Primary School
Book Week 2025: Book an Adventure!
This year’s Book Week, running from Saturday 16 August to Saturday 23 August 2025, invites students to Book an Adventure. At GSG, we celebrated with MakeDo Monday, a Dress-Up Parade, a quiz at lunchtime, a find the golden leaf and design a book cover competition.
By embracing this theme, Book Week becomes more than a costume event; it becomes a journey. Through exploring stories of quests, courage and discovery, children can develop creativity, empathy and a lifelong love of reading. Whether they are diving into fairy-tale forests, exploring far-off lands or meeting brave characters, every book offers a new world waiting to be explored.
Thank you for joining us in encouraging each student to book their own adventure, unlocking imagination and deepening their connection to stories − and to each other.
Thank you to the wonderful Ms Couper, Mrs Orzel and Mrs Cherry for all their wonderful work in preparing such a fabulous week.
ECC Father’s Day Invitation
We are excited to celebrate the important men in our students’ lives: fathers, grandfathers, uncles and special friends. Kindergarten to Year Two students are warmly invited to bring one special guest to our Father’s Day Celebration on Wednesday 3 September.
Morning tea will be served in the Library from 8.45am to10.45am.
Classroom Activities:
Kindergarten and Pre-Primary: 8.45am to 9.30am
Years One and Two: 9.30am to 10.15am
This special occasion is a wonderful opportunity to honour the love, guidance and support of the incredible men who inspire our children. We look forward to sharing this memorable morning with you!
Walk to School Day
Join us for our Term Three, Walk to School Day! Next Thursday 28 August, we will gather at Coraki Park for a wonderful community walk to school. On arrival, children will be welcomed with a delicious muffin and a warm Milo.
To make things easier, a bus will transport school bags directly to school and will also be available to return parents to their cars after the walk.
Please note that all children must be accompanied by a parent or guardian.
Classroom News
We hope you enjoy reading about the classroom news from each week of term in our Early Childhood and Primary School classes.
Kindergarten
The Kindergarten classes loved celebrating their first school Book Week. The children all looked fabulous as they rocked out in their character costumes. A special thanks to all of the parents/guardians who helped make and create these masterpieces. Our Kindergarten students are really enjoying learning about all the different letters of the alphabet. This week we learnt all about the diagraph /oo/.
Pre-Primary
On Friday Pre-Primary went on a Totally Wild Wildlife Park Excursion. We went on the bus to the Australian Wildlife Park at Albany’s Historic Whaling Station. Luckily for us the weather was magnificent! At the wildlife park we saw wombats, possums, white kangaroos and pademelons. The animal keepers very kindly gave us a special experience, and we were able to stroke a Stimson's Python and see the very cute squirrel gliders be fed. We used our skills of careful observation to find a camouflaged tawny frogmouth hiding in his favourite tree, and a grumpy woylie trying to sleep in his hidden burrow. The sulphur-crested cockatoo thought we were wonderful and greeted us with ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’. In the whaling station we were amazed by the enormous skeleton of the pygmy blue whale before playing on the sperm whale slide and headed back to school!
Year One
The Year One students have been busy delving into the different seasons around the world and wondering why Mrs Gouldthorp’s mum is in the middle of a blistering UK summer and yet they are experiencing a cold and often stormy, winter. Also why do they have four seasons each year and yet our Indigenous Noongar friends have six seasons? The class has made some wonderful seasons pictures and are loving their new ‘Djilba’ discovery area. The first Information reports have been written, and much fun has been experienced when differentiating between the four different types of sentences. Fact families and turnaround sums are being further reinforced in Mathematics lessons. Oh, and it is BOOK WEEK!
Year Two
We have had a busy week in Year Two! We have been writing our Information reports on our significant places and have learnt how to use Book Creator in our ICT lessons. The result will be that each of us will have a digital book with information on our significant place! We are learning to quickly use our emoji logins and play around with features such as enlarging text, changing background colours and font placement and type.
In mathematics, we are in the midst of learning multiplication! We are doing this by showing our understanding with hands-on activities using counters to show groups, arrays and repeated addition. We enjoyed reading some of the books the students brought in for Book Week and loved hearing everyone telling the class about their outfit and character choice and explaining why they chose their particular book.
Year Four
The Year Four students have been using their five amazing senses to create vivid descriptions of everything they have experienced in GSG’s Wild Space, using Colin Thiele’s descriptions of the Coorong area of South Australia in the novel Storm Boy as a model. They are experimenting with similes, metaphors, personification, alliteration, onomatopoeia and other figurative language as well as lots of creative adjectives. There are some very talented writers in this class, and we think Oyster Harbour is just as amazing and beautiful as the Coorong! At the other end of the learning spectrum, they have been exploring different types of graphs in mathematics and considering what a graph must have in order to be easily interpreted and have also compared what type of information each different kind of graph is best suited to displaying.
Year Five
This week was the wonderful Book Week and what an eclectic mix of costumes we had. Thank you to the parents for all their hard work to make this possible. In HASS this week we have explored how other children across Australia have grown their own businesses. Some very simple ideas have grown into successful businesses. This helped the students think about what they might like to run for the Market Stall at the end of the term.
Languages
This week has been full of creativity and teamwork! Our Middle Primary students applied their new knowledge of Noongar language to create a stunning tree display, celebrating all the reasons we should learn this beautiful language. In ECC, students are beginning colourful murals with their favourite international first names, thinking carefully about why those names matter to them. And in Upper Primary, our travel brochures are still in the works − because true perfection takes time! Students are showing fantastic problem-solving skills (and lots of teamwork) as they refine their projects.
Upcoming events
Term Three
Week Five
Friday 22 August, Assembly Year Five F, all welcome to attend in the Hall at 9.00am
Week Six
Monday 25 August, Boarders Closed Weekend (Whole School closed)
Tuesday 26 August, Year Five to Six AFL Dockers Girls Cup, (selected students) Centennial Park, 9.00am to 2.30pm
Thursday 28 August, Walk to School Day, Coraki Park, 8.00am
Week Seven
Wednesday 3 September, Kindergarten to Year Two Father's Morning, activities in classrooms and the Library for morning tea, 8.45am to 10.45am
Wednesday 3 September, Years Five and Seven, Spare Parts Puppet Play, in the Hall, 9.30am to 10.45am
Wednesday 3 September, Kindergarten Storytime presented by Albany Public Library, 11.30am to 12.00pm
Have a wonderful weekend,
Ms Leah Field | Head of Primary and
Mrs Hayley Ranger | Head of Early Childhood