School Policy Input

The School Council is inviting community input on a number of policies relating to child safety, complaints, visitors, volunteers, enrolment and Aboriginal and Torres Strait learning, safety and wellbeing. If you would like to be involved and provide input please contact Christian (christianjclark@gmail.com) or Emma (Emma.Griffiths2@education.vic.gov.au) and we’ll get you a copy of the policies, or you can pick up copies at the office. We may all get together next week or you can simply provide feedback by email. Thanks, Christian, School Council

IMPORTANT SCHOOL DATES

Important school dates to remember:

1/11 – Melbourne Cup Day

4/11 – Free Dress Day for Animal Aid (please bring a gold coin donation)

4/11 – School assembly 2.30-3.30pm

11/11 – Curriculum day (Whole school)

15/11 – Ocean swim – Life Saving Victoria – 5/6

24/11 – ‘The Final Word’ G6 Cyber safety

25/11 – School assembly 2.30-3.30pm

1/12 – Elephant Ed – 5/6

7/12 – Grade 6 Graduation

8/12 – Elephant Ed – 5/6

8/12 – School Concert

12-14/12 – 5/6 Camp

14/12 – Gr 6 Big Day Out

16/12 – Christmas themed bake sale

16/12 – Grade 6 leavers assembly 2.30-3.30pm

20/12 – Last day of Term 4

Hello Badger Creek Families,

Over the last few weeks students have been finalising a range of projects in art that we’d love to share with you.

Our preps have been doing a unit on landscapes, with a focus on the horizon line, perspective and warm and cool colours. They have completed a range of drawings and a fabric collage of a sunset inspired by author/illustrator Jeannie Baker.

The grade 1/2 cohort have been making clay tigers using slab, coil and pinch pot construction techniques. They have come out of the kiln and students chose to paint them as a Bengal tiger or a snow tiger.

In grade 3/4 students have finished their dog sculptures and are preparing for their exhibition/fundraiser next Friday. They have put a lot of work into this project, so please come and check it out after assembly. And if you can, bring a gold coin donation for Animal Aid.

Our grade 5/6 students have just finished weaving into a clay loom that they have made and glazed. It was quite a fiddly process but the results are wonderful. They focused on analogous and complementary colours with their glaze choice and pattern and repetition with their weaving.

Have a wonderful weekend

Vanessa Imberger

Art Teacher

Dear Badger Creek Families and Friends,

It is great to be back teaching music to our wonderful students. My initial focus is planning and preparing for the end of year concert and community event that we will finally be able to hold live on Thursday, December 1^st. We have decided on an Australian music theme and will be presenting a variety of Aussie music including folk music, songs featuring First Nations Language, and some good old Aussie rock classics.

Our school band will be playing the song Scar by Missy Higgins, I include the words below.

Calling Musical Parents and Friends  

As we have done several times in the past, we will be inviting our families and friends to join in with the music and to create a BCPS family band to play the last song of the evening, which the whole school will sing together. The song will be simple and I will support musicians and singers in rehearsing this piece.

So, if you love to connect with others musically, have a laugh and show the young ones how it is done, please get in touch with me on the email address below or via the school email address. We are looking for singers, guitar players, strings, percussion, woodwind, YOU NAME IT! Anyone is welcome to join in the rehearsals and performance.

Healesville Community Carols By Candlelight 

BCPS and the Badger Creek Women’s Choir have once again been invited to sing on stage at the Healesville Community Carols in Queens Park on 17^th December in the afternoon. We will be singing two songs together, This Little Light of Mine and Somewhere Over the Rainbow / Silent Night Medley.

The School Choir rehearsals will now take place once a week at lunchtimes and students will be required to commit to attending regularly to be eligible to sing at the Carols. Check out the video of the Badger Creek Women’s Choir singing the medley as we will be singing it at the event.

Choir for Junior Students 

As I am still on a limited timetable while I complete my recovery, I will not be taking the junior students for choir this term. Choir will return for all students in the New Year. I do apologise for that but it cannot be helped under with my current recovery timetable.

Have a great week and please contact me on the email address below if you have any queries or you would like to chat about joining with the parent and friends band for the end of year concert.

Jennifer.legg@education.vic.gov.au

Jenny Legg

Music Teacher

Scar by Missy Higgins

He left a card, a bar of soap and a scrubbing brush next to a note
that said “use these down to your bones”
And before I knew I had shiny skin and it felt easy being clean like him
I thought, this one knows better than I do

A triangle trying to squeeze through a circle
He tried to cut me so I’d fit

And doesn’t that sound familiar? Doesn’t that hit too close to home?
Doesn’t that make you shiver; the way things could’ve gone?
And doesn’t it feel peculiar when everyone wants a little more?
And so that I do remember to never go that far,
Could you leave me with a scar? 

So the next one came with a bag of treats,

She smelled like sugar and spoke like the sea
And she told me don’t trust them, trust me
Then she pulled at my stitches one by one, looked at my insides

Clicking her tongue and said
“This all has to come undone”

A triangle trying to squeeze through a circle
She tried to blunt me so I’d fit

And doesn’t that sound familiar? Doesn’t that hit too close to home?
Doesn’t that make you shiver; the way things could have gone?
And doesn’t it feel peculiar when everyone wants a little more?
And so that I do remember to never go that far,
Could you leave me with a scar? 

Bridge: 

I think I realized just in time, although my old self was hard to find
You can bathe me in your finest wine but I’ll never give you mine
‘cause I’m a little bit tired of fearing that I’ll be the bad fruit nobody buys
Tell me, did you think we’d all dream the same?

