19 June 2019

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From the Principal

Our Motto: Friendly Respectful Courageous Learning

Our Commitment: With courage we learn, connecting to people and place. Striving for excellence by being curious, creative and resilient.

We are very fortunate to have students with such a diversity of talents at our school. Last Saturday we had a Circus Workshop in our school gymnasium with 3 different sessions involving 45 current and past students attending. Everyone had a great time learning, demonstrating new skills and having fun, please check out the gallery from the circus workshops.

Congratulations to all of our students who competed to the best of their abilities in the ENE Cross Country at Winnaleah. From all accounts our students were courageous and competitive with the following students achieving top 10 placings and qualifying for the State Cross Country: Ashar Maddox 7th, Isla de Boer 8th, Eva Bermudes 2nd, Forest Adams 1st, Ruby Sparshott 3rd, Hallie Thompson 7th, Grace Briggs 9th and Ocean Adams 7th. Well done to every student who competed and in particular, to Frankie Watson who never gave up and was the first Bicheno student to finish in his race.

In 2019, Bicheno Primary School, St Marys District School and St Helens District High School have embarked on a learning journey to build common teaching practice across our schools. Internationally recognised school improvement researchers, Pamela Macklin and Vic Zbar, have been sharing their knowledge and expertise with us and are supporting us with our improvement journey. Pamela visited our schools on May 20th and 21st to work with Principals and Literacy Coaches as part of this work. One of our focus areas has been to develop an instructional model for use across our schools.

When teachers are planning lessons, they use an instructional model which outlines what happens at the beginning, middle and end of a lesson and includes teaching strategies which are intended to achieve the highest learning impact for students. It is important that our students have consistency in the instructional model that their teachers use so that they do not have to re-learn the model with each different teacher.

Our teachers have examined instructional models from a range of schools, which include well-researched, high impact teaching strategies. From this work, we will develop an instructional model for our schools.

On July 22nd, the first day of term 3, teachers from Bicheno, St Helens, St Marys, Campbell Town and Winnaleah will be meeting together for professional learning in relation to our work with the instructional model. The Department of Education School Improvement Leader, Shireen Thomas, Principals, our Assistant Principal Middle Years Literacy Project, our In-School Literacy coaches will be leading some of this work and teachers will be working together to focus on the high impact teaching strategies which are part of our instructional model.

Next week, on Thursday June 27th, we will be offering a parent information session at 3.00pm about how to talk with your child about their reading at home. The session will run for 45 minutes and we would love to see you all there.

Mid Term Reports are being sent home on Friday 21st June. This will give parents/guardians time to reflect on your child’s progress in 2019 and also focus any questions around learning improvements you may have for Parent Teacher conferences which are on next week Tuesday 25th June to Thursday 27th June. This is a wonderful opportunity to focus on the school/parent partnership and how we maximise every child’s learning.

Have a wonderful fortnight and I hope everyone stays warm!

Best regards
Rob Presswell

What’s happening in our classrooms?

Kinder Bee Enquiry

Kinder students this term have begun learning about bees as part of our current inquiry project. This came from questions posed by the children after bug hunting in our playground:

• I wonder how bees make honey?
• I wonder if bumble bees make honey?

We began our inquiry with a talking tub full of items and pictures related to bees and honey to help our investigation. Talking tubs stimulate children’s senses, encourages talking and thinking, and this enabled our Kinder students to really engage in their learning. We completed our second talking tub a few weeks later. This was full of tools and items to make a natural bee hive and reflected the children’s interests in hives. We also have a talking floorbook on display in Kinder with all our thoughts, wonderings and questions.

We have learnt the following and completed these activities this term as part of our bee inquiry:

• Tasted different kinds of honey and described how these tasted, what they looked like and what they smelt like
• Cooking – made pikelets to eat with honey and smoothies sweetened with honey
• Watched videos of bee keepers collecting frames and spinning honey
• Learnt that a hive has a queen bee, worker and drone bees. Hives also have guard bees that protect the hive from insects such as wasps
• Learnt how bees make honey – ask us about a bee’s honey stomach!
• Learnt how bees make beeswax in frames to make honey and lay eggs.
• Learnt about the lifecycle of a bee
• Worked with Scott to make a natural bee hive using tools
• Designed a bee hive and made it using Lego

What a busy term we have had. We are very excited as to what direction our inquiry goes in next – and the best thing is that it is driven by the children’s interests and questions.

Prep/One

Social/Emotional:

We are learning to listen respectfully when others are speaking.

Reading:

We are learning to recognise and say letter combinations such as qu, ou, oi, ue, er, ar

Writing:

We are learning to use a computer to type our writing..

