Nerae Preece Principal

From the Principal

It’s that time of the term again. The end has arrived, and it’s time to reflect on how we have grown as a school. With some amazing events and results in our learning, our students should be so proud of what they have achieved. Here are some of the highlights for me…

Orderly environment. This was about making things easier for our students to use the environment to help them with their learning. This has taken a lot of work to develop consistent approaches and expectations as a staff. Our work with Berry Street has certainly helped with this, as well as our work with Marissa our Inclusion Coach.
Smart Spelling started in March, and as this is a new initiative we have decided to track how things are going on a termly basis to evaluate its effectiveness. So far so good. One little bit of amazing data that we have captured is from our preps. In their first test in April the average number of words the preps spelt correctly was around 2-3 words. By the time the preps sat the assessment again this increased to 11 words spelt correctly. This is a phenomenal effort by our preps, considering this particular test starts measuring spelling age from 6 years of age! Well done preps!
As news comes to us, the government are once again providing money for schools to run the Tutor Learning Initiative. As you would know at Badger, we have modified this to create a Response to Intervention program (15 minutes of skilled based practice every day for small groups). Our RTI has seen over 50% of our student’s access the skill development, this helps them make learning growth. Our teachers have done an amazing job to plan and create space to make this happen.
In Sport, David Pitts was able to organise some great events, we had the Colour Fun Run and AFL Footy Day (A big thank you to our friends at Healesville High School). On top of this success, we have had lots of fun being involved in our district sports activities, with tabloid sports and Hooptime. It was great to see Badger achieve so much success with basketball.
The Arts once again continued to astound us… With our Steam punk exhibition, to making mobiles and terrific Father’s Day presents. One to look out for are the dog sculptures that the ¾ students are making. They will have an exhibition in term 4 where they will be selling their sculptures to raise money for the Coldstream Animal Shelter. Thank you Vanessa Imberger for the great art lessons.
The PFA have been consistently blowing our socks off with the fun and joy they are creating. It has been so lovely to have great meals provided, morning teas and for our school to raise money for worthy causes. Thank you PFA team for being so generous with your time!
So many people have helped us move out of our buildings in the past few weeks. A BIG thankyou is in order. We could not have done this without our village to support us. There have been times where we have had no idea where to move things, and next term will certainly provide its challenges as we try to work out how we work in our new temporary places, but we will show patience and understanding as we navigate this.

I couldn’t feel more proud of our Badger Creek Primary School Community. Everyone is always so willing to help and make our school a better and happier place.

What can you look forward to next term???

We have more special lunches to come… raising money for some great causes.
A Student free day on Friday 11^th of November (Save the date)
The annual school concert on Thursday 1^st of December.
The build will begin in gusto! Watch how the school changes!

That’s certainly enough for a term! Thank you for your ongoing support and please have a marvellous holiday!

Nerae Preece

PS A very special mention goes to Vanessa Saffin, who is heading off on maternity leave. We wish you all the very best, and hope you come back to Badger one day and work with us again. It has been a pleasure.

PPS Good luck Alyssa Drill as you finally get to your wedding day. We know how much you are looking forward to your special day. We hope the day goes perfectly for you.

IMPORTANT SCHOOL DATES

Important school dates to remember:

3/10 – Term 4 starts

18/10 – Prep concert – Pevan and Sarah

1/11 – Melbourne Cup Day

11/11 – Student free day

1/12 – Annual School concert

20/12 – Last day of Term 4

PFA…

This week in Prep…

What a fun filled week to end the term!

Caines Arcade, Footy day including a special lunch, our prep picnic and to make our week even better, we got to have Miss V for two days!

In Reading, we focused on reading for enjoyment. Throughout the week, we explored various texts to see whether we found enjoyment in them or not. What does this look like and looking at the ‘why’ were conversations that followed.

“I didn’t really enjoy that book, I found it a little boring.”

“I enjoyed that book because it made my body nice and calm.”

“I did not enjoy that book because it had the same name in it as my rat, and my rat died. It reminded me of that”

“I enjoyed that book because it made me laugh and entertained me”

In Writing, we were learning to write about what we are grateful for. Each day, we thought about something that made us feel thankful and lucky, recording our thoughts in our gratitude journal.

“Today I am grateful for the Earth; it gives us so much”

“Today I am grateful for my dog.”

“Today I am grateful for my mum because she is feeling better”

We also introduced the children to writing on dotted thirds, looking closely at where each letter should sit in comparison to a cat. For example, the letters y, j, g, and z sweep down to the same line as the cat’s tail, when the letters h, l, b and d stretch up to the same line as the cat’s head.

In Maths, we brought our focus back to teen numbers. Using the language of ‘ten and how many more’. We went on a treasure hunt to find our teen number that we would be working with for the next task. Once the Preps had discovered their teen number, they created a paper chain using one colour to represent their tower of 10 and another colour to represent ‘some more’.

Our Prep picnic was a success! Throughout the term, when someone reaches ‘true leader’ they place a pompom in the jar. Prior to the term, the children discussed as a team what they would like as a class reward, hence our Prep picnic! It was a perfect end to the term, celebrating the hard work, the learning and simply enjoying each other’s company with plenty of laughs and stories!

