Infants and Primary

Rostrum Public Speaking

On Thursday, 21st May, we celebrated our young speakers at the Rostrum Public Speaking School Finals! Congratulations to Grace Crawford (Stage 3 winner) and Lachlan Gledhill (Stage 2 winner)—both inspired us with their passionate speeches about “Bees”. 

A huge shout-out to all seven participants: Milla Apps, Sophie Armour, Ruby Bloxsome, Annabelle Collins, Grace Crawford, Lachlan Gledhill, and Harper Mayne. Each student impressed their peers with their confidence, creativity, and enthusiasm! 

Thank you to all our families for your encouragement and support in helping our students prepare and shine. A special thank you to our judge, Jen Cox (English/HSIE Head Teacher), for sharing her expertise and helping select our winners.

Well done, everyone! We are so proud of our public speakers! 

Charlotte Groves

Lunchtime Lego Club

K-6 students have loved joining in with lunchtime clubs lately. On Monday, students had Lego club. It was fabulous to see different students working together to build some amazing creations, and participate in more quiet, passive playtime if they chose. 

Stewart House

Recently, Neihana had the wonderful opportunity to spend two weeks at Stewart House on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. Located opposite Curl Curl Beach, Stewart House provided Neihana with stunning ocean views throughout his stay.

Neihana had an amazing time trying many new experiences and making friends with students from across NSW. He also enjoyed learning with different teachers while continuing to keep up with his schoolwork in the classroom.

Every second day, students were treated to excursions around Sydney. Some of Neihana’s favourite experiences included visiting Taronga Zoo — where the chimpanzees were a highlight — exploring museums, swimming at the underground pool, and visiting the Sydney Olympic Park Aquatic Centre, along with many other exciting places around the city.

The students enjoyed daily walks and swims at the beach, as well as delicious home-cooked meals. According to Neihana, the lasagne was definitely the best! He says that when he is 20 years old, he will look back on his time at Stewart House and remember how much he enjoyed trying new things, especially the woodworking classes.

We sincerely thank Stewart House for providing this wonderful opportunity for our students.

Mrs Denise Corkhill 

Year 1/2

Year 1/2 have been very busy over the last few weeks preparing their item about sea turtles to present at the assembly on Monday, we hope everyone enjoyed our presentation, we certainly enjoyed learning about them. On Tuesday we had 'Do it for Dolly' day, we had lots of discussions about bullying and what we can do to stop this from happening in our school and our community, we made crowns to remind everyone that it is cool to be kind. We have also been working on improving our addition and subtraction skills through games. We have been playing 'Clear the board' this week. We even looked at the probability of which numbers are likely to come up more often and then we were able to play this game with a strategy. We have been reading the text 'A Year on our Farm' and talking about nouns. We drew pictures of the things we find on farms and have been talking about the seasons and how they change what happens on the farm throughout the year. We enjoyed our safety walk around town last week on 'walk safe to school' day and even got to stop and have a play in the park. Lots of fun things happening in Year 1/2.

Ms Natalie Downey 

Infants

Lots of fantastic learning has been happening in our Infants area.  We have been enjoying noticing the change in weather with the warm days finally giving way to some much needed rain and greening up our outdoor spaces a bit, and now of course the cooler mornings as Winter gets ready to set in.  Please remember to make sure your children have appropriate warm clothing that is labelled so that it can go home on or with the right person ready for a fresh start the following day.

Last week our Infants Students enjoyed a walk around Boorowa as part of ‘National Walk To School Day’. We acknowledge that many of our students aren’t able to walk to school, so we chose this alternative activity as a way of enjoying our town on foot, while at the same time identifying and practicing safe places and ways to walk in our town. We had lots of fun spying ducks and tyring to spy a platypus along the river, and then stopped at the park for a quick play before heading back to school.

Our focus at school is for learning and being safe with our friends. Each day, all staff work together with this in mind, and our regular TRP lessons (The Resilience Project) and PBL expectations (Respect, Responsibility and Participation) are taught across our school. The consistent expectations of our staff help align what is taught in the classroom is also being followed up in the playground. Students can expect, and benefit from, common language and expectations from classroom teachers, duty teachers and any casual teacher who might be at school. 

Kindergarten 2027 Stay and Play     

Last Tuesday, 19 May, we welcomed prospective Kindergarten 2027 students and their families into our school for a ‘Stay and Play’ and information session. This was such a great opportunity for students and families to explore our classroom, playground and Library spaces and get a feel for what our wonderful school has to offer. Our Kindy students enjoyed featuring in a short ‘movie’ to share with our new families – you can view this ‘Day of Life in Kindergarten’ on the BCS Facebook page if you wish.

Kindy

The learning in Kindergarten is going ahead in leaps and bounds. Many of our Kindergarten students are really seeing all the foundational sound skills we’ve been working on begin to ‘click’ into place as they are becoming more confident in reading and writing short words. This is such an exciting time for young learners when the reading and writing process begins to make more sense and have more meaning and helps to set them up for future reading and writing success. 

In Mathematics, we have been busy sorting, categorising and displaying information. We have realised that we can sort and classify in many different ways, and have explored this by sorting different items in our classroom and playground, such as, shape blocks, fruit and animals. We have also been playing many games to help consolidate our number sequencing using cards. It has been fantastic to see our Kindergarten students working together with different partners to build these skills – so much academic and social skill learning happening.

We have been learning about the needs of living things in Science. Great fun was had when we explored how plants absorb water using celery, white flowers and food colouring. The ‘magic’ happened very quickly with our celery leaves turning pink overnight and our white flowers being tinged green. Students have enjoyed making observations of this process over time.  We have visited the school farm recently to observe and explore the needs of some of the living things we have at school, and have really enjoyed saving our fruit scraps for the chooks.