Dear Parents,

We hope that you have connected to this week's newsletter via Seesaw. If you are having any problems accessing Seesaw then please contact your child's class teacher and they will support you in accessing the platform. We will continue to use both  Seesaw and our current communication platform to ensure that all parents are fully connected.

Parent Connect- We held our first Parent Connect meeting yesterday, we discussed the Terms of Reference for the role, this involved how we would work as a team.  The School Leadership and parents will collaborate together to ensure we address parental concerns or questions. The focus is to ensure that all parents are able to ask questions related to the school. We are in the process of reviewing the minutes and we will hopefully be sending these before the short holiday this weekend.  Thanks to all the parents that have taken on this role and are now playing a part in supporting our community.

PTA- The School held its annual PTA recently, the new committee have been elected and you can see the list below of the new members. Many thanks to the previous committee who successfully organised a number of school events.  We would like to extend our thanks to all the previous members of the committee who have now stepped down from their positions.

Please see the picture below of the departing committee.

The PTA will be holding a coffee morning on the 5th of October, please come and say hello and meet the PTA and members of the school leadership team, everyone is welcome.

Maylee Hyde is the new chair of the PTA, see below the address for the PTA if you wish to contact them directly

PTA Committee members:

Chair - Maylee Hyde 

Vice-Chair - Sheila Marie S. Borbajo

Secretary - Lindsay Mowad

Treasurer - Sasi Kamalraj

General Member - Amber Oelofse

General Member - Heather Williams

General Member - Cristina Correa

Teacher rep - Mohsin Shabir

Teacher rep - Kirsty McDonagh

LSA rep(sharing ) - Nabiha Al Ghadani, Bushra Al Jaradani

After School Clubs - We will change the pick-up collection points from the start of next week. The increased volume of clubs has resulted in congestion at the main door. Students from MP 1 and 2 can be collected from the Learning Souk area, MP3 and the swim squad can depart from the main door. Hopefully this will ease the congestion, thanks for the support.

Parent Meeting- We will be holding a  Parent Meeting on October the 11th at PDO School. The event will be a follow up meeting from the PDO school Review that took place in Term 3 last year.

Road Safety - With the cooler weather more children are cycling to school. Please could we ask all of our parents to remind the children to wear a helmet and to be aware of cyclists and pedestrians on the road. Children travelling to school on an electric scooter are reminded to be mindful of the speed that they are travelling, especially when there are other children on the walking and cycling paths.   

A reminder that school is closed on Wednesday and  Thursday of this week. We will open as normal on Sunday.

Tim Robinson

Headteacher

Parent Teacher Meetings (PTC) - 9th & 10th October

We would like to invite you to attend a 15 minute Parent Teacher Conferences which will be held in your child/ren's classroom on either: 

Monday 9th October from 2.15 - 4.15 

Tuesday 10th October from 4.00pm - 6.00pm 

To book an appointment to see your child/ren's class teacher, please follow the instructions below: 

Click on: www.schoolinterviews.com.au 

Go to Make a booking Enter the event code for Class Teacher PTCs: wmsjf 

When entering your telephone number, use +968 in front of your number 

Enter your details and the name/s of your child/ren and select suitable times for your appointments. 

You also have the option to make a 10 minute appointment to see our specialist teachers. Please note that we do not have enough appointments available for every parent to meet with each specialist. We would ask that you only book a specialist appointment if you feel that it is necessary for you to meet with them. If a slot is not available, please email us at notices@pdoschool.com so that we can arrange an appointment at another time for you. 

www.schoolinterviews.com.au 

Enter the event code for Specialist Teacher PTCs: znzc2

Early Years

 Milepost 1

Year 2

In Year 2, we have been learning how to find synonyms in a thesaurus.  We had to use our knowledge of the alphabet to find the words. This was challenging at first but we used our growth mindset and helped one another. Using more adventurous vocabulary in our writing will make it a lot more interesting for the reader. Instead of using words like 'hot' we can now use scorching, sweltering or boiling.

Milepost 2

Year 4

Top Trumps! This week the Year 4 children were tasked with creating their own wolf character and presenting it as a Top Trumps card. Taking inspiration from ‘The Wolves in the Wall’ class text, they used interesting vocabulary to build sentences with expanded noun phrases and varied sentence openers which described their wolf. To start off, the children played Top Trumps- Volcanoes, linking with their IPC learning. They even discovered the location of Mount Merapi which was mentioned in their guided reading book- The Firework Maker’s Daughter. A short week but a busy one! 

Year 3

In IPC, the Year 3 children have been investigating how the supercontinent Pangea became the different continents that we know today.  To help them to do this, the children have been learning all about the structure of the Earth. They used modelling clay to create a model of Earth before cutting it in half to create a cross section. They then learnt that the crust consists of different tectonic plates and that it was in fact continental drift that was responsible for the continents shifting positions over time.

Milepost 3

Year 6 have been getting creative in their Maths lesson this week. While learning about square and cube numbers, the children worked collaboratively to represent the concepts in different ways. They used indices and multiplication, drew arrays to represent square numbers and used multilink cubes to represent cube numbers. The largest cube used a whopping 216 cubes.

Science Club

Science Club started with a BANG last week as we observed the chemical reaction between baking soda and vinegar to recreate a volcanic eruption. We also investigated the reaction of adding mentos into a bottle of cola – it was a lot of fun! 

This week, we were flying high designing parachutes and testing different materials to see which one would create the most air resistance. During the process, there were plenty of ‘good struggles’ taking place as the scientists had to be very resilient and adapt designs several times before the parachutes worked.

Ms Hayley and Ms Arlene

Wishing you a pleasant weekend,

The PDO School Team