This week was extra special as we also had a special celebratory lunch with our Grade 5 buddies…hot chips and lots of storytelling!

Our handy helpers have continued to be on the lookout for people showing ongoing Pride in and out of the classroom. Next Term, we will be focussing on a new school value, which the Preps are already looking forward to being on the lookout and setting their own expectations of their peers.

We hope that all our wonderful Preps have a well-deserved break. What a busy but fabulous term we have all had!

See you next Term!

Love your incredibly proud teachers,

Mrs C and Miss H 😊

This week in Grade 1 / 2…

Dear Families,

It has been lovely to get a taste of warmer weather this week. The students have responded well to it and have had great week of learning.

In literacy, we have been working on the creating information reports that have focused on the local environment. The students have learnt about the different elements of a nonfiction text and how to set one out. They have researched and gathered information for a piece that is being published next week.

In maths, the students have been exploring different strategies to understand multiplication. These included, arrays, repeated addition, skip counting and number sentences.

The Grade 2 Sleepover was a huge success. The kids enjoyed pizza, a movie and a night walk through the classrooms!!! The Grade 2’s (most 😉 managed to settle and had a good night’s sleep. Thank you to the McKern family for providing breakfast in the morning.

The 1/2 Team wish you a happy and safe holiday and look forward to fabulous start to Term 4.

This week in Grade 5 / 6…

This week in Grade 5/6:

Well, aren’t we just proud as can be! This week has seen the culmination of weeks of work come together at our BCPS Caine’s Arcade event on Tuesday.

With the Library completely void of books and shelving (thanks to all those who lent a hand on our Pride Afternoon on Friday last week!), we had a perfect venue for our event. We put on our finishing touches and set up our space, ready for action. And action it was!

All classes visited the energised space on Tuesday and engaged in all the games. We had tremendously positive feedback from students, parents and staff alike, marvelling at the feats of engineering attained and effort applied. It was so heart-warming to see the positive engagement between the younger and senior students and all the smiling faces.

I personally don’t think the library has ever been so noisy, but what a glorious send-off it was! Thank you to all the families who supported the event! It was a huge success.

Don’t think for a minute that this is the only learning we’ve been up to! We’ve been creating and collating our own written poetry and the famous poems we analysed, into our cartoneras. We certainly have lots of talented poets at BCPS! In Reading, we’ve been upping the ante in our summarising by recounting the main events, identifying the main idea or theme, and providing a comment on our personal perspectives – with impressive results! We’re also trooping along with SMART Spelling and even completed this terms whole school spelling test.

In maths, we concluded our units on multiplication and division, as well as a pre-test on our upcoming unit of Volume and Capacity. We also took a moment to analyse, interpret and create graphs of the real-life data we collected during our Caine’s Arcade.

In AUSLAN, Michelle brought in a special guest, Mr Andrew Swan MBE, to share his story and experiences as a deaf person. Mr Swan is a world champion and Olympic gold medallist in skiing – he even brought in his gold medals to show us. Michelle interpreted as Mr Swan shared and the students were enthralled. Plenty of questions were asked during Q&A time. If you would like to read some more about Mr Swan, you can read an article about how he was honoured at the National Sports Museum here . Or read more about National Week of Deaf People (19 – 25 September) here . Thank you for coming in to visit us, Mr. Swan!

On Wednesday, we participated in Footy Day! We had a morning of games organised by Mr Pitts and Mr Schultz, and run by impressive students leaders from Healesville High School. Students loved the hotdog lunch provided by the PFA. YUM! Thanks! Families, please keep an eye out for the Compass post regarding our rescheduled Winter Sports event on Friday 7^th October. We have our fingers crossed for the weather to be kinder to us!

What a wonderful end to Term Three! Next term, we’re excited to learn more about adaptations of plants, animals and fungi in our biological science unit – SURVIVAL.

BCPS Caine’s Arcade

Thank you to all the families who supported our Grade 5/6 initiative, BCPS Caine’s Arcade.

We had an awesome time getting all our games ready for all the guests and there was such an electric buzz on the day. We had a great time sharing our learning with you and raising money for a good cause.

From our initial count, we have raised $650! This is amazing!

Esther Rijk, past BCPS student and founder of The Kickstart Project Inc, came to speak with the Grade 5/6s on Monday so we could here about her work first hand. We learnt about the living conditions for people in the crowded Kibera Slum in Nairobi, Kenya. We learnt about how much the kids want to go to school and how much they value education. We learnt about the people who volunteer to teach in the primary school (which looks like an old corrugated iron shed) and how it’s too expensive for kids to go to high school, so they just go to work instead – if they can find a job! Find out more about The Kickstart Project here – https://thekickstartproject.com.au/

We will also make a donation to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation which helps provide quality reading books to remote schools and communities in Australia. To find our more about this amazing organisation, check out https://www.indigenousliteracyfoundation.org.au/

We believe that everyone should have access to education and learning.