IMPORTANT SCHOOL DATES

Important school dates to remember:

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

SCHOOL CONCERT: Thursday December 8^th, 5.30pm

Dear Parents and Friends,

We are now only weeks away from our first school concert in 3 years! It will be held oncfollowed by pizza and socialising at 6.30pm. The event will be held outside on the basketball court as we have done with assemblies of late.

• Please bring a chair and or cushions and blanket to make yourselves comfortable.
• Look out for information regarding ordering pizza for the night. (This will be pre-ordered and paid)

All classes will be performing a song and we will also be singing a song together as a whole school.

As you may know, I have been off school for some time due to a shoulder injury. As a result, I have only had 4-5 weeks with the students to prepare their performances. I am delighted with the way students have applied themselves to this task and I am sure we will do our best to give you all a good show. The main thing is that we can get together in person and enjoy some music and the company of our wonderful school community.

Check out some photos of our students in their music classes and lunchtime rehearsals. We really have such amazing musical people here at Badger Creek. It is onward and upwards form here.

SENIOR SCHOOL CHOIR CAROLS BY CANDLELIGHT Saturday 17^th December 6.30pm

This year on Saturday 17th December, the Badger Creek Children’s Choir have been invited to sing at the Healesville Carols by Candlelight celebrations. We will be joining the Women’s Choir and will be singing 2 songs. Admission is free. We are very excited about our contribution to this fantastic community event, after a 2-year break for COVID.

• We will be singing at around 7pm. Please arrive at 6.30pm.

Students will need to have black clothing on their bottom half, including black shoes if possible. WE WILL BE WEARING OUR CHOIR SHIRTS FOR THE PERFROMANCE. These will be supplied on the day when the children arrive at 6.30.

We hope to see as many choir members at the event as possible, we rely on each other to make a great sound. This concert is free, so this is your chance to see your child performing at this very special community event.

Have a great week,

Jenny Legg Music Teacher

We had yet another wonderful week in Prep! It’s hard to believe that there are not many weeks left in the year.

In Writing, we stepped outside of our comfort zone and started to write diamante poems. When writing a diamante poem, there are specific rules to follow. This type of poetry required us to use our prior knowledge of nouns, adjectives, and verbs, as we experimented with words to create fabulous poems about ourselves. Our poems were incredible! They existed of 9 words, which were made up using 2 nouns, 3 adjectives and 4 verbs. They are published and displayed on our writing wall, be sure to check them out!

In Reading, we continued learning about inferences. This week, we looked closely for the clues in the text to make inferences about the characters in, ‘Rose meets Mr. Wintergarten’. We inferred that Mr Wintergarten was scary, old, and grumpy at the beginning of the story, but as we continued to read, we inferred that he was lonely and just wanted a friend…

“They were all scared of him at the beginning because they didn’t want to go into his house, but he was just lonely and maybe didn’t know how to have a friend.”

We also inferred that Rose’s mum was, “kind, caring and inclusive because she didn’t care what stories she heard about Mr Wintergarten, she still showed kindness by taking him over muffins.”

In Maths, we revisited teen numbers. We identified our teen numbers and noticed that they always start with the 1 at the front, the 1 representing ’10 and some more’. We discussed that if the 1 does not come first, then it changes the value of the number and is no longer a ‘teen number’. We practised our number formation, helped Miss H by correcting her teen numbers, provided feedback to each other regarding our number formation and played bingo using teen numbers.

SMART Spelling was so exciting for the Preps this week. It was our first trigraph! Our word was ‘watch’, with our sentence being ‘She looked at her watch before she got into bed.’

Have a wonderful weekend, hopefully we are gifted with some sunshine!

Love Mrs. C and Miss H.

News from the Preps:

We have been learning more about nouns, verbs, and adjectives. We used these in writing to create diamante poems.

In Spelling, we have been learning to spell watch and swan.

In Maths, we were practising our number formation. Teen numbers have a 1 at the start, you put 10 into the number and then add some more.

In Reading, we have been learning to make inferences about Rose and Mr Wintergarten. We inferred that he was a selfish old man because the clues in the book told us that he didn’t care about Rose getting the ball. At the end of the book, we inferred that he was just lonely and wanted a friend.

Dear 1/2 Families,

It has a been fantastic week of learning this week. From summarising to climbing story mountains, typing narratives, performing division to mini-beasts and back again.

In reading, we have learnt to summarise fiction texts by using the learning tool ‘Somebody, Wanted, But, So, Then…’ This allows the students to identify the most important elements of a story when making a summary.

For writing, the students have continued using Chrome Books and iPads to create a narrative story. There has been many new skills learnt, including, accessing Google Drive, creating a new ‘Doc’ and using the Shift key.

In Maths, we have been dividing numbers into equal groups and showing our thinking by drawing a model, making a number sentence or writing an equation.

