating ideas from a range of sources. Writer’s notebooks have been personalised and the children have now made several entries as they learn to collect writing “seeds” and sprout these into extended writing pieces.

Maths sessions have seen the introduction of regular number talks to the classroom. These are brief open-ended tasks where students brain-dump all the facts in their head relating to a particular number, before sharing their ideas with the class on the whiteboard. Through these tasks children have made links to a range of mathematical areas including the four operations, fractions, time, money and decimals.

We have also begun reading our key Inquiry text for this term – Young Dark Emu. We are seeking to offer students a different version of Australia’s history before the arrival of Europeans to that which we teachers encountered when we were in primary school. This text is already provoking some interesting discussions and we can’t wait to see where this unit takes their learning.

Congratulations on a fabulous week, kiddos!!

Thanks,

Kat, David & Andy

This week in Grade 5 / 6…

Another busy week in 5/6!

We have continued to build rigour in our learning and focus on exhibiting our school values.

In literacy, we have been checking our understanding of texts as we read, and tracking our thinking, focusing on interesting words, characters, wonderings or questions and connections. In writing, we have been building our writer’s notebook, collecting ideas using our senses, images from magazines and more artefacts.

In numeracy we have explored the concept of time, shared our knowledge of clocks, connecting modern day and ancient calendars, and discussed how “soon” and “in a minute” can take an awfully long time.

In Grade 6 Leadership we are planning on how to be most effective in our roles, while the Grade 5’s have been working on current events.

We have continued to build our capacity to work together in shared spaces in the classroom and out in the yard.