Numeracy:

We are learning about ordinal numbers.

Science:

We are learning to understand how the weather affects everyday life.

HASS:

We are learning to describe places we live and belong to.

Grade 1/2

In English, we are learning to accurately spell words with regular spelling patterns and words with less common long vowel patterns. For example, long vowels: ai/ay, oa/o_e, and ee/ea.

We are also learning to use punctuation accurately, and write words and sentences legibly using unjoined upper- and lower-case letters.

In Maths, we are learning to recognise increasing and decreasing number sequences. For example, we have been counting on and back in 2s, 3s, 5s, and 10s from any starting point.

We are also learning to recognise patterns in number sequences, such as adding and subtracting 10 always results in the same final digit. (e.g. 74, 84, 94, 104, 114 …)

In Science, we are learning about mixtures in our chemical sciences unit All mixed up. We are learning about materials that don’t mix well, and others that are difficult to separate.

Grade 3/4

In Literacy we are exploring spelling patterns and rules with a focus on words ending in “tion” and long and short vowel sounds with words ending in “le”

In Numeracy we are exploring angles and creating symmetrical shapes and patterns.

Grade 5/6

In English

• Reading :- author’s purpose: - to entertain, to inform or to persuade
• the impact characters and setting has on a story
• Writing :- language devices - metaphors

In Maths

• working with positive and negative numbers
• using a grid system and a number plane for plotting and finding locations
• problem solving
• fractions of quantity

In HASS

• Australia’s system of law making

In Science

• about the three states of matter: solid, liquid and gas
• changes in states of matter

In Art

• portraiture

Indonesian

• In kinder we are continuing with the ELLA apps and learning how to count to 11.
• In Prep/1 and 1/2 we are learning the days of the week.
• In 3/4 and 5/6 we are extending vocabulary around days of the week and months of the year.

Monday/ Senin, Tuesday/ Selasa, Wednesday/Rabu, Thursday/Kamis, Friday/ Jumat, Saturday/Sabtu, Sunday/Minggu.

Bicheno Primary logo redesign project

This June the school community will be collaborating on a brand refresh project, beginning with the redesign of the school logo.

Local design teacher, Carl Noonan, will be guiding the students through the redesign of the logo in a staged, collaborative process.

The western wall of the library will be used as a design process wall where research and design ideas will develop, so that the students will see their work and the work of other students, parents and teachers as it develops.

The three design territories we will explore are

• The local environment
• Education and learning
• School values.

Students will be learning about the design process, the concept of collective identity and understanding audience. Carl will coach the students through simple, practical ways of graphic symbolism.

Input from parents and members of the local community is very welcome.

Evidence of our work from Week 1

Carl Noonan

School banking

Important dates

LiL calendar

School Association Update

Position available: Bicheno Primary School Association Secretary

The Bicheno Primary School Association still has a position vacant as of term 4 2019 for a Secretary. While there is an expectation that all members will attend all meetings, these are usually bi-monthly along with ad-hoc catch ups and we are flexible with meeting dates to work around members availability.

We also welcome all school community members along to all our meetings and join our discussions.

If you would like to volunteer your time to support our students, please speak with any member of the committee.

School Disco

Notices will soon go home for our annual BPSA sponsored student disco. We require a small number of parent volunteers to help supervise the event on 4th July, 4.30-6pm. If you hold a current working with vulnerable people card and would like to assist then please speak to a member of our committee.

Walk-For-A-Cause update

The first 3 backpacks have been delivered to children in Subaya Village in Bali. The Bali Children’s Project have sent some photos and the kids were very excited to receive their school supplies. Once again we thank the entire school community for supporting this wonderful initiative.

Lego Holiday Program

Footy Margin Tickets

Round 11 Winner was Corinna Taylor
Round 12 winner was Kathy Poole
No winner for round 10 as yet

Songwriting Holiday Sessions

Dental Service

More information regarding the Royal Flying Doctor Service

Information for parents

A friendly reminder that the school has a duty of care for student from 8:15am, extending to 3:15pm. Students on the school grounds outside of these operating hours must be under parental supervision. The school toilets and classrooms are closed at 2:45pm. There are public toilets located next to Little Penguins Child Centre.

Rob Presswell

School Information

Phone: 63751222
Email: bicheno.primary@education.tas.gov.au
Principal: Robert Presswell
School Business Manager: Sandra Silberberg

Teachers

Kinder and LiL: Eliza Spykers
Prep/One: Bronti Cooke and Bron Pierce
Grade 1/2: Bruce Campbell and Jen Sliskovic
Grade 3/4: Sam Kelly
Grade 5/6: Jill Bosua
Support Teacher: Bron Pierce

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