Inquiry has continued by making comparisons of some Mini-beasts we have found in our garden. The students have utilised a Venn diagram to compare similarities and differences between  snails, worms and ants.

HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT TYPING CLUB?!

In Year 1/2, we are using ‘Typing Club’ everyday! It helps us become more familiar with the keyboard on our laptops/iPads, which is greatly supporting our publishing phase during Writing sessions.
Next year, our Year 2s will be sitting Naplan, early in Term 1. For the first time, they will be typing their Writing, instead of using pencil and paper. It is our hope that Typing Club  will assist our students with this process.
Would you like your child to access Typing Club at home? Guess what, IT’S FREE! Click here or type Typing Club into Google, then click on the ‘jungle’ for heaps of fun lessons! Happy typing! 

Thank you to the volunteers who have been helping the students with the learning throughout the week.

Well, the term is marching on but the learning continues in the 3/4 area.

This week in Reading students have been revising the various comprehension strategies we have covered this year through a choice board. Each day students choose from twenty-five activities covering the skills we have developed throughout the year and apply this to a read-aloud mentor text (such as our favourite from this week – The Little Wooden Robot and The Log Princess) or their current independent reading book. Moving into next week, students will be publishing one of their responses, complete with illustrations.

Writing sessions continue our investigation of persuasive pieces, with students writing about their stance on the ethical dilemma of what to do with a found $10 note on school grounds. Is it best to hand the money to a teacher? I mean, someone might really need that money and be beside themselves for having lost it. But then again, I would be pretty excited to find a $10 note blowing towards me. I could buy some pretty cool stuff with $10. What would you do?

In Maths, students have been investigating the features of maps, including the importance of a  key, scale and grid reference system. We look forward to applying these skills next Friday at the Sanctuary. If any parents are keen to join us for this excursion, please contact any member of the 3/4 teaching team. Oh, and map-reading skills are not a requirement – our kids have that one covered.

Go 3/4s! See you next week.

Grade 5/6 News,

Things are gearing up in 5/6 land, as we approach the end of the year.

In Reading this week, Grade 5/6 have continued to develop their reading response skills by stretching themselves to include a personal reflection or judgement about a text. It can be a challenge to link text topics and or understandings to a broader context, but students have been striving!

In Writing, we have finished our narratives and explored autobiographies, before diving deep into scientific writing to complement our Inquiry studies. We’ve been examining the use of Tier Two and Three words; engaging, descriptive or topic-specific words that help explain concepts to the audience. We’ve also been discussing and comparing the use of action verbs within the ‘Method’. It’s out with ‘put, grab, get, and stick’ and in with ‘remove, slice, measure, and distribute.’ We’ve also begun our research for Adaptations / Survival projects and look forward to what information text the produce. We are planning to showcase their information texts and their science experiments at our Science Fair Open Afternoon on Friday 9^th December. Please mark it in your calendar and come along. We look forward to seeing you there!

In Maths, we’ve moved on from the Order of Operations (remember BODMAS?) and onto Transformations and Tessellations. Students really enjoyed making their own beautiful repeating patterns and created some incredible designs, both by hand and using technology. It’s magic to see the art in mathematics! This week, we are exploring angles. Beginning with a review of the types of angles (acute, right, obtuse, straight, reflex, and revolution), we have now moved on to explore complementary and supplementary angles, as well as alternate, co-interior, corresponding and vertically opposite angles – always linking these back to our knowledge of 180° and 360°. It’s a new concept for many of our students and we’ve been impressed with their determination to master it!

Recently, we have had a very successful trip to Sandridge Beach to complete our Surf Life Saving experience. We made use of breaks in the weather to learn open water safety and life-saving skills. Yesterday, Grade 6s participated in ‘The Final Word’ – our cyber-safety session, which was a timely reminder of privacy, safety and respect in the online space. Soon, we will have our Elephant Ed sessions, covering topics around personal health and development. We also had our first AUSLAN lesson with Mr Clingin which was thoroughly enjoyable. We’re lucky to have you, Mr C! Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us.

The Grade 5s have been busy preparing their application letters for their 2023 Leadership Roles, and will start practicing skills for their upcoming interview. We are waiting for the last few students to vote, before unveiling the Grade 6 uniform design for next year.The Grade 6s have been busy organising their Graduation performances for their upcoming event. It is wonderful to see many of our musically-inclined students commit to performing on the evening to celebrate their achievements for the audience. It is looking to be a wonderful, celebratory evening!

We also wanted to thank Mrs Miller and Verso Books for making our Book Fair for 2022 happen. It takes effort to organise these events which so greatly benefit our school and community. It was great to see so many new books in the hands of students (and staff!) in the classroom. Thank you!

Until next time!

Grade 5/6 Team