Principal Day

Today, Friday 5th August is Principal Day.

It is a day where we get to celebrate and recognise the contributions our Principal and Assistant Principal make to BCPS.

Ms Preece and Mrs Griffiths, we would like to thank you so much for everything you have done for our school and everything you continue to do for our school.

There is so much behind the scene work our amazing Principal and Assistant Principal do that make BCPS the amazing school it is.

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!

IMPORTANT SCHOOL DATES

Important school dates to remember:

Winter Sports Round Robin – TBC

11/8 – PJ 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

We can’t quite believe we have just completed our forth week of semester two, in Prep!

As we enter the second half of the year, we are noticing more and more that our Preps are ready to take away their training wheels and ride on smoothly ahead. For example, the sound charts in our room are being used more for letter formation rather than sounds at this point. Those sounds are pretty much instilled in our brains! How cool is that? We’re just so proud of how independent they’re all becoming.

(We’re not crying, you are…)

This week, we’ve had a ball learning about all things car related! In the true spirt of SMART Spelling, we made a strong link between our word of the week and Maths. With 3D shapes in focus and ‘car’ being our focus word- we made our very own three-dimensional cars! We followed a design process to build our cars. Initially, we drew a ‘side view’ of our ideal car. Then built each 3D shape needed to bring the design to life. What a great outcome everyone had!

On top of that, we carried our car focus into Writing, with a Lightening McQueen picture prompt. The kids were so excited to write about their favourite speedy Pixar character. So many amazing sentences describing just how fast and smokey he races! Our writers really know how to paint a picture in their readers mind.

Other than that, we’ve continued with our CAFÉ strategies in Reading- with a class focus of looking carefully at the words and letters as well as blending the sounds in each word.  We loved the way one of our learner’s described why these strategies are so important: “The pictures are not going to tell us the story, we need to read the words first and then enjoy the picture.”

A couple of kind reminders from us:

-Our lost property basket is getting full- please swing by and reclaim any lost items

-Pevan and Sarah permissions slips and payments are due. Please get in contact with us or the office if you have any issues surrounding this event.

It’s been a fantastic week in the 1/2 area this week. From filling our shoes with blocks, mapping favourite journeys to reading with gears and planning incredible stories. This week has had it all.

In Reading, we have learnt to become voracious readers and used our reading gears to read at different rates.

For Writing, we explored how adjectives describe nouns and have put on our authors caps by planning a narrative piece that we will share with the Preps next week.

Maths has been a hands on experience, learning about capacity and mass. We have been filling shoes, lunch boxes and hefting pretty much everything we could find in the classroom.

Our geography unit for inquiry had us exploring a special journey we have taken with our families in our community.

Thank you to all the students for their hard work and amazing effort they have put this

It’s been an amazing week of learning in 3/4 . All 3/4 children have shown resilience and pervasiveness in their learning when exploring angles, poetry and the choices author’s make when writing a story.

Our exploration of Poetry begun with a deep dive into reading all kinds of different poems and deciding what we like and didn’t like about each one. We explored poems from Banjo Patterson, Lewis Carol and other famous poets. Our 3/4s then created their own poems, including Diamante, Rhyming Couplets and other forms. We invite families to share their favourite poems with  your kids and celebrate them!

In our Reading unit, through poetry and other texts we explored the different choices Author’s have made in their writing, whether that’s choices around the setting, characters, the plot or the audience.  Our budding authors are then going to use these skills to develop a author’s study in anticipation of Book Week.

Our Maths unit has taken a turn……. Into Angles! We have been looking at angles when they are compared to a right angle, and have been learning that an angle is a measure of a turn. We have also been applying these skills to sports, whether that’s surfing, skateboarding or footy and basketball.

Our Reward Day has been a huge success with so many children celebrating all their hard work in learning from Term 2 and 3. Look out for more photos and stories in next weeks’ newsletter.

We’ve had a busy but wonderful beginning to our term. Our Grade 5/6 students have started ready and raring to go.

In Reading, we’ve been digging deep into making connections. We are beyond making surface level connections to texts and are now connecting the evidence from the text and our schema (prior knowledge) to a broader context. We’re asking ‘How does what I think and know about this text relate to others, the world, history or life in general? How could my connection apply to other people or situations? What other ideas can be connected here?’ – It’s big, bold, brave and broad thinking and we’ve been blown away by the responses our students are having. Students are finding power in drawing on knowledge they have gained through reading and life experiences. They are taking risks and realising that their ideas and opinions are valid, as are others’, and how many people can read the same text and have different connections, wonderings, and conclusions – and that that’s okay. We just need to be brave enough to try, be respectful and empathetic when listening to truly hear other perspectives, and be humble, flexible and wise enough to know our thoughts can change as we grow and learn. Exciting learning on so many levels.

We began the term with using non-fiction texts (fact files, profiles, atlases and even Google Earth) to explore countries and their demographics, history, culture and values. From there, we transitioned into traditional tales, folklore and fairy tales to make connections between a country’s culture and values to storytelling. We have been discussing author’s purpose, theme, moral or message, and how (and why!) stories have changed over time. This sparked some wondering ideas about right/wrong, fairness, and the historical the journey from oral storytelling, to visual, to printed text, to moving image/film – and what could possibly be next!? Our next step is to ‘marinate’ our Grade 5/6 students in poetry.

In Writing, students have been exploring non-fiction texts. Students have been finding, sorting, selecting, analysing and summarising information to create profiles on their selected countries, and building our own world maps. We’ve been using venn diagrams to present our ideas when comparing and contrasting countries. Over the last two weeks, we’ve been building our knowledge of sentence types and structures – simple, compound and complex – and writing literal and inferential sentences. Students have been using the Five Stages of Writing to create and publish a narrative which will showcase everything they know about what makes a good short story. Students have brainstormed ideas, dug a little deeper to choose the best, planned their story structure and characters, considered a beginning to ‘hook’ the reader in, remembered sentence variety, dialogue and details that ‘show, don’t tell’, and have stretched themselves with punctuation and paragraphs. We’re just finishing up our published pieces and look forward to sharing these soon!

In Maths, measurement has been the focus. We’ve reviewed what we measure, which tools are best to use and when, and which measurement units for what purpose. We’ve worked inside and outside, used rules, measuring tapes and trundle wheels to  exact our accuracy. We’ve been exploring length, area and perimeter of various spaces and shapes, and have even been applying formulas to help us. Students have been exploring how and why the formulas work, especially around triangles and parallelograms. We’re keen to find out more about pi, which is an exciting space! It’s been great seeing student connecting their knowledge of place value (x10, x100, x1000 and /10, /100, /1000) to convert between units of measurement. Nice work!

This week, we’ve been improving our understanding, fluency and accuracy in multiplication, as well as exploring factors, products and multiples. It was an easy connection between area and multiplication, so students are well practised in arrays. We will use this knowledge to build confidence in using different multiplication strategies. Some students have express a desire to master multi-digit multiplication using vertical algorithms, and even how to multiply fractions and decimals. We love it when students direct their learning!

In Inquiry, we are linking our learning of what countries value, to the importance of education, resilience, ingenuity, sustainability and enterprise. We’re embarking on a project based on Caine’s Arcade. Watch this space! It’s going to be busy and exciting times. We look forward to extending an invitation to all to experience the end product 😊 If you have any large boxes at home, we’d love to take them off your hands!