14-27 School News 

It has been fantastic getting out into the playground this week to do some yard duties. Students have been enjoying the sunshine and making the most of the playgrounds. Catherine brings out her drums to have a Drumming session in the sun with the kids. Some are playing tag with their friends while others are playing football on playground 6. Our students love their time out in the yards and it’s great to see staff joining in with games and activities as well. 

The classrooms take part in a weekly colouring competition. As I have been visiting classrooms, students have been eager to show their beautiful colouring in. Each week students wait eagerly to find out who has won. I am grateful it is not my job to pick a winner as I would want to pick them all! 

This week students made pizza in the Stephanie Alexander kitchen garden program. Students chose toppings such as tomato sauce, cheese, olives, pineapple, spinach, capsicum and oregano from the garden. The students enjoyed rolling out the dough and cutting up their ingredients. The pizzas were very tasty. Be sure to get your child to make some pizzas at home as we have some quite good pizza chefs here! 

Room 16 has been enjoying borrowing books from the library. Students have particular favourites and they really enjoy big books. The library is a space enjoyed by all of our students at JSA. It has many books to suit all reading levels as well as resources that can be used in the classroom like puppets and readers. Students are able to go there during class time as well as borrow books to take back to the classroom. Teachers encourage their students to read often and to find enjoyment when reading.

Room 20

It has been a very busy week in Room 20 this term. For most of us, we are heading into the final six months of our schooling, we are putting together a project that best reflects the class's art skills, and we are doing a lot of things inside and outside the school that classify as industry experience.

Last week, we joined the ADVANCE classes on an excursion to Dream City which is at South Wharf DFO. While we were there, we tried our hand at a few different activities related to different industries. We explored coding techniques to give directions to robots, we named and measured animatronic babies in a nursery ward and we even got to try a flight simulator where we all got to try and fly an aeroplane. Easily our favourite part of the excursion was the Virtual Reality exhibit. None of us had seen anything quite like it.

This week, students who had completed their VET Visual Arts started a new industry based experience at Ellenni & Co. in Essendon. As it was our first day, we did a tour and an induction of the program, including OHS briefings. We also worked on designing and creating mosaic pieces and naturally dyed material using plant matter. We will be doing some more project-based activities which will link to our VCAL outcomes and we will have a good time doing so.