IMPORTANT SCHOOL DATES

Important school dates to remember:

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

22/11 – Verso Book Fair – 5.30-7pm

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

Our 3 / 4 students held an amazing fundraiser last week to help raise funds for the Animal Aid shelter in Coldstream.

I know our students and staff thought this was an amazing idea and showcased some incredible pieces of art.

I know the humans weren’t the only ones who loved this fundraiser.

Greetings to our wonderful school community,

It is such a great feeling to be back teaching music to all of our students again. After such a long break, everyone has grown a bit and got just that little bit older. I have really noticed the development in many children. Even though we have had disruptions with the building project, the students have been remarkably settled. What a resilient bunch we have.

We are preparing for the school concert, which is going so well. I can’t wait to help the children show you all just how much they have learnt and how they are able to work together to present their songs.

As I have been away for almost a term and a half, we will be presenting a fairly simple repertoire with a focus on Australian music and composers. The main thing will be getting together, sharing some food and enjoying meeting as a community once again around the wonderful medium of music.

Check out some of our students in music class this week.

Have a great week.

Jenny Legg

Music Teacher.

Wow, what a week in Prep… The Preps totally blew our socks off this week!

Our ‘Come and meet the Author’s’ event was such a success! We promised you it would be a best seller and it certainly was! Thank you so much to all our incredible families who supported us on this journey. Your excitement, support and encouragement made the event even more special.

So much planning, organising, and collaborating went into this event and the Preps were involved every step of the way. From designing invitations, thank-you flyers, signs, posters, moving tables and chairs, handing out biscuits and drinks… everything!

… And of course, the creating of the book. Over the past two weeks, the Preps chose an endangered animal. From here, we spent time on the iPads investigating. We researched our animal’s habitat, their major threats, and ways in which we could help. With this knowledge in mind, we then followed our familiar writing structure. Brainstorming key words, drafting sentences using our keywords, revising, and editing our sentence to fix up any spelling, adding more information or checking that our information was correct. The final step was to publish our writing, with our edits included, ready to be made into a class book.

We are so proud of the pride that the children showed in their writing and their illustrations. Knowing that their writing was going to be a part of something special and to raise money and awareness about endangered animals motivated the children to produce their best work yet! What absolute superstars!

$237.50…. yes, you heard right! That is how much money our wonderful, passionate advocators raised so far to donate to the Healesville Sanctuary to help in the fight against extinction! As we have a few more orders yet to fill, our grand total is still yet to grow! We are so excited to visit the Sanctuary next week to hand over our donation.

In preparation for our book event, In Numeracy, we started to explore Australian money, in particular coins. We discussed each coin’s value, the differences we could see in each coin and the purpose of money. The children were then set the task to create a replica of their own Australian coins as well as a picture. We had to decide a money amount and write that amount on our drawings, that was the price we were selling our artwork for. We then created our own shop in the classroom where the preps used their coins to buy a picture from someone else.

Reminders:

Thursday 17^th November – Healesville Sanctuary Excursion

Friday 18^th November – Special lunch and dress up day.

Have a wonderful weekend,

Mrs C and Miss H 😊

News from the Preps:

The Preps have been learning about endangered animals that are in the Sanctuary. Our favourite thing about the week has been making our books.

In Writing, we buddied with a learning buddy. We researched our animal up on an iPad and thought of keywords. We used our keywords to make sentences to add to our classroom book. We revised and edited our work. We published our illustrations to go with our writing.

So far, we have made $237.50 because the parents came in to buy our books. We are helping the animals, so they don’t die. We are learning to fight extinction.

In SMART Spelling our word of the week was ‘wheel’. We wrote the sentence ‘Some of us have been looking at a big truck wheel!’.

Let’s start with the highlight of our week!! To support our learning in Inquiry we invited our very own Bonnie Van De Ven (Parent and amazing human) to share her understanding of all things Bees. Bonnie captivated the ¾ audience with her backyard bee keeping stories which sparked many questions and wonderings. We are so grateful for the visit and love the support of parents and friends in student learning.

In Reading this week, Students have begun working on cause and effect in the texts. The cause-and-effect relationship is a basic thinking skill and text structure for all types

of reading and subject areas. Students use the understanding of this relationship in all school subjects and in day-to-day living, whether watching TV, playing games, or in

friendships. We teach cause and effect every time we demonstrate that one event is the result of another(CAFÉ Ready Reference Guide).

You can help your child at home with this strategy by sparking conversation about the text by using the following questions:

• What happened and why did it happen?
• What were the clue words?
• Why would this have happened?
• Give examples of cause and effect relationships throughout your life. In your family, in sports, and in your friendships.

We have continued to practise the writing process by planning, drafting, revising, editing and will finally publish a chosen piece in the later weeks of term 4. In our Multi-Genre writing unit students have had choice of further developing one of their favourite writing pieces. It’s incredible the growth we have seen in students this term as they continue to hone their craft of writing. They are taking risks with paragraphing, word choice and revision. We are so proud!

In Maths, we are learning to problem solve to find equivalent equations with mixed operations. We are encouraging students to explain their thinking and provide evidence of their problems solving to share during reflections.

Have a fabulous (longer) weekend 😊