Nerae Preece Principal

From the Principal

Today is officially half way through the term. That is probably good for a winter term, which always has short daylight hours. As we reach this point in the year you can feel spring is coming. If you get a chance to look at the Wurundjeri Seasons, we are in Guling season, which is where we see the wattle blooming and the orchids come out. There is something reassuring when the wattle comes out. It reminds you that warmer days are coming. What do you notice about the environment during Guling?

Family Pride afternoon

A big thank you to all of the families who were able to help at the Family Pride Afternoon. It was amazing to have so many people to help us clear out our classrooms. Like moving a house, there seemed to be a lot of things that we have accumulated as a school over the last 30 years. Many of the things have a new home, and we were able to dispose of the items we no longer need. We will be having another Pride afternoon in a few weeks to sort through the library and admin building so if you were not able to get to this Pride day you can come to our next one, Friday the 9^th of September, from 2:30-5:00pm

The Capital works build

We can announce finally that we are a few weeks away from our build starting. We have had a few trades people come through the school to plan and solve problems, like how can we keep the power on for 3 buildings when we have to disconnect the main switchboard? How much pathway do we leave for people to access? How do we make a new driveway near a roundabout, for services to access? Oh so many things for the builders CIRCON to think about.

Are you keen to have a look at the plan? I will place it on my window of my office for you to have a look at. It has been such a great process to have students, families, school council and our teachers involved in this design process, it is a building that brings everyone together, and helps us push forward into new learning spaces.

In the next few weeks you may notice some access points changing but we will keep you up to date as they come closer. In the meantime, a new accessible toilet is being built in the balit space and a new data room built in the durn durn space. When these things are complete the project can start in gusto!

Attendance and family holidays

Just a gentle reminder about taking family holidays. We have noticed a few families have taken holidays without notifying us. As you can imagine it creates worry for us, and we start to put our wellbeing checks into place to ensure the student is safe, only to discover that they are on holiday.

The Department of Education would prefer students are at school during term, however if you are in a position where it is not possible to travel at an alternative time, you can follow this procedure.

Email me to “request” that your child/ren will be absent. You can let me know the dates. Email badger.creek.ps@education.vic.gov.au
Brogan will then pop the dates into Compass so you don’t get a message everyday of your holiday asking why your child is absent.
Email the teacher to ask if there are any tasks that need to be completed over your holiday, or if there is any catch up.
Enjoy your holiday.

We thank you in advance for your support in following this process.

School refusal

Over the years I have popped information in my articles to talk about school refusal. It is a very real thing that can be exhausting as a parent. Please know that you don’t have to go through this alone. There are people out there to help.

If school refusal from your child is becoming a problem in your household, come and talk to us. Emma, Edwina and myself are available to listen and support where we can. If we need to reach out to other supports we can help you access these. It is not a problem you need to face alone, and often when you share the problem, we discover that in most cases we can solve it together.

So please reach out if you need some support in helping your child. We will be more than happy to help.

That’s about it for this week. Have a terrific weekend and we will see you all again in week 6!

Cheers

Nerae Preece

IMPORTANT SCHOOL DATES

Important school dates to remember:

Winter Sports Round Robin – TBC

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…

This week in Art…

Grade 5/6 Steampunk Exhibition

During the last five weeks, our grade 5/6 cohort have been busily constructing their Steampunk sculptures. They have put the final touches on their art and would love for you to come and see all their hard work.

On Friday 19th August after assembly, the art room will be open for families to view our grade5/6 Steampunk sculptures.

We’d love for you to celebrate their work.

Warm Regards

Vanessa Imberger

Art

This week in Grade Prep…

It is hard to believe that we are now halfway through Term 3. It was lovely to catch up with so many families during our 3-way conferences, celebrating the learning and just how amazing the Preps are!

This week has been full of wonderful learning moments that have seen us, the incredibly proud Prep Teachers, say “wow”.

In Maths, we used our friends of ten strategy to introduce us to addition and subtraction. We created our own friends of ten hands to use as a support. We were able to use our friends of 10 hands to model our thinking when working out addition and subtraction number stories.

In Reading, we had a focus on identifying the author’s purpose. We discussed that an author’s purpose can be to entertain, to inform or to persuade. To support our learning, we provided the children with examples and discussed the clues that lead us to believe what the author’s purpose was. This week, we focussed mainly on the purpose being to persuade. We carried this focus into our writing space.

In Writing, we had our first ever go at writing a persuasive piece. Our picture prompt allowed us to choose from four popular destinations, The Healesville Sanctuary, the Beach, the MCG or Luna Park. Once we had picked our desired destination, we thought about the words that we are using, making sure that we were using ‘wow’ words to help persuade our readers as to why they should visit our chosen place. When planning for our writing, we also used our senses to explore various aspects of each location to extend our vocabulary.

Mrs. C and Miss H know what they will be doing on the weekend now after reading some persuasive writing pieces…

“You must go to the MCG to see the footy!! The crowd cheer loud and you can eat a hotdog”

“You must go to the zoo, not the small zoo but the big zoo. Why? Because there are a lot of lovely animals and cuddly koalas there. It is a lovely zoo!”

“The kids are having fun at Luna Park on the rollercoaster. You must go to Luna Park. You must go in the cart. I like Luna Park.”

