Welcome Back to School!

School Performance Base Layers needed for costumes 

Can all students please bring a base layer of black to school for the performance asap? 

This would mean black pants/leggings and black top, preferably long sleeve with no logos/colour. 

If parents can put them in a bag with your childs name on each item of clothing and the bag, that would be great.

They can be left in the art room and I will sort out boxes for each grade level next week. Thanks, Kate

Apologies for the change of date for the curriculum day.  Please note it is 20th August. If you need Outside School Hours Care, please contact Kerrie.

Helpers needed. Our Student Council members sent out a survey and got fantastic response from parents. They are keen to get the Friday food happening but we need at least 2 adults who can take this on together. The most popular options are pizza and toasties to start with…

First Nations Ways: Country and Place helpers for 7th August needed

We need 2 parent or family helpers for each class to come in next Thursday to work with Kath and the students making clap sticks. The adults will be sawing the sticks for students.

P-1 9-10am

2-3-4 11:30-12:30

5-6 12:30-1:30

From the Office...

Semester 1 Reports

Semester 1 reports are now available on Compass. Follow the prompts on your Compass dashboard: Academic reports

If you have not had your student/parent/ teacher learning conference, please make a time as soon as possible!

Year 6-7 Transition

The Castlemaine Secondary College Principal Team are offering Tours for any interested current Year 6 families and their students on the following dates:

• Monday 28 July, 11:30am – 12:30pm

• Monday 18 August, 11:30am – 12:30pm

• Monday 1 September, 11:30am – 12:30pm

Any families interested are welcome to attend by meeting at the General Office and we would encourage you to promote this with your school community.

Pool Fundraiser Bonfire Dinner August 2nd

We love our local Chewton Pool!

They are having  a bonfire dinner on August 2nd. It is their major fundraiser and they are keen for our school community to get behind this event and support the pool.

Of course, the pool is always looking for new volunteers. Can you help out on the night? Can you help out this summer?

What's happening in P/1?

Welcome Back to Term 3!

We’ve had a wonderful and busy start to Term 3 in our classroom! The students have settled back into routines beautifully and are already diving into lots of exciting learning.

Literacy
 In Prep, students have been learning how to add the plural suffix -s to words like cat/cats, hill/hills, and log/logs. They've enjoyed writing their own sentences using these words, while practising key writing skills like starting with a capital letter, using finger spaces, and finishing with punctuation.

Our Grade 1 students have been focusing on the /oo/ sound, as heard in words like footy, book, and wool. They’ve also been working hard to apply our sentence-writing strategies to construct well-structured sentences.

In Reading and Writing, we’ve begun a new unit on Procedural Texts—or ‘how-to’ writing. To kick things off, the students explained to Erin how to make a classic Aussie treat: Fairy Bread! They loved giving verbal instructions, making their own fairy bread, and then writing up their steps. This week, we’re learning how to write a procedure for brushing our teeth!

Mathematics
 In Maths, our Preps have been learning about ordinal numbers—a helpful concept when following steps in a procedure—and practising subitising, which helps them quickly recognise the number of objects in a group.
  Grade 1s have been working on skip counting by 2s, 5s, and 10s, and exploring the beginnings of division through sharing activities.

Inquiry
 This term in Inquiry, we’ve started a Science unit on Materials. We’re exploring the different materials that objects are made from, and how some items can be made from more than one material. We began by learning the difference between natural and made materials, and then made our own binoculars to help us spot various materials around the classroom.

Welcome to Our New Student!
 We are very excited to welcome a new friend to our class this term—Finn (Grade 1) It’s been lovely to see the children warmly welcoming him, helping him settle in, and showing him around the school and playground.

100 Days of School!
 We can’t wait to celebrate our 100th Day of School tomorrow! It’s a big milestone, and we look forward to sharing some photos of the fun with you soon.

Warm regards,
  Erin, Sue, and Luke

Phonics games

Procedural text: How to make Fairy Bread

What's happening in 5-6?

It was a busy fortnight in the 5/6 Class as we begin working on our concert.

We look forward to surprising you with our new skills.

During First Nations learning with Kath Coff our students investigated their totem animals and produced some magnificent illustrations.

In writing we have been working on procedural text creating an accurate travel itinerary with all the events, transport, times, dates plus calculating the costs of extra inclusions; your students endeavoured as far as Antarctica, Vatican City and North Korea. Our second focus of the fortnight has been in complex sentence construction using visual prompts to expand the descriptions of explaining events, portraits and ideas.

In Maths apart from an intensive multiplication review we made a fun start looking at 2D to 3D space, mapping a unifix city into four different perspectives.  We also sent images from coordinates on the cartesian plane. Translating pictures from coordinates is how our computer games communicate moment to moment through digital code. We celebrated my birthday with some very average Toffee Apples followed by planting new native plants in adjacent bushland behind the school as part of a community sustainability.

Attendance has been great in 5/6 and we would love you all to keep this up!

Tree Planting Day Friday 25th July 

with Serena, parents and POHAG

We had a wonderful day planting a variety of seedlings in the bush over the creek with Serena, parent volunteers and volunteers from POHAG. Thanks to everyone who helped!

Community Notices

School Can't Parer and Carer Group

The next School Can’t Parent & Carer Group is on Wed 6 August 4.30-5.30.

More info: https://events.humanitix.com/copy-of-school-can-t-parent-and-carer-group

 First Peoples connections and information

You can find out more about Yoorrook here

https://yoorrookjusticecommission.org.au/ and Four Corners have an excellent program on Yoorrook. 

https://iview.abc.net.au/show/four-corners/series/2025/video/NC2503H008S00 

We also heard about the current Treaty work being undertaken in Victoria. You may have heard that Djaara have begun Treaty negotiations with the Victorian government.

Sushi Dates for 2025

http://www.schoollunchonline.com.au 

14/2

14/3

16/5

13/6

8/8

12/9

24/10

14/11

12/12