Primary School

Classroom News

We hope you enjoyed visiting our classrooms during the Kingfisher Fair and Open Day. Our teachers and students are incredible, and we were extremely proud to showcase their hard work, joy and learning. 

We invite you to enjoy reading about what our classes have been up to this week.

Djinda 

It was so wonderful to see so many Djindas walking around the grounds on Sunday with their families, enjoying incredible live music, showing off their classrooms to great-grandparents and beaming with pride seeing their chickens showcased amongst the ‘big kids’ work! This week we continue to soar ahead; we are creating a Djinda book titled The Places We Roam where each child’s art expertise, shared vision and dialogue will be used. In coming weeks, snippets will be shared as the project and excitement grows!

Kindergarten

As we near the end of term, it has been lovely to enjoy some of the beautiful weather and spend more time exploring our Wild Space. Recently, we have been noticing the creatures we find and the different homes they make. This week, our attention has turned to water. The children have noticed how much it can change from one visit to the next. Sometimes there is lots of space to play, while other times the water comes right up to the trees, leaving us with only a small space to explore. We wonder why??? We have also noticed that the water under the bridge is sometimes clear enough to see what is happening underneath, while at other times it is very dark. These observations have sparked lots of wondering and conversations as we continue to look closely at the changes happening around us.

Pre-Primary

Pre-Primary have had a very busy term! We have celebrated 100 Days of School, an excursion and to round things off, both classes are presenting assemblies! Of course, we have been continuing to practise our phonics, our reading, our writing and lots of Mathematics skills, too. We continue to love going to the Wild Space and have been putting our observational skills to work finding and recording living things.

Year One

What a glorious day it was on Friday for the Year One excursion! Our first stop was the Patrick Taylor cottage, where the children marvelled at the old toys including toy soldiers, wind up trains, tea sets and a 159-year-old doll named Emily! Our guide, Belinda, also gave us a tour of the cottage and showed us some fabulous historical artefacts. Our next stop was the teddy den. We were all amazed at how many teddies could fit in one room! There were teddies in a hospital, teddies having a picnic and teddies flying. We saw famous teddies, massive teddies and ancient teddies, and we were thrilled when Sue presented us all with our own packet of Tiny Teddies! Our last stop was the Albany Residency Museum. Rachel helped us to extend our inquiry knowledge with a range of toys and games from the past. We then got to play these old-fashioned games and then met our families for a teddy bears picnic in the grounds of the museum. Thank you to those parents for coming and for bringing some delicious teddy themed food! A special thank you to Mrs Cameron for driving the bus, Mrs Ranger for joining us and, of course, Mrs Ramsell!

Year Two

What a busy couple of weeks we have had in Year Two as we begin to wrap up Term Three. The students have had lots of fun learning about and sharing their knowledge of the planets in our Solar System, working together to help problem solve when we face challenges using technology and working hard on building our time-telling skills! We even got to do some spelling out in the wild weather this week, using the bricks outside the gym to sound box our spelling list words and writing some creative sentences with conjunctions and adjectives.

Year Three 

We have commenced our final shared writing task for this term. As we are focusing on character development in a narrative, it is allowing students to be creative and have extra fun with their writing. Students have made a fantastic start and are highly engaged. Our opening line for the shared writing is: 'When I opened my lunchbox on Friday morning, I saw a tiny robot hiding behind my apple. It was no bigger than my fingernail.' Students have had a lot of fun creating their own characters and settings. Some have chosen to discover a chicken in a barn, while others have chosen to find a rat in a tractor or a brown bear in a school bag. I am truly excited to watch them develop their narrative writing skills and apply these in our hot task next week.

Year Four

It has been another busy and exciting week in Year Four! Students have begun their journey into becoming poets, exploring creativity and expressive language, while in Mathematics they have been mastering division with and without remainders. In Science, students put their geology knowledge to the test, revisiting rocks, Earth’s layers and the processes that shape our planet. Outside the classroom, students showed fantastic School spirit during the Battle of the Bands and House Singing, giving their all and supporting their Houses. A special shoutout to our Year Four girls, who ran a cake stall for R U OK? Day last Thursday and raised an incredible $250+! Their initiative, generosity and community spirit were fantastic to see.

Year Five

We have stepped into the big blue police call box and begun learning about timey-whimey things. If you read that last couple of words in David Tennant’s voice, I’ll see you at comic-con next year my fellow Dr Who fans. For those of us more interested in the Mathematics side of things, this is what Year Five time looks like. We begin with simple conversions and appropriating the language of time. It is a pleasure to finally hear students refer to time numerically rather than … lunch time. As we progressed through the week, we learnt about ante meridiem (a teenager’s least favourite) and post meridiem (afternoon to those not versed in Latin). We will be moving logically onto time taken next and finishing up with timetabling as we end the term.

Year Six 

The excitement in Year Six never seems to stop and our last week has been no exception. Our amazing young writers headed off to the Young Writers Workshop on Tuesday, and our incredible musicians were absolute professionals during Kingfisher Concert rehearsals and the performance on Thursday night. The Dockers Shield, last Thursday, was an awesome opportunity to give AFLW football a try and all reports were of a fantastic day. In the classroom, it is very exciting to see some longer projects ending and let's just say we have a little feeling that salty water is perhaps not the wisest choice for having seeds germinate. With the wrapping up of Economics and Business in Humanities, we have been investigating specific methods of business and in Mathematics we are realising that when our teachers told us at the beginning of the year that we would be very, very familiar with decimals, percentages and fractions by the end of the year, they were right!

ECC Briefing

The following superstars have worked exceptionally well and received a Star Award for their outstanding efforts. 

Kindergarten A: Hugo Walls 

Kindergarten B: Alaina Chen

Pre-Primary A: William Marsh

Pre-Primary B: Shamiso Paradza 

Year One: Charlie Macdonald 

Year Two A: Isla Hodge 

Year Two B: Georgia Gent  

Students have been focusing on the value of Compassion this week. Well done to the following students who stood out within their classrooms: 

Kindergarten A: Matthew Brown

Kindergarten B: Wyatt Downham

Pre-Primary A: Tom Keeler

Pre-Primary B: Remi Yap

Year Two A: Harvey Lucas

Year Two B: Soraya Leslie 

Primary School Briefing

Congratulations to our students who have shown the School value of Compassion this week. 

Year Three: Elliott Ruffell

Year Four: Eymen Carter and Aurora Leslie

Year Five: Finley Branchi and Hannah Fergie

Year Six: Isla Kiddle and Brock Nelson

Ten-Minute Tables

Well done to our new 120 club members: Charlotte Owenell, Harry Vesey and Sophie Mitrovski.

We wish all our students the best in their Grand Finals this weekend. Win or lose, GSG is behind you all the way! 

Have a wonderful weekend.  

Ms Leah Field | Head of Primary and

Mrs Hayley Ranger | Head of Early Childhood