Nerae Preece Principal

From the Principal

A big thank you to all of our families for accommodating our pupil free day last Friday. As some of you may have been aware we were doing Berry Street Training. For those of you in the mental health field, you may be aware of Berry Street and the work that they do with schools to help educators understand trauma and how it affects our students. The statistics are really eye opening. Within our classrooms at least 2/3 of our students have experienced at least 1 traumatic incident and within that group 1/3 have had multiple experiences of trauma. One of my big takeaways was that trauma isn’t the event, it is the way a person handles it afterwards. How do you cope after a major event?

This is where resilience is really important. In my 20 years in education I have encountered parents that remove every obstacle out of their child’s way. It comes from a place of love and protection. It actually does more harm than good, as our children end up being exposed to situations that are stressful they haven’t developed a way to manage the feelings in their bodies that are stress related.

So how do we help as parents? As hard as it is, you need to help them through the stress, not move it out the way. You can do this by helping them develop the words for how they are feeling, “Name it to tame it” (Dan Siegel). Being able to simply help a child with the language that relates to their feelings can really help to regulate their brains and therefore their bodies. Most importantly, listen, be silent and give them space to talk. It is amazing what kids will share if you give them space. Another really good strategy is to teach them ways to be mindful and present (not thinking about things that happened in the past and in the things that will happen in future). Breathing exercises are a really great way to bring yourself back into the moment.

There are so many things that we learned. I wish that everyone had the opportunity to come along and learn. Our next Berry Street day is in August, which will be another Pupil Free Day. More details will be available later in the term.

Brekky Club

We have to give a big thank you to Ian Armour, Emma Ryan and Nicole McKern for getting Brekky Club started again on Fridays. It starts from 8:30 and finishes up ready for calm start at 8:50. We welcome families to come along as well to have a chat. It is such a nice way to start a Friday.

Prep – Grade 2 Photo trail

Today our students in the younger years were able to make their way by bus to the Maroondah Dam for their Photo trail Day. This day is full of fun activities and a great experience for our kids to have an active day of learning. A big thank you to our educators and parents who were able to help out on the day. Days like these work well when we have volunteers joining us to make the day great. Thank you. A gentle reminder, that if you wish to become a volunteer, please get your working with children’s check from here.

Assembly

Next Thursday the 19^th of May will be our first assembly for the term. This assembly will showcase music and learning awards. We are very excited because Mrs Miller was able to get more books for our values awards. If you already have an award this year, we will make sure you get your book gift from us before the end of the term. Assembly will start just after 2:30 and finish up at around 3:30. We look forward to seeing you there.

Voting Centre

On the 21^st of May (Election Day) our school has offered to be a polling station/voting centre. So if you notice lots of people around the durn durn space you know that is what is happening.

Margot Bagnall Workshop

We are so excited to have local artist Margot Bagnall sharing her knowledge in a workshop on Sunday the 22^nd of May from 12:00-2:30. Bookings are essential (20 places only, payment guarantees spot), you can ring Brogan at the office to organise this or email your interest to badger.creek.ps@education.vic.gov.au. Tickets are $80 and include a grazing table and you get to walk away with your own Margot Bagnall inspired artwork.

Education Week Open Night

On Wednesday the 25^th of May we have our Open Night for Education Week. We hope you can come along and see all the wonderful learning your children have been up to. The event starts at 3:30 and finishes at 6:30. We encourage you to invite family and friends. Afternoon tea will be provided and there will be lots of music to listen to and activities to do. We look forward to sharing how we do things a little bit differently at Badger.

That’s enough for this week! There are so many great things going on to look forward to!

Have a great weekend.

Nerae Preece

Principal

IMPORTANT SCHOOL DATES

Important school dates to remember:

19/5 – School assembly – 2.30pm

25/5 – School open afternoon – 3.30-6.30pm

3/6 – Student Free Day (Triangulation/moderation day)

6/6 – 10/6 – Grade 1 / 2 Swimming

Parent workshop

The first week of our parent workshop has been completed.

Parents are more than welcome to still come and join

MUSIC NEWS

Greetings to our wonderful families,

Badger Creek Primary School will be holding a Prep expo and Open Afternoon on Wednesday 25th May from 3.30 -6.30pm. As part of this evening, we will be presenting musical performances at 5pm. The program will be approximately 30 minutes as follows:

Grade 3/4 students: The Wellerman
Nancy Mulligan Band
Individual instrumental performances TBA
School Choir (3 Songs)

I am delighted to invite the all School Choir Members and any grade 3/4 students who would like to attend and take part in a performance of The Wellerman. The performances will be held outside the canteen, weather permitting. Students should be in full school uniform please.

