IMPORTANT SCHOOL DATES

Important school dates to remember:

Winter Sports Round Robin – TBC

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

LAKE MOUNTAIN SKI TRIP

During the week some of our students, teachers and parent helpers were lucky enough to enjoy a day of skiing at Lake Mountain.

Our students, teachers and parents started the day early with a bus ride up to the ski resort.

They all got o enjoy a full day of skiing, they enjoyed a toboggan ride and even got to have a snowball fight.

I have had inside information the weather was just ‘perfect’ for skiing as well.

We hope all who attended had the most amazing day filled with memories they can share forever.

Hello Badger Creek Families,

Can you guess why term three is my favourite in the BCPS art room? It’s because it’s a term filled with construction and modelling projects. Every year level has been busily gluing, taping, and building their three-dimensional sculptures and boy oh boy are they looking good.

Our grade 5/6 cohort are doing a unit on Steampunk. They have been using a range of found materials and cardboard boxes to create their artwork. They have almost completed the construction phase and will be moving onto painting, using a style that will imitate a metal finish.

The students in grade 3/4 are creating dog sculptures inspired by artist Sally Watts. Today they made the armature of their sculpture out of newspaper and masking tape. In the next few weeks we will be covering them in Plaster of Paris bandages and painting them. Their dog sculptures will be part of a fundraiser for a dog shelter. More details to come shortly.

Our 1/2 students are making magical masks out of egg cartons. They have looked at how other cultures have used and worn masks and have created their own masks with different qualities and powers.

The preps finished their wonderful Alexander Calder inspired sculptures this week. They used pipe cleaners and beads to make intricate shapes and structures in their artwork. It’s always a joy to hear them exclaim how much fun they’re having! What a great few weeks we have had.

Enjoy your weekend.

Vanessa Imberger

Art Teacher.

We cannot believe it is already the end of week 3! We’ve had so much fun, celebrating 100 fabulous, fun-filled days of prep!

In Writing this week, we had a very important focus – positive self-talk. We talked about the book ‘All The Ways I Can Be Smart’. We continued our predictable writing structure as the children thought about all the ways that they are smart – we heard about all the things that the Preps are great at, and they showed us just how great they are at writing too! Check out some of the wonderful sentences the preps created below:

“I like myself” 

“I am smart” 

“I am good at learning” 

“I am kind” 

Also, we focused on our letter formation again and we’ve seen such success in this area.

We didn’t have a SMART Spelling sentence this week as we stopped for some revision. Instead, we focused on our common words and got to make some chatterboxes which we added our common words onto. As always, we loved seeing how many Preps returned their communication folders so that they could swap over their readers.

In Reading, we got even more practice with summarising stories. We summarised the book ‘Colouroos’, creating our own summary wheels – each child drew an important part of the story in their own slice of the summary wheel, and all 4 parts together summarised the story perfectly! After all this practice, the children are becoming experts at summarising!

In Maths, we moved our focus to ‘before and after’ numbers and number patterns! We had lots of fun and lots of success in this space – we practiced naming numbers before and after, before moving on to looking for number patterns within our 100s chart. One of the patterns we noticed was that all numbers in the first column of our 100s chart end with a 1! For example, 1.. 11.. 21.. 31.. 41.. etc.!

Our 100-day celebration was SO MUCH FUN! We absolutely loved seeing everyone’s 100-year-old costumes – it was like a glimpse into the future! We celebrated the day by reflecting on our first 100 days, sharing in our favourite school memories so far and engaged in fun learning experiences involving all things 100!

As well as Friday being our 100-day celebration, it was also Miss V’s last day with us! Miss V has been with us on and off for a total of 10 weeks over the year and golly gosh we are going to miss her! Miss V has been such a big part of our prep journey and we have already locked in future dates for her to come and visit us! We wish Miss V all the very best for the remainder of her studies. We are already counting down the days until you come and visit us!

Friendly Reminders:

Our Pevan and Sarah concert will be here in no time! As we continue to organise numbers, please ensure permission forms and payment have been returned rather to the office or your child’s classroom. Please come and see us if there are any further questions regarding the excursion 🙂

Have a wonderful weekend,

Love the Prep Team 🙂

WEEK 3 in YEAR 1/2! 

