Whole School Activities

Assembly

Our term 4 assembly highlighted the wonderful achievements of our students. Congratulations to students who received merit certificates for their hard work and academic achievements. Well done to the YCDI award and badge winners. Students sung one of the commissioned pieces from New England Sings and shared their wonderful artworks.

Stage 3 Leadership Excursion

Stage 3 attended a leadership day at UNE last Thursday, with Kentucky and Kelly's Plains students. Year 5 and 6 students were immersed in workshops to better understand the qualities of a leader, and how to write an effective leadership. A highlight of the day was a key note speech by Mr Hobbs. 

Whole School P.E.

We have been lucky to have some opportunities recently to have Upper and Lower Division combine for PE. It is wonderful to have the whole school come together and this provides a great opportunity for all students to engage with each other and further build on the friendships that exit across all stages of our school.

STEM

We have continued our lessons with Mr Jacobs UNE. Lower Division had a great time coding and programming for microbits. The tasks we completed included coding different actions for buttons on microbits and some students even progressed to writing longer messages that the class had fun reading. Upper Division enjoyed making intricate stop motion animations through PowerPoint, unleashing their creativity and understanding of placement and movement of graphics on a screen.

Remembrance Day Ceremony

Our students gathered for a Remembrance Day commemoration at Rocky River last Monday, after making red poppies out of crepe paper.

Lower Division

We have had a busy time in Lower Division, continuing our work on compound and complex sentences in English. We concluded our study of the book "What's inside a Flower" and produced some wonderful labelled drawings demonstrating our learning.

In Mathematics we have been looking at how groups of items can be split into smaller groups such as halves, quarters and eighths. We have enjoyed using different manipulatives in the classroom to help us with this and will continue to build on our knowledge in the coming lessons.

Upper Division

Stage 2 have been studying the mentor text 'Piano Fingers' by Caroline Magerl and have gained a deeper understanding of the textual concepts; imagery, symbol and connotation. We have been exploring how authors use imagery, symbol and figurative language to influence meaning.

Stage 3 have begun researching and drafting their podcasts with a purpose to inform and entertain an authentic audience through informative and respective discussion on Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander cultures. Students have partnered up and are scripting on a topic of their choice: totems, languages, songlines or dreaming stories. We will be visiting the Armidale Library next week for students to record their work at the podcasting studio. We look forward to sharing these multimodal texts in the weeks to come!