Important school dates to remember:

13/3 – Labour Day public holiday

17/3 – School curriculum Day

25/3 – Footy colours day and Special lunch

27/3 – School assembly – 2.45-3.30pm

29/3 – Respectful Relationships Open Night – 4.30-6.30pm

31/3 – School curriculum Day

7/4 – Last day of term 1 – assembly 1.30-2.30pm – 2.30pm school finish

Breakfast club announcement…

Due to the school curriculum day on Friday 17th March our school breakfast club will be running on Thursday 16th.

Following a formal process conducted by the selection panel, Nicole Wood has been appointed as Acting Principal for the remainder of 2023. The selection panel made this decision based on Nicole’s extensive experience as the Principal of Gladesville. Nicole has successfully led school improvement and has a strong commitment to improving educational outcomes, and developing and supporting staff and student wellbeing.   Nicole Wood will begin her role at Badger Creek on 24 April 2023.

As the School Council President, I would like to thank Nerae Preece for the fantastic work she has performed in the role of Acting Principal. She has led the school for the past three years ensuring not only that remote learning was implemented successfully but also that the capital work project is on track. This term Nerae is leading the school review that will determine the goals of a new strategic plan.

This is an exciting time for Badger Creek and I am sure you will join School Council in welcoming Nicole Wood to the Badger Creek family.

Any queries please contact:

Area Excutive Director Outer East

Clayton Sturzaker

Ph: (03) 7022 2409

Email: Clayton.Sturzaker@education.vic.gov.au

Yours sincerely,

Emina Sejmen

School Council President

This week in Science, the whole school participated in learning devoted to Clean Up Australia Day.

We explored the origin of CUAD, which goes back 30 years, when an Australian sailor took matters into his own hands and held a community-based cleaning bee around his Sydney backyard. This quickly turned into the nation’s largest environmental event that celebrates the many ways we can come together and combat pollution.

Of course, we all headed outside onto the school grounds and picked up any rubbish we could find. We were surprised by how much rubbish seemed to have come from lunchboxes and discussed the importance of a nude food lunchbox.

Some wonderful pledges were made across the grades to reuse packaging for different purposes, unwrap their food rubbish at home before coming to school and to switch their cat food sachets to recyclable tin food- along with many more.

The most important take-away we had was that we should treat every day like Clean Up Australia Day!

Have a wonderful weekend of discoveries!

Mrs. C 😊

This Week in Music

Greetings to our wonderful school community,

It has been re really good week in music. Grade 5/6 are learning their music skills in different ways this term, some classes are learning to record songs on Garage Band, this is a free app on ipad. Some are playing live in the classroom. The learning takes place in different ways depending on the interests and skills of each class. After years of teaching music, it is interesting to see the wide variation of class dynamics.

Grade 3/4 are still doing some great work on the ukuleles. We now know three chords, which means there are loads of songs we can play. We are currently learning to play Best Day of My Life by American Authors. I have included a link to the song here.

I have introduced a new song, Ngaya Naba, to the grade 1/2 classes with lyrics in the Dharug Aboriginal language, from Gadigal land in the Sydney area. I have also included a video of that song for your interest.

Grade Prep students have settled into the routine of music and are really enjoying listening to the music from The Carnival of the Animals. We listened to the music of the Swan today with our eyes closed. The children were encouraged to move their hands to the music. One child told me that he loved moving to music as he felt he could put the music where he wanted it! I love that so much!

Have a great week,

Jenny Legg

Music Teacher

Best Day of My Life

Ngaya Naba

How are we at the end of week 7 already?

Time flies when you are having fun!

This week in Prep, our socks were well and truly blown off by the fabulous learning that we noticed throughout the classroom.

In Reading, we focused on a new CAFÉ strategy…stretching sounds and blending the sounds to form words. The preps are becoming experts with recognising the sounds and putting the sounds on our fingers, our next step is to squash (blend) the sounds together to support us with our developing reading. To help us with the concept of ‘blending’ we blended bananas, strawberries, ice, and water together to make smoothies. We were able to see what happened when we blended all the ingredients together, “the ingredients all squashed together to make a drink, just like our sounds. When we squash our sounds together, we make words”.

The students did a fabulous job of practising this new skill, please make sure you are encouraging them to blend the sounds together with their take home readers! Thank you to everyone who has been remembering to bring their blue take home folder back to school each Monday morning and placing it in the take home folder basket in the classroom.  Remember you can also log on to Decodable Readers Australia to read even more texts. We are very appreciative of the work families are doing at home with reading and practising our SMART spelling words each week.

Talking about SMART Spelling, this week was a revision week. Meaning, students didn’t receive a new SMART Spelling word this week. Preps have done so well learning the first four words and sentences, Miss H, Miss R and Lis are all very proud! We are excited to learn a new word and sentence next week!

In Writing, we are learning to write sentences. This is a big step for the preps! Together, we discussed what is needed to form a sentence. We created a checklist to help remind us to use a … capital letter, a full stop and finger spaces. We wrote sentences on our whiteboards and as we became more confident with our writing, we used our Writing books to record our sentences.

