From the classrooms

Infants

What an awesome final fortnight for the term we’ve had. So much fun, excitement and participation with the Colour Run, Athletics Carnival, Merit Event and SRC Social. It was just fantastic to see all of our students getting involved and having a wonderful time at each of these events, and the staff doing the same. Everyone has been in great spirits and enjoying the time together taking part in these long-anticipated activities.

Student reports were sent home on Wednesday. We will be holding parent-teacher interviews in Week 3 of next term, details of which will be sent home shortly. Staff look forward to further discussing student progress during these interviews.

We are also extremely excited to be holding our Infants Excursion to Canberra Theatre in Week 1 next term. We will be traveling by coach to see ‘The Twits’ live theatre performance, which is something we’re all looking forward to. Please sign the permission note and return with payment to the office as soon as possible. We acknowledge the short turn around and appreciate your understanding.

Have a happy, safe and relaxing holiday with family and friends!

Ms Mem Brougham  

Assistant Principal Infants (relieving)

K/1 class

We have finally had a full class of healthy people at school and enjoying learning with all our friends together again. We have spent time revising and consolidating our reading, writing, and counting skills. We have also looked over our workbooks and work samples from earlier in the year and have blown our socks off with how much we have learnt and improved. It is fantastic to see how proud students are of their achievements.

This fortnight we have been reading many Dreamtime stories and reflecting on these. We have also been working on artworks that will be displayed in the library as part of Education Week. We hope many families and friends will be able to join us for many of our activities during Education Week. 

Ms Mem Brougham - K/1 teacher

2/3 class

Year 2/3 have had a fantastic term learning and exploring innovative ideas together. We are very lucky to have Ms Nosworthy teaching us music this term, we love learning how to play the boom whackers. We have enjoyed exploring in the garden and seeing which plants are growing and learning about bees. 

During gardening we also conducted some eggsperiments with eggs. We discovered that eggs are pretty eggcellent to use for many different things. We eggspecially enjoyed all of the egg puns the teachers came up with.

After watching Charlie and the Chocolate Factory we created our own colourful flowers by cutting out shapes in brightly coloured paper and sticking them together, they looked just like Mr Wonka's garden in the movie. We enjoyed our day at the athletics carnival with lots of smiles and laughs as we encouraged each other in all of our events. We have been going to the computer lab to practise our computer skills each week and we are getting particularly good at logging ourselves on to the computers and completing our work. During art lessons we have been creating dream catchers in preparation for education week next term. We are looking forward to a fun a busy Term 3, after a nice break in the holidays.

Ms Nat Downey - 2/3 teacher

Well, we have now reached the end of Term 2, which has been a busy and entertaining term. We have had our Cross Country, Athletics Carnival and Mortimer Shield. We've also had Rostrum Public Speaking, District and Western Sports Carnivals, Year 6 Transition Day, Colour Run, NAPLAN, School Photos and our class Spelling Bees - It certainly has been busy.

We look forward to welcoming you into the school for Education Week in Week 2 of Term 3. Lots of activities are in store and the students have been working hard to practise their skills and performances.

I would like to thank Mr Keighley for helping us out being the Yindy teacher for the last three terms. It has been great having him a part of our faculty and we wish him all the best as he returns to his position in the High School HUB. I would also like to extend a huge thank you to Brett Sullivan who is moving with his family back to Sydney in the coming weeks - we wish him all the best and it's been fantastic working with him this year.

I hope you get a lot out of reading the student half-yearly reports. The teaching staff put an incredible amount of time in to writing them, and they are an excellent documentation of achievement, effort and progress. I look forward to meeting with parents at the parent/teacher meetings early Term 2.

4/5 class

Time flies when you are learning and having fun! I can't believe we are halfway through the year already! 4/5 have finished a unit of work on persuasive writing with excellent results. We continue to grow as readers and are looking forward to exploring a new novel next term. Students are now asking for longer than 20 minutes each day, but I have to remind them that we have other work to complete. I encourage all students to read for 20 minutes each night, this is especially important in the school holidays. It is so nice to see the students love for reading increasing. 

In mathematics, we continue to focus on the basics: addition, subtract, multiplication, and division. We are using these skills to solve more complex problems that require multiple steps. We have also looked at angles, fractions, decimals and reading maps. I have introduced a new game called Numero to help with our mental calculations. I continue to work with the student’s times table fluency, and I encourage you to practise with your children for a few minutes each day in the holidays. 

As always, we have enjoyed our cooking lessons and during our gardening lesson we loved making origami flowers! We have been making some eagles and butterflies to display in the library during book week next term. We have started coding in class and will be using these skills with Mrs Bridge in STEM next term during robotics lessons. 

We have started learning about metacognition (thinking about thinking) to understand how we learn best. We are using metacognitive strategies to learn about growth and fixed mindsets. Someone with a growth mindset views intelligence, abilities, and talents as learnable and capable of improvement through effort. A fixed mindset means that you believe intelligence is fixed—so if you’re not good at something, you might believe you’ll never be good at it. The way we think about our intellect and talents not only affects the way we feel, but it can also affect what we achieve, whether we stick to old habits, or if we will go on to develop new skills. Next term we will continue learning about growth mindsets and I will be encouraging the students to adopt this mindset to help them have a positive outlook on learning.

Matthew Rowley - 4/5 teacher

5/6 Class

In the 5/6 classroom we have been lucky to have Miss Wales teaching us for the past few weeks for an hour or two each day. Miss Wales was fantastic as a student teacher, and we hope that she comes back when she is finished her university degree. 

In English, we are continuing our work on Muster Dogs, the ABC iView documentary. We have also moved onto geometry in mathematics, and we look forward to exploring more 2D and 3D space in the future. We are working on LEGO Bots in STEM and enjoy working together to solve problems. In creative arts we are working on different songs that we will be performing at SMArt Night!

Well done to Bonny Bromham who won the Rostrum Yass District Public Speaking Competition on Monday night. Bonny's achievement is thoroughly deserved, and we look forward to celebrating future success with her as she progresses to the next round that is held in Canberra in August.

Take care and have a happy, safe and enjoyable holiday break.

Jason Stuart

5/6 Classroom Teacher

Assistant Principal Primary (Relieving)