And doesn’t that sound familiar? Doesn’t that hit too close to home?
Doesn’t that make you shiver; the way things could have gone?
And doesn’t it feel peculiar when everyone wants a little more?
And so that I do remember to never go that far,
Could you leave me with a scar?
Could you leave me with a scar?

How have four weeks already passed by us this term?!

Four weeks of pure joy!

This week the Preps have been extremely busy.

Friday was the highlight as not only did we visit Badger Creek Kindergarten, we went in our Halloween costumes! Rest assured no children were scared during this time. We had so much fun catching up with our younger friends. We were pleased to come back to school with a special lunch waiting for us. It was truly the best!

In Reading, we have continued our learning about character traits. This time, focusing on the inside rather than the outside. “This is when we look at how someone acts. Like, maybe they’re being a silly billy.” We were experts at noticing and describing the key behaviours of our favourite characters, such as Winnie the Pooh, Eeyore, Bluey and Bingo.

In Writing, we have been creating character analyses. Our growing knowledge of character traits have really come in handy with this learning. We all chose one character from Winnie the Pooh to focus on. Reporting on all the things we know about this character. Miss H had a go at reporting on what she knew about Mrs. C. The Preps were quick to notice that Miss H needed to rethink how accurate her information was. “Mrs. C definitely does not have six arms…”

In Maths, we have been learning to share. We take the equal group rule very seriously in Prep. We make sure to only share fairly. It was great to see our problem solving skills shine when we had left overs. We saw the Preps discuss the need of changing the amount of groups or adding/subtracting from the total number. Super stars!!

We also learned that if there’s a left over when sharing in between two groups, that these numbers are odd. How cool!

Kind reminders from us:

-We have sent home an invitation for our book promotion event. This will be held on the 9^th of November at 2.45pm in our classroom. The Preps are so excited for this little fundraising project! We are raising money to support the Sanctuary’s fight against extinction. We will be visiting the Healesville Sanctuary on the 11^th of November to hand deliver our book and proceeds. (You can find the permission for this excursion on Compass.)

Now, over to news from the Preps…

In Reading we have been thinking about someone’s inside character traits. And we have been using our learning goals during read to self.

I like when we were sharing numbers equally with the teddy bears.

I really like writing sentences about Winnie the Pooh. We did editing, using our green pencil to change the letters that were wrong and fix up our words.

We added super words in with our purple pencil.

Our favourite though is publishing our writing.

I loved play time. I was playing inside with my friends when it was raining outside.

We practised fork in SMART spelling and thumb was our word of the week.

Spending time with our teachers means we get to do things that are fun like counting and sharing m&ms and eating them.

We have been making predictions while reading. Making predictions is a skill that requires combining the readers own knowledge with evidence from the text. When your child is reading to you at home, ask them… “What do you think is going to happen next?”

In writing, the students have been consolidating their knowledge of narrative structures and creating ‘good’ and ‘bad’ characters for their own narrative stories.

For maths, we have been learning the value of Australian money. The children have been challenged to order money and explore the many ways they can make $1.00.

Our inquiry into insect and invertebrates has continues with discovery of the many natural wonders at school and at home. The student’s loved taking a close look at an earthworm found in the Harvest Garden and creating a detailed, label diagram based on their investigations.

Finally, we have been creating a Growth Mindset and practising making ‘Power of Yet’ statements. This strategy is used when we are faced with challenges. Instead of saying, “I can’t do this!” We say, “I can’t do this YET!” We also learnt the brain is like a muscle. When we are challenged our brain literally grows and gets stronger, just like a muscle does when we exercise.

Reminders:

• Please ensure your child brings their take home reading satchel and diary on Monday.
• We have recently sent home, via Compass, two sight word PDF’s to help your child become more familiar with the most commonly used words. These sight words will greatly assist in developing fluency for both reading and writing.
• If you are interesting in assisting with reading in the classroom, please reach out to the teaching team to organise a time.

Thank you to the parents who have popped in this week and had a chat about their child’s progress. We greatly value the partnership that we have with you in order to assist in educating your children.

Have a great weekend,

The 1/2 Team

It’s been a Spoooooky week in 3/4 this week;

We were visited by an Inquiry ghost who helped us explore the wonders of Inquiry. For the last few weeks we have been looking at Gum Trees, what lives in them, how they grow, how they pollinate and the important step they play in the Australian Bushland! In the coming weeks we hope to look at the importance of bees, our major pollinators and other plant reproduction.

Our resident Maths ghouls (aka the teachers) took us through balancing equations and using all kinds of mental strategies to calculate problem solving and subtraction skills. The 3/4 s have also been understanding the importance of showing their work, they are continually asked “prove it” in maths lessons. As part of our daily maths lessons we have incorporated fluency, the art of automatically recalling quick maths. Times Tables is our primary focus! Test your children parents… perhaps using the candy that many will collect on Monday.

We have zombified writing in the last few weeks by allowing students to work on one idea in many different genres. Students have used one seed to write, letters, movie trailers, narrative and even some pretty incredible non-fiction texts. We look forward to publishing them soon for all eyes to see. In reading we have been focused on teaching the reading strategy of cross-checking words and phrases. Simply put if it doesn’t look right, sound right or make sense you need to backup and try a new strategy to work out what’s being said.

Thank you for all your hard work 3/4s it’s evident to all of us that you are working hard! Keep it up and you’ll be so successful in the last few weeks and beginning of next year.