Sustainability Team

The MPS Sustainability Team is back with a newly formed group of enthusiastic students for 2021. This year we plan on tackling our waste, starting with a ‘Clean up our school’ day on Tuesday. We are lucky as a nude food school that we have little rubbish in our grounds, but the team was still able to collect some rubbish, and promoted environmental care to the school community.

MPS Recycling Program

Here at MPS we have a recycling program where we have bins in every learning area to collect soft plastics, paper and cardboard, as well as compost (food scraps) for our vegie garden. The Sustainability Team wants to add more bins later.

Soft Plastics

Items like glad wrap and plastic bags are called soft plastics. They take a long time to break down and can choke animals mistaking them for food. Ways to help cut down on plastic use include using reusable bags, container and water bottles, and avoiding buying too many items that use plastic wrapping.

Paper And Cardboard Recycling

Recycling is important to make sure that we aren’t sending reusable items like plastic and paper to landfill. It is even better if you reuse recyclable items yourself, or don’t use it as all. As well as using the soft plastic tips, also make sure you pick up any plastic or paper you see and put it in a nearby recycling bin, then use hand sanitizer or soap and water.

Compost

Compost is broken down organic matter that helps plants grow. If you have a compost bin you can put most food scraps in,then after a while it will turn into rich nutrient filled soil which you can put on your garden. However there are some food scraps that can not go in your compost bin, like citric foods, for example lemon. If you are unsure about what these are and are not, visit this website: Composting Fruit & Vegetables

Written by Laura, Grade Six who is one of the Sustainability leaders, and adapted from Roshan, Tahlia and Ella, part of the sustainability team.

PREP Learning Area

The Preps are enjoying the phonics program and have been learning the chants and especially the actions for the letters they’re learning. They’re also learning about upper and lower case letters and starting points to practice letter formation. The letters we have learnt so far are:

/Mm/, /Aa/, /Ss/, /Tt/, /Bb/, /Gg/, /Ee/ and /Hh/.

Fun ways to learn the sound that each letter makes is to practice them at home with your children.

The letters we have covered in the last 2 weeks are:

Ss

Seals swim, seals slide - /s/s/s/

Use hands to make up and down swimming and sliding movements

Gg

Giggling girls - /g/g/g/

Nod head from side to side with a big grin

Ee

Empty eggs - /e/e/e/

Make a cup shape with hands to be empty egg shells

Hh

Happy house - /h/h/h/

Form a roof with hands overhead

Number lines and ten frames - what are they? If you don’t know, guess what? Your children do! They are learning to use number lines to locate numbers and show quantities using a ten frame. The children have also been learning to write numbers correctly. You can practise these at home, especially numbers from 0- 10. Write the numbers on paper, on whiteboards or use chalk to write them outside.

The children have also taken maths outdoors by identifying 2D shapes in the playground and making collections of objects in nature to match a number.

Grade 1 Learning Area

As part of our Integrated studies lessons, we have asked the question ‘Who are the people in our families?’ The students have produced a family tree to explore this. Have a look at the wonderful Family Trees the grade one students have produce.

Grade 2 Learning Area

It’s really only been a few weeks since the start of the school year but goodness we’ve been busy in the year 2 Learning Area!

We have been writing and sharing our special experiences with personal recounts.

We have also written wonderful letters to family and friends using the correct structure then finally publishing the letters.

Here are some of our amazing letters that we hope you will find interesting!

3/4 Learning Area

Place Value Project

The Grade 3/4's have been learning about Place Value with numbers up to 10,000 and for some even up to millions. MAB (multi arithmetic blocks) are one way of showing value using scale.

3/4D were intent on finding as many MAB that they needed in order to make the representation of 100,000. They were very impressed with themselves.

Growth Mindset Project

The grade 3/4 ‘s have been learning about Growth Mindsets. We have learned about famous people and the failures or challenges they faced in their lifetime before achieving success.

With a partner, we worked on our “Famous Failures” project. We researched a famous person who has achieved success and discovered how their challenges or failures helped them learn, and what they did to overcome those challenges.

The important things we learned about having a growth mindset were that a failure is an opportunity for learning new things, and sometimes you need to try lots of different things before you achieve your goal.

5/6 Learning Area

Merri creek Project

In week 6 the 5/6 ‘s kick-started off the Merri Merri creek project with the driving question of “What can one square metre tell us about the Merri Merri creek ecosystem?”

With alternating turns each class took a walk to the creek, and took a look at their one square metre while taking notes, drawing pictures and looking at things under the microscopes. With all the information we have about our square metre we are presenting our project in a unique way for the community to see.

Merri Creek Reading:

To learn more about the creek we read some information about the Merri Merri in our reading. We are learning to activate our prior knowledge about the creek and inferring images somewhat relating to the creek. While reading we learned information about the creek we were tasked to talk with a partner about what we found or inferred.

Merri Merri Math:

Last week we did something called Merri Merri maths. The activity involved remembering the route we took to the Merri creek and putting landmarks in our map design, with an extra challenge seeing if we could find our square metre’s along the path.

Captain's Corner

The "Captain's Corner" is going to be a little interview the School Captains & Vice Captains will do with different people around the school each fortnight. This week they had a chat with Brendan, our mural Artist.

Brendan's Interview- Captain's Corner

Q1: How does it feel to be an Aboriginal man in 2021?

It’s very challenging, there’s so much happening now and there are issues in the communities. And the world around us is changing.

Q2: How do your hands-on practices relate to the new science in the world?

We use modern-day technology to preserve our cultural practices.

Q3:What’s your opinion on Aboriginal languages dying out in Australia?

It's saddening to watch our languages disappear, our languages carry the meanings of us, the land, the animals. We need our languages back.

Q4: What traditional and modern cultures influence your artwork?

The elements that influence my work are the land, water, all the animals and the beautiful colours of nature, that’s what influences my work.

Q5: Are you an Aboriginal elder, If so what does that involve?

Younger generations tend to look up to me as a leader figure, but I wouldn’t consider myself as an elder. For me, there’s still much to learn about.

Q6: What makes you love art and when did you discover it?

When I was younger I used to draw at school and at home. But it wasn’t until 8 years ago where I started to take art seriously. However, two years ago I started to paint murals.

Q7: You're from Tati Tati country,

What was it like growing up there and what was the most interesting thing about living there?

It was different compared to now, we didn’t have any technology so we spent most of our time outside and swam in the hot summers. And we never had any junk food, there weren’t McDonald’s or KFC around so there wasn’t any junk around to eat|

Moreland Mail

Issue 3 · 12 Mar 2021

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