Nerae Preece Principal

From the Principal

Welcome back to this space, it’s the end of week 2, and it’s been a great start to the term, with lots of amazing learning happening across the school.

In the background over the past few months, a few amazing people have been organising some great initiatives to support our students and their families at school.

As I have mentioned previously in another newsletter, Kara Chater and Edwina Whiteside have been building a connection with the Men’s Shed in Badger Creek, already we have had a number of students in ¾ engage with a weekly program designed to help our students discover new hands on approaches to learning. We have been able to create a one day event this term for our 5/6 students which was highly successful as well.

We have been so privileged to have an abundance of new mentors offer support to students at our school. These volunteers offer an hour a week of their time to provide invaluable 1-1 time for the students they are buddied with. Sometimes they help with learning, sometimes they are a person who is able to listen. A big shout out to Joel and Jen from Liberty Church for helping us find these marvellous people. Are you interested in being a mentor to a child at Badger Creek PS? Get your working with children check and reach out to Edwina Whiteside who will help you get started.

Gwen Shand is back for term 3 and is busily supporting our students in grades 3-6 in areas of resilience. This term from 9-10 on a Friday she offers parent support. An hour where you can come in and ask those burning questions about your child and their behaviour. Come to the staff room and grab a tea or coffee and ask away. As previously mentioned Gwen is a counsellor and teacher who is a published writer (her books are great!), make sure, if you can, you pop in, she will be more than happy to listen and share some strategies with you.

Of course one of the best groups in the school is our PFA. The team have been organising regular fun events for our students, yesterday was no different with our Crazy Hair Day and Burger and Brownie Special Lunch. A lot of work goes into creating these fun days, and it’s wonderful that these days are great for making memories for our kids who have missed out on so many fun things over the past 2 years. I want to personally thank Michelle, Kylie and Racheal for their hard work this year to make these memories happen. Remember if you’re keen to help out have a chat to Michelle, Kylie or Racheal, they would love some new people to come and join them.

Assembly next Friday

Just a little reminder that next Friday the 29^th of July, from 2:45-3:30 we will be having our first assembly for the term (dry weather will be under our new shade sail, wet weather will be on webex). We will keep you posted closer to the date. More dates for the term will be sent home soon in a calendar to pop on your fridge.

That’s about it for this week. Have a great weekend.

Nerae Preece

IMPORTANT SCHOOL DATES

Important school dates to remember:

26/7 – Winter Sports Round Robin

29/7 – School Assembly 2.45pm

11/8 – Jeans for Genes Day & Special Lunch

19/8 – School Assembly

19/8 – School dental forms to be returned

24/8 – Healesville High School of Rock performance – Grade 5 / 6 Students

26/8 – School curriculum Day

29/8 – Colour Fun Run & Special Lunch Day

2/9 – Expo Tabloid Sports – Grade 3 / 4 Students & Father’s Day raffle

5/9 – 9/9 – Prep Swimming

7/9 – Downball Championships

9/9 – Women’s Health Morning Tea

9/9 – Athletics Techno Challenge – Selected students

12/9 – Physical Maths Challenge – Grade 5 / 6 Students

14/9 – Footy Colours Day & Special Lunch

16/9 – School Assembly & Last day of term 3 – 2.30pm Finish

PFA…

The Badger Creek PFA would like to say a very big thank to Jan Murdoch for helping make the brownies for the special lunch.

We would also like to say a big thank you to Kaisey Hart for helping organise all the ingredients for the special lunch.

We hope you all enjoyed your cheeseburgers & brownies!

From Badger Creek Primary PFA

School Representative Council…

Congratulations to the members of the School Representative Council for running a fantastic event last Friday afternoon to celebrate NAIDOC Week. The SRC taught us how to play traditional First Nations games such as munhanganing, wana, kai and koolchee. Lots of smiles and laughter were shared by all as we had fun playing the games.

This week in Grade Prep…

How is it the end of week 2 already!? We have said this before, but time definitely flies when you are having fun, and what fun we have had this week in the land of Prep!

We continued to link Inquiry with Writing this week, with our writing prompt being the Indigenous seasons. We continued with our predictable writing structure to ensure success among the students, and we definitely witnessed it! Our picture prompt evoked valuable wonderings and thoughtful conversations to support our writing. Letter formation was an area of focus within our success criteria, ensuring that we used available supports to help us to correctly form letters.

Our SMART Spelling sentence was ‘The vet will see your pet’ with ‘vet’ being our focus word. We were proud to see how many children returned their communication folders this week, changing over their readers and SMART spelling words.

In Reading, we were learning to summarise the main points of a story. We read the familiar fairy tales, ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’, and ‘The Gingerbread man’. In small groups, we then discussed the story, including the main points and as one of the Preps told us, when we are summarising a story, we are “wrapping it up in a neat little bow”.

In Maths, we continued with our focus of the ‘teen numbers’. What success we had in this space! We discussed what makes a teen number (always has a one at the start) and that not ALL teen numbers have the word ‘teen’ inside of it! We also spoke about how our teen numbers are ten and some more… 15 is 10 + 5 more!

Crazy hair day was so much fun! We loved seeing all the crazy hair styles. Can it be crazy hair day every day!?

Next week, the Preps reach the milestone of being at school for 100 days! 100 fabulous, fun-filled days of learning, discoveries, and friendship! On Friday 29^th July, we invite the Preps to come to school dressed as a 100-year-old. We cannot wait to celebrate all the hard work and successes of our wonderful Preps! Invitations were sent home this week to some very excited Preps, soon to be 100-year old’s!

Have a great weekend,

Love the Prep team 😊

This week in Grade 1 / 2…

It’s been another great week in Grade 1/2!

Our students are working really well in the Balit Space and seem to be getting into a really nice groove in Term 3. The learning space is quiet, calm and productive and students are working beautifully together, which is so great to see.

In Reading, we have been focusing on blending, flipping and backing up and rereading strategies. Students are enjoying exploring different texts and discovering new words.

In Writing, we have been looking at nouns and verbs. Students have learned that nouns are naming words while verbs are doing words, and have been exploring different types of nouns and verbs and practising using each in sentences.

In Numeracy, our students have been focusing on skip counting the numbers 2, 3, 5 and 10 and looking at number patterns (including those that don’t begin at 0).

In Inquiry, we have been looking at geography – specifically, the geography of our local area. We started the inquiry off with looking at what makes our house a home? This week, we went on a nature walk around our school yard to see what makes our school unique. Our students observed what they could see, hear, feel and smell. We’re looking forward to delving more into our local geography and allowing students to explore what makes our local area so special.

This week in Grade 3 / 4…

It’s been another fun week in 3/4. Wednesday morning’s subzero temperatures saw sheets of ice being brought to our morning circle time after students carefully retrieved them from puddles around the school. The smiles we saw were priceless!

Now to the learning… this week we’ve been exploring figurative language, in particular neologisms and spoonerisms. Some of our favourites neologisms were noob, google, chillax, spam, whilst the most loved spoonerisms were: thanks for chewing the doors; I hit my bunny phone; you’re a smart feller. It’s been fun learning how authors can have fun with words to create comedic effect for their readers. We’ll be looking to incorporate some of this into our own writing later this term.

In Maths, we’ve spent the week looking at division. This has seen students making the connection between multiplication and division through fact families.

Inquiry is continuing to expand our minds as we investigate islands of the Pacific, including the least visited destination in the world: Tuvalu. We’ve begun discussing the potential impact of climate change on our neighbours in the Pacific, which has been a hot topic in the news given the recent Pacific Islands Forum. It has certainly been an interesting start to the geography unit we will be exploring throughout this term.