In SMART Spelling, our sentence of the week was, ‘The king is going to sing all of his songs’, with our focus word being ‘king’. We looked closely at the /ng/ diagraph, discovering other words that also have the /ng/ digraph during our whole class brainstorm.

Friendly reminders:

Our Prep lost property basket is starting to explode! If your child is missing a jumper, please come and check out our lost property, located in the prep classrooms! Also, a perfect reminder to please label your child’s clothing so we can return the lost items to their owner 😊

The countdown to our Pevan and Sarah concert has officially started…66 days to go!

Have a fabulous weekend!

Love,

The Prep team 😊

This week in Grade 1 / 2…

We have been very busy in the balit space this week.

In reading we have been focusing on the skills of determining the author’s purpose and reading at an appropriate rate. It has been a pleasure to see students the students slow down their reading when it is an unfamiliar text and check in with the words they are reading. If it’s a text they are familiar with though, they jump back into third gear and read at a medium pace. Determining the author’s purpose has been a big leap for some to try and understand why a author might be writing their book. Is it to persuade, inform or entertain? They have stretched themselves to gain an understanding of this concept. The ½’s have been gearing up all week, planning a narrative that they will be reading out to the preps next week. They are very excited about this prospect. Through this task we have been honing our understanding of the writing process and coming to terms with the fact that good writers do rewrite their work to make it better. We have also spoken about audience and that some plot twists might not be entirely appropriate for a younger audience. In Maths we have been exploring how data can be collected and then represent this on a graph. This process can easily be applied to the real world and the students had a good time assessing the colour of cars that have been chosen by the teachers at their school.

We missed Inquiry this week as we had our wonderful 3-way interviews. Thank you so much for taking the time to come and meet with us. It is important to have those conversations and celebrate the student’s goals and their achievements that have transpired.

We are very excited to begin getting ready for our Grade 2 Sleepover. More details about this are still to come on Compass, but in the meantime, you can set aside the 8^th of September for your child to be staying overnight at school.

This week in Grade 3 / 4…

What a fantastic week we’ve had in 3/4! It was great to catch up with so many families and celebrate our students’ phenomenal achievements and current learning goals during Wednesday’s 3-Way Conferences. If you haven’t managed to catch your child’s teacher yet, please get in touch; we’d be delighted to make a time.

This week in reading we have been continuing our unit on analysing author’s craft, with a focus on the words writers choose to use to have maximum impact on their audience, and identifying the theme of a book – the lesson that an author wants their reader to learn from reading their text.

Writing sessions have investigated poetry, with students trying their hand at quinzaine, alliteration and verb poems, before choosing their favourite from the unit for a published piece to be included in our 3/4 poetry book. We look forward to sharing the results with you all in the near future.

Our maths classes have explored fractions, with our introductory lesson proving to be particularly thought provoking for students. Three tables were set-up in the classroom, one with a single cake, another with two and the last with three cakes. One-at-a-time, students entered the classroom and were challenged to sit at the table where they thought they would get the largest amount of cake. Once all students had chosen a table to sit at, the cakes were divided into portions and expressed as fractions to determine the table where students got the largest piece. Luckily, the cakes weren’t real, as some students would have ended up eating a little too much cake…

Well done 3/4s, we can’t wait for the week ahead and we wish our Hoop Time representatives all the best for Tuesday when they proudly represent our school.

This week in Grade 5 / 6…

The beginning of the week saw our students acknowledge the wattle bloom, signifying the arrival of Guling Orchid Season in the Wurundjeri calendar, and a particularly significant observation for our local community. This time of year also brings more afternoon sun-showers and rainbows. If we have sunshine and rain around 3:30pm, look east back towards Badger Weir. You might be lucky!

Back in the classroom, early in the week, we undertook a Whole School Reading Assessment Task and – wowzers! – were we impressed! It was evident from the quality of their work, that students have really tuned in to our exploration around deep connections and providing robust, brave responses to prompts to share their best thinking. Well done, legends! We look forward to moderating these pieces and sharing feedback with them to highlights progress and goals.

This week also saw us transition into poetry. In reading, the Grade 5/6 classes have been analysing, inferring, visualising, questioning and making connections. We read the first few stanzas of a well known poem by Edgar Allen Poe about a rapping, tapping, tormenting raven – do you know the one? We also noticed the comparing/contrasting/connecting language within diamante poems, then applied this knowledge to create our own. Reviewing parts of speech – nouns, verbs and adjectives – was critical to our success. Do you remember which is what? We welcome poems created around the dinner table to find their way back to class!

In maths, we continue our mastery of multiplication. Students have chosen their own learning journey is this space, determined to reach their learning goals. Across the rooms, we are delving into factors, multiples, products and strategies. We’ve been looking at equations, vertical algorithms, the array and lattice strategies, as well as developing an understanding of why multiplying a factor by a decimal less than zero results in a smaller product. Some of us will be looking at prime factorisation and index notation. What a journey!

We are also steaming ahead with our Caine’s Arcade project in Inquiry. Now, in their groups, students have selected their arcade game and identified the vital skills necessary for a successful project for the rubric. We will move into the design and construction stage. There will be a lot of respectful communication, compromise, problem-solving and persistence, but we know we’ll rise to the challenge. If you have any large boxes, please bring them in to school!

Until next week!