What another exciting week in Year 1/2! We can’t believe it’s Week 3 of term already! Thank you to all the parents who helped our students create fancy hair styles last Thursday, for Crazy Hair Day! It was radical! We had colourful hair, amazing buns and twists, mohawks and my personal favourite… plats upon plats! I thought I’d gone to a circus for the day! Well done to our families and children for your creativity!

In Literacy this week, we’ve been revisiting accuracy strategies including ‘Skip the Word and Come Back’ and ‘Cross-Checking’. Here are some helpful tips to use at home:

Skip the Word and Come Back 

Cover up a word in a book and have your child read the sentence and guess what the word might be. Then, uncover the first letter of the word and help them use the first letter and other clues from the text to figure it out, e.g. context of the book or pictures. You can even get involved by asking your child to cover a word and showing what it sounds like when you try. J

Cross-Checking 

When your child comes across a word they’re unsure of, remind them to cross-check. Doing physical movements helps children remember the questions:

• Does it look right? (cross your right arm over your body to your left shoulder)
• Does it sound right? (cross your left arm over your body to your right shoulder)
• Does it make sense? (hold both arms out flat with your palms showing up)

Your child knows this sequence back-to-front so they can model it for you at home! Next week in Reading, we are focusing on ‘Back Up and Reread’.

In Writing this week, we’ve been exploring commas in lists and apostrophes. We’ve practised using commas by listing things we did on the weekend and ONLY using ‘and’ when we’re up to our last item, just like this: ‘On the weekend I went to the park, swung on a swing, went down the slide AND played with a ball. We practised using apostrophes in words such as don’t, won’t or haven’t. We used a helpful poem that reminds us ‘Hungry hungry APOSTROPHE eats the letters we don’t need!’ Next week, we’re exploring adjectives and then heading into planning our own Narrative. J

We’ve also been keeping up our Smart Spelling and using our spelling pattern of the week, in sentences. We call this ‘dictation’ but ours has a fun twist… We say sentences aloud for our children to attempt, then we award points like a star (2 points) for remembering the digraph in week (2 letters making 1 sound) or a love heart (worth 5 points) for the trigraph in their (3 letters making 1 sound). It’s super fun and is really helping to develop our Writing skills! Check out our photos for some group shots of our dictation efforts! J

In Maths, we’ve been exploring patterns in numbers, and using number lines. Check out our pictures to see our work on skip counting and number patterns. Can you figure this number pattern out? 55, 58, 62, 67, __, __, __? Next week, we’re heading into Measurement with a unit on Capacity and Mass! Fun, fun, fun!

In Inquiry this week, we’ve discussed ways we can look after our school environment. This links beautifully to our school value of ‘Pride’. Next week, we are learning about who lives in our community and exploring our differences.  

We look forward to another wonderful week, next week. Just a quick reminder to remind you child to pack their Reading Satchel to change their Take Home Reading Books, every Monday morning. J

Have a great weekend!

The Year 1/2 Team

Hello to our 3/4 student, parent and friends community.

Over that past couple of weeks students have been exploring how author’s use figurative language to engage their audience. We have had some big belly laughs exploring different types of figurative language including spoonerisms. This is when corresponding consonants, vowels, or morphemes are switched between two words in a phrase. Check out some of the student’s spoonerism posters that made us all laugh.

This week in Maths we have explored 2D and 3D shapes. Students have shown terrific prior knowledge identifying and describing regular shapes using mathematical terminology including face, vertices, edges and sides. They developed spatial skills when building 3D shapes from nets and extended themselves by drawing possible alternative nets for some regular 3D shapes.

Next week, we are beginning a writing unit on poetry. We hope to explore many different types of poetry, famous poems and poets. This would be a great opportunity to share your own love of poetry with your child or even create some poetry together.  It would be fun to publish some family co-created poetry in the upcoming newsletters.  Sharing reading and writing at home helps our student to have authentic learning opportunities outside of the classroom setting. We challenge you to give some poetry a crack!

Please remember to encourage your child to do Mathletics at home. New activities are set to align with classroom learning and help to consolidate understanding.

Have a wonderful weekend.

Kat, Andy, Dave and Julia