Week 7, Term 1

A reminder from Miss Cox about allocating your School Savings Bonus - we have had some teething issues with the Grade 2 camp, that will hopefully be smoother with our next camps.

• You must allocate to "Activities" in your SSB account, otherwise we cannot access those funds for your camp payment.  We are not able to allocate on your behalf.

• If you have allocated $300 to Activities and the camp costs $320, you need to pay the $20 balance before your child attends camp.

• Please return camp forms as soon as you can, so we are not chasing them in the days leading up to the event - saves stress from our end as well as yours!  

If you have multiple children at CNPS, you are able to use all of one child's code for Uniforms, then all of the other child/ren's code/s for Activities.  Just email Jan/mark it on the permission form, so we know.

Thanks for your cooperation as we navigate this new system.

 During this week and next, teachers will be shifting their wellbeing focus from explicitly teaching the ‘Play is the Way’ Life Raft values, to our Resilience, Rights and Respectful Relationships program.  

Respectful relationships education is part of the Victorian Curriculum and delivered by all Victorian government schools. It supports students to develop the knowledge, attitudes and skills needed for respectful relationships, and helps to build respect and equality across the entire school community. 

Research tells us that providing respectful relationships education at school can lead to positive impacts on students’ academic outcomes, their mental health, classroom behaviour and relationships. 

Our school uses the Department of Education’s evidence-based teaching and learning resources to teach our students about Respectful Relationships from Foundation to Grade 6.  

The Resilience, Rights and Respectful Relationships resources have 8 topics that teach students about emotional literacy, personal and cultural strengths, resilience, problem-solving, stress-management, help-seeking, gender norms and stereotypes and positive gender relations. 

This week, many classes, began working on Topic 1 – Emotional Literacy which helps students to learn how to be aware of, understand and use information about their own emotions and the emotions of others. 

If you have any questions about Respectful Relationships education, you can contact Nicole Wagstaff or Sam Chapman or visit the Victorian Government’s Respectful Relationships page: https://www.vic.gov.au/respectful-relationships 

 Hello from the Preps, 

After enjoying a long weekend, we were back busy at school. In Literacy, we met Milo’s friends, Nelly Numbat and Oscar Octopus. Every day we practise writing our letters and using our sounds to read and write words! We are so proud of reading our books! A highlight this week was our ‘Term 1 Cold Write’. We came up with our own sentences to explain what we would do if our favourite toy suddenly came alive! Students drew a picture, wrote their name and then copied writing their sentence written by the teacher. 

In Maths, we continued practising saying, writing, ordering, making and matching numbers 0-10. We enjoyed different maths activities including ‘SPINGO’. 

This week we started our new Big Question for the rest of the Term, ‘How are we connected to other living things?’. We looked at the difference between living and non-living things and learnt that all living things need four things to survive: food, water, air and light. In Wellbeing this week, we focused on our Play is the Way concepts: ‘It takes great strength to be sensible’ and ‘Have reasons for the things you say and do’. After class discussions, students demonstrated ways we show these concepts at school. 

Next week we will meet two more friends of Milo Monkey. In Maths, we will be looking at data. We will answer yes/no questions and then create our own aquariums. We will continue learning about plants, their needs and different parts as part of our new Big Question. Next Tuesday we will celebrate ‘Harmony Day’ by participating in whole school activities. 

Enjoy your weekend. 

Nicole and Miss Else 

It’s been a short but busy week in the Golden Wattle building! We have started to look at different habitats as part of our Big Question ‘How are we connected to other living things?’ This week we focused on ocean habitats and read the stories Magic Beach by Alison Lester and Stella: Star of the Sea by Marie-Louise Gay. When reading and responding to our stories we have been focusing on proper nouns and making sure we include capital letters. We also completed a Cold Write where students wrote a recount about a time they went to the beach. 

As part of our Big Question we have also been researching leafy seadragons and weedy seadragons (which are smaller) through books, websites and videos. Our STEAM Challenge involved making our own leafy seadragons ensuring they have specific features such as a long snout for sucking up plankton and shrimp, leafy appendages to help with camouflage and spiny bones on the outside of their body. 

In Maths this week we have started to lead into addition and subtraction by partitioning numbers (breaking them into parts) and making bar models to help us visualise the parts. We completed an assessment task where students needed to imagine they had made cupcakes for their friends and showed different combinations of cupcakes if some were chocolate, some were strawberry and some were rainbow. 

In Wellbeing this week we have started the Respectful Relationships curriculum with a focus on Emotional Literacy. This saw us acting out how our bodies and faces may look when we are experiencing different emotions and thinking about what things may make us feel this way. 

Next week we look forward to celebrating Harmony Day on Tuesday and the Grade 2 students are off to Boomerang Camp on Wednesday with Wendy and Laura (so exciting!). The Grade 1 students will not miss out on all the fun, as we will be exploring desert habitats and looking at the animals and plants that live there. 

