Specialist News

S.T.E.M. 2023 The journey so far.

This year has seen STEM as a new specialist subject for our school and I am very proud that STEM will be continuing in 2024 with myself at the teacher. I will be moving spaces from my current room to the double portable near Derby St. This will allow me to have more of an open teaching space as well space to store all of my resources. (And more room to run experiments, program robots, build catapults... the plan is endless). Did I mention I want to launch rockets next year?

I am very thankful to the fundraising committee for helping raise additional money to purchase 2 sets of programmable robots for 2023 and a complete class set of electronic kits for use in 2024. I am very thankful to the many parents and students who have donated cardboard, material, string, lego, cars, straws, pipe cleaners and other things that have been the lifeblood of our design-make-create this year. A personal thankyou to Jo Howard who has kept her keen eye out for many additional donations throughout the year.

In brief, my highlights of STEM for 2023 were

• Our chemical experiments in Term 1 including our attempt at dancing ooblek.
• Grade 3-4 designing catapults to launch things over 7 metres.
• The level of detail in the microorganism models and biomes completed by the grade 5-6 students.
• The coding completed by the students on code.org including the grade 1s attempting their first (small) matching challenge.
• The preps creating their insects in Term 4 and space exploration vehicles in Term 2
• Our experiment on the needs of plants that ran over 4 weeks.
• The Visiting planetarium dome learning about the Earth and planets.
• The incursion by Swinburne University on robotics (grade 2) and circuits (grade 5-6).
• The weather channel presentations filmed by grade 1 and grade 2 students.
• The Sphero robot chariot races.
• The successful grade 3-4 students who got to extract some of their DNA this term.

I could go on with many more examples.

Thankyou for your amazing support of the STEM program, and I promise that more will be to come next year.

Stephen Lytton, STEM specialist teacher.

PE & Sport

Next year will be an earlier start to Summer Interschool Sport. Our first game is scheduled for Friday, week 2 2024 in Term 1. That means we will have our sport try outs earlier than usual. We will be commencing try outs for Bat tennis, Softball and Basketball Friday week (week 11). The grade 4 students will come out to join the grade 5s between recess and lunchtime to start the practise and selection process. 

I have attached the fixture for next year for your reference.

We are also in the process of setting up a rewards program with The Athlete's Foot store at Highpoint shopping centre, which has two stores. If you buy a pair of shoes at the stores, $5.00 will be donated back to our school to assist in purchasing PE equipment. So if you think you may be purchasing some new runners for yourself, your child or children it will benefit the school.

I have attached a preliminary flyer, however I am in the process of setting up our application with the store. When this is done I will get our unique poster and QR sanner code for the school. When this is done I wil send it out on Compass.

Barry Rees.