There will be a notice coming through on Compass. Please read this and respond when it arrives.

Have a great week,

Jenny Legg

Music Teacher

This week in Art…

This week in art our students have begun work on a range of painting projects.

Our preps have learnt about the artist Paul Klee and his catchy saying ‘a drawing is simply taking a line for a walk’. They have used ink and watercolour paints in both warm and cool colours to create an abstract work inspired by Klee’s style.

The grade 1/2 cohort have been exploring the work of Australian artist Pete Cromer. They have been painting papers and collaging their chosen animals. I can’t wait to show you their final pieces.

Students in 3/4 began working on their backgrounds for their paintings in the negative. This style of painting is inspired by Western Australian artist Sarah Robey. They focused on analogous colours (colours that sit next to each other on the colour wheel) and positive and negative space in compositions.

Our grade 5/6 students have finally finished their underwater printmaking artworks. It has been a mission, but they are so proud of the outcome. I’ll have these displayed in the art room later next week if you’d like to pop in and take a look.

Enjoy a wonderful week!

Vanessa Imberger

Art Teacher

This week in Prep…

What a wonderful week 3 we have had in Prep.

This week has been filled with so many amazing experiences. We’re pretty sure the most exciting of all, was the time spent with Pickle at school!

The Preps worked extremely hard to earn enough pom poms for the ‘Pickle reward’ from our classroom jar, by showing so many school values.

What a great team effort this was. We love sharing in on the excitement when our friends reach true leader.

We’re sure you’ve heard all about Pickle’s day at school by now… He loved posing for the Prep’s ‘Pickle Portraits’ and was very honest during their interview.

“Pickle, why are your ears so long and soft?”

“Pickle, what colour are your eyes?”

…were just a couple of the great questions formulated by the Preps. Along with many observations about his short legs and long body.

In Maths, we have been skip counting by 10s. The Preps have absolutely mastered this skill – you might like to ask your little one to showcase this mastery to you.

Across literacy, we have explored vowels and the different sounds they make.

We have flown through another writing cycle. It’s wonderful to see our sentences come to life over the week, after brainstorming key words and strengthening our sentences through the revise and edit process.

Thank you Preps for bringing your very best selves to the photo trail excursion today. What a successful day it was! We hope you have a big sleep in tomorrow- you deserve it!

That’s all from us this week!

Thank you for your continued support and kindness across our Prep community.

Love Mrs. C & Ms H

This week in Grade 3 / 4…

It has been particularly busy in the grade 3/4 area with students in grade 3 participating in NAPLAN. We are so proud of the resilience and effort our kids have shown.

We are looking at how readers use background knowledge (schema) as well as clues from text and illustrations to infer meaning. We know author’s leave out details and we as readers need to fill in the missing gaps to better understand texts. We had fun looking at items and thinking who they might belong to or where they might have come from? Students continue to work on building their independent reading and working toward achieving their individual learning goals.

We have also been exploring measurement this week, in particular length and capacity. We used formal measurement including millimetres, centimetres and metres to accurately measure length, width and height. On Monday we took our learning to the old 1/2 corridor. This did come with the disclaimer, ‘DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME’.

This week in Grade 5 / 6…

This week in the 5/6 Team we saw the Grade 5s complete NAPLAN for the first time and we are all very impressed with their efforts and willingness to give it a go and apply their best efforts.

In Literacy we improved our reading comprehension through applying various strategies like visualising, making connections, recalling facts and details, and identifying the author’s purpose. We also created our own fractured fairy-tale where students were changing up a fairy-tale they know to create their own masterpiece.

In Numeracy we continued shape and started making a Geometric City that the class can put together and have on display. We have seen so many amazing designs which will make our amazing cities look fantastic when put together.

Across our other units:

For Auslan, Michelle helped us understand emotions and how to express who we barrack for in AFL which brings out some of our finest emotions at times.
We learnt about tectonic plates and the earths different layers where we put together tectonic plate puzzle.

We are incredibly proud of the learning the 5/6 students have accomplished this week and they should be too.

Healesville Men’s Shed

A report from Kara Chater on 3/4 students first visit to the Badger Creek Men’s Shed. “The first session went so well. The students were so polite and engaged. My highlight was hearing the kids praise each other on their work.”

Thank you so much to Kara for volunteering and making this wonderful opportunity happen for our kids!

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