We hope you have a lovely weekend, 

Wendy, Laura, Claire, Sarah and Andrew 

 This week has been a busy one with our Grade 5 students knuckling down to complete their Naplan tests. Meanwhile, our Grade 6 students had the opportunity to be together as a group, playing a game of ‘capture the flag’ with an orienteering twist. They also consolidated their knowledge of cartesian planes, playing a giant game of human battleships, with plenty of masking tape involved! For Maths, we continued to work on identifying factors, and how we can use factors and the associative property to solve Maths problems involving multiplying two digit numbers, see example below.

In Literacy, we launched our new Big Question: "How are we connected to other living things?" Students began to explore what it truly means for something to be living and even created their own little 'living things' out of plasticine to deepen their understanding. These ‘matchbox mites’ will play a key role in our learning journey as we continue to explore this topic. Looking ahead, next week we will dive into photosynthesis, discovering how plants play a vital role in sustaining life on Earth. 

For wellbeing this week, we have finished exploring our Life Raft lessons of our key areas:  

• Be Brave, participate to progress; 

• Have reasons for the things you say and do; 

• Pursure your personal best, no matter who you work with; 

• Have the Strength to be sensible; 

And our Golden Rule; 

• Treat others as you would like to be treated;  

We will begin to move on to exploring Emotional Literacy with our RRRR program in the coming weeks. Next Tuesday we will celebrate Harmony Day by learning about and celebrating culturally diverse groups in Australia. We will also observe the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (IDERD) on the 21st of March by learning about how racism has a significant effect on our Australian community, and asking questions about how we can create positive change for the future. We look forward to the many discussions we will have with our students around this.   

Bec, Nicci, Ben, Carly, Mr Higgins and Jay.

 Next Tuesday we will celebrate Harmony Day. Harmony Day is an opportunity for us to celebrate cultural diversity within our communities and learn about respect, kindness, and inclusivity. As part of this we will be running some multi-aged rotation activities at school for part of the day. This day will also be an out of uniform day and everyone is encouraged to wear orange as part of the day.

Ibu Kimberley

 Bendigo Braves Basketball Home Game Experience for Grade 5/6 

Our students have an opportunity to participate in the Bendigo Braves Basketball Schools Cup at the Bendigo Braves NBL1 match on Sunday 6th April (this is the first weekend of the school holidays). Our school selects 10 students from Grade 5/6 to compete against other schools using the fundamental skills of basketball, rather than a match. Selected students would need their families to arrange their own transport to and supervision at this event. You will also receive a ticket for you and your student to the game. We’ve had eight students sign up so there are a couple of spots still available. If you are interested in this opportunity (and not committed to school holiday plans), please contact carly.mcginniskin@education.vic.gov.au 

Castlemaine District Basketball, Football and Netball Gr3-6 

All students in Grades 3-6 participate in the District Sport Gala Day on Friday 28th March. Gr 3/4 classes experience skills and activity rotations in all three sports: basketball, football and netball. Students in Gr 5/6 have selected their preferred sport from football or netball to engage in match play for the day (some Gr 5/6 students select skill rotations with the Grade 3/4s). We require the assistance of parent/carers to supervise each team or group on the day. We are also hoping to provide some netball umpires to help run our day. Please indicate on the return slip of the permission form if you are able to assist. 

House Cross Country Gr P-6 

All students in Grades P-6 participate in our House Cross Country on Wednesday 2 April, 9:00-11:00. Students may wear their house team colours on this day. We have been practising our jogging in PE and class. The emphasis is on students completing their course and earning points for their team. Approximate schedule outlined below. 

9:20

12/13yo 4 blocks + 1 school lap 

9:25

Grade 2 1 block + 1 school lap 

9:40

11yo     4 blocks + 1 school lap 

9:45

Grade 1 1 block + 1 school lap 

10:00

10yo       3 blocks + 1 school lap 

10:05

Grade P 1 school lap 

10:20

8/9yo 2 blocks + 1 school lap 

 Over the last few weeks, the Prep students have been working on singing and acting various nursery rhymes and stories. Last week they enjoyed putting on costumes to become the different characters in Baa Baa Black Sheep and this week they all went on ‘bear hunt’ and had fun going under, over and through a piece of fabric! 

During Drama, the Grade 1/2s have had a focus on ‘friendship’ and have been learning different techniques to work on drama elements including sculpting, freeze frames and improvising and role play.  

The Grade 3/4s are enjoying creating their small scene for our Super Mini Musicals! Each class is working on 4 short scenes drawing from inspiration from Matilda by Roald Dahl, Matilda the Musical and Matilda the movies. Last week each group composed a short ostinato and this week they have been plotting the key moments in their scene. 

The circus was in town this week for the Grade 5/6s as they worked on developing and performing a circus routine to the class. We had a focus on Creativity, Teamwork and Confidence. It is impressive to watch the skills some of these senior students have. A stand out was Luke C who was using the devil sticks whilst balancing on the rolla-bollas! 

No Values Awards for this week.  We will hand out last week's awards at our Assembly on Monday.

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