Welcome to week 6 of Term 2. The weather is certainly letting us know that it is almost winter, with snow on the mountain and the cooler air – especially noticeable at recess and lunch breaks!

It has been fabulous to see a high attendance rate for our conferences this week with many families taking the opportunity to meet with class teachers about the learning progress of their children. This year the format has been slightly different with teachers sharing an ‘Evidence of Learning’ which has focused on the success demonstrated in the work, with discussion about future goals for continued learning and growth. The students have been a major part of this process, working with class teachers to help identify areas of further development. It is great that our students are able to celebrate their successes and work together as a team to build on that success.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding your child(ren), please make the first point of contact the class teacher. Making a time for after school is advisable as their mornings can be quite busy with the students. Contact can be made via email, phone or in person. If it is more than a quick check in, please book a time to see them.

At times, it is important to remind ourselves about some of our procedures regarding the safety of our students. For example, our school hours are from 8:30 through to 2:50. It is important that parents do not bring children to school before school hours because there is no supervision of students at that time. Similarly, it is important parents either collect their children at the end of the school day or arrange for them to catch the bus home/make other collection arrangements so that students are not left unsupervised at the end of the school day. Unsupervised students may engage in dangerous play or put themselves in dangerous locations such as car parks being used by buses and cars during school drop off/pick up. Parents are responsible for their child outside school hours unless they have accessed school based child care during these times. If your child is accessing ‘Breakfast Club’ before school, please be aware that this is not open until 8am. Again, students should not be left at school before this time as there is no supervision before 8am.

Student well-being and safety is extremely important to us. Please discuss with your child(ren) the importance of letting a teacher know of any inappropriate behaviours so that staff can address and follow up any issues in a timely manner. We are a “hands off” school. This means that students are to choose games and actions that do not require the physical nature of touching others. Likewise, we encourage students to choose kinds words when talking with each other. Inappropriate language and conversations that do not reflect respectful interaction between students and  teachers is not okay.

We congratulate Mrs Mann on her new position as Principal at Collinsvale Primary School. This is a wonderful opportunity for Mrs Mann to share her expertise and leadership with another school community. Although she misses everyone at Austins Ferry Primary School, Mrs Mann is still in contact with us!  Mr Lewinski and a number of students recently visited Collinsvale Primary and enjoyed some activities with their students. We look forward to continued associations with Mrs Mann and students from Collinsvale Primary School, and wish Mrs Mann all the best in her exciting new role.

Many of you may not be aware, but Tasmania, along with many other States across the country, is experiencing teacher shortages that are presenting difficult challenges for many schools, including ours. There are simply not enough teachers to put in front of classes. Many schools are surviving with rotating relief teachers, dividing classes up when relief is not available, etc. We are fortunate enough at this stage to have a number of regular relief teachers, however, we have had to split classes at times. We are working with our HR department to find solutions to this issue, and we are grateful for your understanding.

It is always great to celebrate the success of our students such as Maci and her achievements in dancing. If you would like to share the successes of your child(ren) please let me know so that we can celebrate student achievements as a community. Email me at suzanne.oates@decyp.tas.gov.au with information that you would like shared.

As always, the door is always open. Please feel free to pop in and have a chat.

Issue 4 of the Scholastic Book Club was distributed to students last week. Please return order placements, with payment, to the school office by Tuesday 6 June 2023. 

Kinder enrolments for 2024 are now open!

Enrolments packs are available at the office between 8:30AM to 3:30PM. 

For more information, please talk to the office staff during opening hours. 

Winter is here! Second-hand Polar Fleece (various sizes) are available for purchase for $10.00 from the office during opening hours. If the size you wish to purchase is not on display in the office foyer, please speak to the office ladies who will check available stock. 

*Please note that due to limited stock, the previously advertised after-school uniform sale will not proceed. Instead, please come to the office between 8:30am-3:30pm . Quality is first in, first served. Eftpos and cash payments accepted. 

Kinder Spaulding has been learning about the letter 'R' and the sound that it makes. We practiced adding colours to rainbows, filled our word wall with interesting 'R' words and looked for the letter hiding in books from our bookshelf.

We read The Rainbow Fish and then used process art to make our own rainbow fish, which are now on display in our classroom. We painted them with water colour, then stamped poster paint on the scales using sponges, and finally stuck sparkly paper on our fish for the special scale. After we read the book, we discussed our ideas about sharing in our ‘hello circle’. We are practicing sharing things with our friends in our classroom, just like the Rainbow Fish did.

In 2A Riseley, we have been learning about narratives and how to create a setting, characters and a problem that keeps the reader engaged. We have also been developing our descriptive language and how to use it to make our writing more interesting. We used a spooky picture as a prompt and were able to come up with lots of different language using our 5 senses of see, taste, hear, smell, and touch.

We have also been working on our tally and graphing skills during maths time. As a class, we used the school grounds to collect sticks, flowers, rubbish, and leaves that were laying around on the ground. We then came back to the classroom to sort our collections in our groups and used that information to create a tally and graph to show what we found. Students were able to identify that we were not only learning, but also helping clean up our environment.

This Term our class has been learning about place value in maths. We have learned how to expand numbers, round numbers, partition numbers, and use blocks to represent numbers. We even made place value castle artwork. Don’t they look great!

In science, we have been learning about living and non-living things. We have looked at specimens and attempted to identify whether they are living or non-living. We even explored the garden at school to sketch living and non-living things. We have identified that to be a living thing, something must move, breathe, reproduce, grow, and eat things. Now we are trying to categorise living things into plants and animals.

This Term in 5/6 Perry, as part of our place value unit in mathematics, we undertook a series of lessons on estimating. We learnt that good estimating skills allows us to use simpler numbers (estimates) to determine the reasonableness of an answer when solving mathematical problems. Students took part in an exercise where they measured how far they could throw a bean bag, roll a hula hoop, do a standing jump and also measure how far they could run in 5 seconds. After each turn students measured accurately the distance and then converted the figure to an estimation. These rounded estimates were then much easier to use in further calculations than the exact measurements.