In the Classroom

Plastic Free July

In Science this term, students have been investigating the impact plastics are having on our environment, it’s people and animals. In our learning journey we discovered ‘Plastic Free July’, a world wide initiative to create a world without plastic waste. 

So, Niangala Public School is cleaning up our act! We are joining schools around the globe during the first 4 weeks of term 3, by taking the Plastic Free Schools challenge to rethink our need for plastic wrapped items. As custodians of our beautiful school and environment, we have conducted a garbage bin audit and plan to set up recycling stations in the classrooms, staffroom and playground to monitor what waste ends up in our bins. This will help us see what the pesky plastics are and work towards finding a solution to reduce waste and live more sustainably.  So stay tuned.

The staff and students at Niangala Public School invite you to join the Plastic Free Schools challenge! Together we can make a difference. Many families have found inspirational plastic waste reduction tips from other schools on the Plastic Free July website www.plasticfreejuly.org If you would like to know more, please don’t hesitate to contact the school.

Kind regards,

Kelly Makeham 

Plastic Free July is a global movement that helps millions of people be part of the solution to plastic pollution – so we can have cleaner streets, oceans, and beautiful communities. 

Small steps, big difference

This year’s Plastic Free July campaign focuses on small changes each of us can make to reduce plastic waste under the slogan “Small steps, big difference”. Each year millions of Plastic Free July participants from over 190 countries worldwide are together making a big difference by choosing to refuse single-use plastic.

An astonishing 10 billion kgs of household waste has been avoided by participants over the last five years because millions of people choose to make a change for cleaner streets, healthy oceans,  and beautiful communities or just to do the right thing.

Choose one single-use plastic to avoid or take the pledge to avoid single-use cups, plastic drink bottles, or plastic food wrap. These “Top 3” items are single-use plastic items we commonly use each day that most of us can be easily replaced by;

• Refilling reusable water bottles from the tap
• Bringing a reusable cup or sitting and enjoy a real cup
• Switching from plastic wrap to reusable containers or wax wraps.

Life Skills GO

Whole school wellbeing, whole student wellbeing

Niangala students have been trialling the emotion check in through Life Skills GO for the past two weeks.  The check in provides real time feedback for proactive wellbeing response.  The data assesses learner readiness and identifies students that may need additional support before commencing their learning.

What is Life Skills GO?

Life Skills GO is an easy-to-use emotion and wellbeing data collection tool that measures readiness to learn through empowered student voice, displays real-time dashboards, reports and insights enabling educators to make informed decisions, and provides quality evidence based and curriculum aligned resources and adaptive lessons to support social and emotional literacy and foster wellbeing.

What is wellbeing data?

The wellbeing data collected by GO is based on student-led emotional responses and related contexts.

How are you feeling today? “I’m feeling happy.”

Why are you feeling that way? “I’m happy because of something that happened at home”

GO provides up to 48 emotional responses (not all emotions are on offer to choose from all at once) cross-referenced with 5 common school-based contexts.

Art

Using black glue to create the outline of a flower and chalk pastels to add colour the children have created amazing Flowers. It is always wonderful to see how everyone creates something different with similar instructions.

Cooking 

Years 2-6 cooked a vegetarian frittata to share for lunch on Tuesday 18 June.  They enjoyed being back in the kitchen making a healthy nutritious lunch to sit down and share with staff and kindergarten students.

Vegetarian Frittata Recipe

Fluency through Reader's Theatre

The students are working on their phrasing, expression, accuracy and rate when reading and practicing this using Reader's Theatre is lots of fun. It was entertaining when Chaise, Chanse and Valerie recently performed their Reader's Theatre for us during assembly. The audience were entertained by the interesting accents and portrayals of the different characters in the play.  Thank you Chaise, Valerie and Chanse.