FNPS Fete 2024!

What a brilliant day it was on Sunday! It was wonderful to see our community come together at the fete, after months of build-up and hard work.

Not only was the fete an incredible fundraising event for our school, but also a fantastic chance to showcase so many great things about Fitzroy North Primary. Thank you so much to so many of our community members who helped make this event happen. This includes the fete committee who were responsible for organising and planning the many facets of the event, the Grade Parents who coordinated the stalls, the families who volunteered in the lead up to the event (including at the working bees and through endless fundraising and logistical activities), and the many family members, staff and students who helped on the day! A huge shout out to our incredible fete coordinators, Lincoln Gray and Iliana Martinez, for their exhaustive work in the lead-up to fete and on the day itself. The day would not have been the incredible success if was without your incredible work!

I spoke to a couple of our school leaders about their fete highlights. Alfie (6BM) said, “My highlight was playing on the stage, the sound was really good. The experience was lots of fun; I got to play with my brother.”

Alessio (6BA) said “My highlight was also playing music on the stage. I played with the ABC instrumental group and also the Grade 6 Rock Band. The day was a lot of fun!”

State Debating Competition - Fitzroy North Crowned State Champions

Today, nine of our Grade 5 and 6 students proudly represented FNPS at the State Debating Competition at St. Leonards College in Brighton. This competition follows weeks of preparation, where the students have been honing their debating skills and practicing with their own intra-school competition.

It was a strong start, with our first team (Oscar, Josh and Alex) winning their opening debate convincingly, arguing on the negative side that the sale of animal products should be banned. Our next team (Lilly, Ruby and Josh) presented the affirmative side of this argument in the next debate and lost in a tightly fought context. The next two teams (Lilly, Armaan, Alex, Sudays, Harry and Gully) then argued either side of the topic ‘that we prefer individual sports to team sports’. Unfortunately, we didn’t win either debate, but all the students did an excellent job and got some invaluable feedback from the adjudicators. Finally, two teams worked on ‘secret topics’, only discovering these at lunchtime and then having limited time to prepare their debates. We won one of these two debates.

At the award ceremony Fitzroy North Primary Team 1 (including Alex, Oscar, Josh and Lilly, Armaan) were crowned State Champions, winning the overall competition by one point! Congratulations to this team for their incredible efforts. A special mention to Alex who received the award for best overall speaker in the competition (including two best speaker awards), as well as Lilly who also won a best speaker award for one of her debates.

Well done to all the students for their performances today and thank you to the family members who came along to support the students.

Gully shared his thoughts with me about the State debating competition: “It was a fun and worthwhile learning experience. I was a bit nervous at first, but halfway through my debate I felt much better.”

Alex told me, “I was very proud of my achievements. It was a great experience to debate against such high level opponents. I was very glad that I won the best speaker award. I’ll definitely continue with my debating at Princess Hill, when I get to high school.”

A Day at Secondary School

On Wednesday our Grade 5 students got a taste of secondary school. They were invited to spend the morning at Fitzroy High School and rotated through several activities, including spending time in the science lab and music room. From my discussions with students afterwards, it seemed it was a really valuable experience and some told me they feel like they’re now ready to go to high school!

I had a chat with Brando about his experience, “Yesterday we went to Fitzroy High. We did science, art and music. My highlight was the science because they had actual science desks with gas valves and scientific machines - it was cool. And we got to make sparklers. It was a chance to see what it will be like to go to high school when we finish Grade 6. It was very fun.”

This opportunity is the beginning of the transition process for our Grade 5 students, many of whom have done school tours throughout the year and are starting to think about Year 7.

Our Grade 6s are now only weeks away from the big step up to secondary school. Tuesday 12th December is the statewide transition day for all government secondary schools and on that day many of our students will be spending the day at their 2024 school, meeting their teachers, making new friends and learning about life in Year 7.

Prep Mini Beasts Incursion

On Monday the Prep students had another exciting learning experience with their Marvellous Minibeasts Incursion. Students visited several stations where they could handle and feed a range of minibeasts, used microscopes to look more closely at some minibeasts and designed their own bug adaptations. This incursion supports the Preps learning around the ‘Bugs and Us’ unit, where we are going on a deep dive of how we share the planet with even the smallest creatures.

I spoke with Luca (PZP) about the incursion. “On Monday we had the minibeasts incursion and we learnt about mini beasts. We fed butterflies and we looked at stick insects. We made our own mini beats out of clay. It was really good!”

Have a wonderful weekend.

Toby

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