Do you like watermelon? Do you like bikes? Do you like concrete mixers? Do you like horses? Were just some of the fabulous questions that the students thought of to gather data in Maths. We have been learning to answer ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to various questions to help us in gathering data. With this data, we have been looking closely at what this is telling us. From here, we moved on to ‘this’ or ‘that’ questions to gather data. In small groups, we interpreted the data and discussed what this data was telling us, we worked out that the Preps prefer the beach over the snow!

“I can’t do that…yet” is the growth mindset that we have been modelling in the prep classrooms this week. Learning can be tricky, especially in Prep where everything is new to us. We have been advocating the fact that mistakes are how we learn, everybody makes mistakes…even the teachers! Instead of saying that we can’t do something, let’s say “We can’t do that…yet”.

Friendly Reminders:

• Monday 13^th of March is the Labour Day public holiday – no school on this day.
• Friday 17^th of March is a BCPS curriculum day – no students at school on this day.
• Please make sure all items that come to school are clearly labelled with your child’s name so we can return lost property to its rightful owner.

Preps, thank you for another fabulous week! We hope that you have a lovely weekend 😊

Love,

Miss H, Miss R and Lis

Hello Families,

The 1/2 students have continued their hard work in the classroom this week. We have been loving the stretch in writing from simple to compound sentences. Students have collected data on favourite pets, breakfast foods and games to play and represented the data in tables and column graphs. So many new skills and challenges but we climbed out the other side of the learning pit with smiles on faces. Students have also enjoyed visiting and borrowing books from our temporary library. They will continue to have this opportunity fortnightly during building works.

Looking ahead to next week.

In reading, our focus skill is retelling a story in sequence of the events. When you read with your child have them retell the story to you to help develop this strong comprehension skill. Next week in writing, students will have the opportunity to unpack narrative text structures to have a go at writing their own well-structured story. In Maths, we will be returning to place value, reading, modelling, renaming numbers and ordering numbers on number lines.

SMART Spelling sound for next week is /ea/ as in beach.

Thank you to all the families that were able to catch up for 3-way interviews. If you haven’t been able to do so, please drop in or email your teachers to have a quick conference. These are great opportunities to learn more about your child to help best support them at school.

Have a wonderful, safe long weekend.

Best wishes,

The 1/2 Team.

You know it has been a busy week when you get to Wednesday, and it feels like it should be later in the week. We have been busy, busy, busy. 

What has been keeping us busy? Several things:

• In Reading, we have been learning to visualise what we are reading. To do this, we have been paying attention to descriptions, and other details within the text. Imagining is one thing, but we have also been writing it down, and drawing labelled pictures to show what we have been visualising as we read.
• For Writing, we are all working to help our Year Threes get ready for NAPLAN and learning to write persuasive texts. While we acknowledge that children may not need our help in learning the art of persuasion, they may need our help in learning how to write about it. We have been practising gathering reasons for an opinion, and then being able to provide examples that back up our reasons. We have had some interesting discussion about topics where our students have been divided in their opinions, for-or-against an idea. And you may be interested to know that most of the students were not keen on the idea of attending school 6 days a week.
• Maths: If you see your children striding around the house with giant steps, and we mean, ‘around’ the house, it could be that they are estimating distance. This week we have been learning about AREA and over the next two weeks we will learn more about MEASURING.
• What we need from you:  What we need from home is for your child/ren to bring a ‘matchbox’ or ‘hotwheels’ car (or like) to school. We will be using these cars to assist us in an activity for measuring distance at the end of next week. If you do not have one of these at home, don’t stress. We will provide spares. 

Dear Parents and Carers,

The term is certainly flying by! Routines are established and students are now identifying and working towards the achievement of their own learning goals.

This Friday a number of 5/6 students are participating in Kayaking on the River. Thank you to Mr Pitts for his organisation of this event. What a great opportunity!

In the Grade 5/6 Classrooms:

Reading: We are continuing to build our knowledge and application of comprehension strategies. We will be prioritising these throughout the year with a range of texts. Students have been engaging with our current mentor text ’Ziba Came on a Boat’ by Liz Lofthouse, learning how to link their responses to evidence from the text to support a deeper understanding.

Writing: Students have been experimenting with ways to enhance their writing, considering the effect of word choice and how to engage the reader. We have been using prompts and tuning into our senses in order to describe an object or a moment in time.

Maths: We have been learning about decimal numbers, up to thousandths and beyond. Students have been ordering and comparing decimal numbers, locating them on a number line, and are now exploring the use of the four operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) involving decimal numbers.

Upcoming dates

13 March: Labour Day public holiday

17 March: school curriculum day

27 March: school assembly (from 2:45pm)

29 March: school celebration night (from 4:30pm)

A reminder that Monday 13^th March is the Labour Day public holiday – we hope you all enjoy a relaxing weekend!

Grade 5/6 Team

Lunch play at BCPS…

During play time on Monday some of our students created and built a bus.

This bus was able to transport the students on a trip to Disneyland and Timezone.

All around the world and the students weren’t even late for their afternoon classes.

CSEF application

Badger Creek Primary school is taking applications for CSEF (Camps, sports and excursions).

If yo have a current/valid Health care card or a pension card in your name you may be eligible for the fund.

If you have the required cards to apply please come in to the office where we can answer any questions and apply for you.

The annual amount for CSEF is $125 for primary school students