From the Principal’s Desk – Embracing Community, Growing Together

Dear Franklin Primary School Community,

As we move through Term 3, I’m reminded daily of the strength and warmth of our school community. Our vision, "Embracing Community, Growing Together," is seen in every interaction, every classroom and every decision we make.

This past fortnight has been a wonderful reflection of that vision in action.

Our Year 5/6 students returned from camp full of stories, laughter, and new friendships. The camp was more than just an adventure—it was a chance for students to challenge themselves, support one another, and grow in confidence. A huge thank you to our dedicated staff and volunteers who made this experience possible. Remember kids, see everything as an opportunity, don’t say I have to, say I get to.

Book Week was another highlight, with our parade bringing colour, creativity, and a shared love of reading to life. Seeing students (and staff!) dressed as their favourite characters reminded us of the joy that stories bring and the importance of fostering a lifelong love of reading. Our library continues to be a hub of imagination and learning, and we’re proud of the reading culture we’re building together.

We were also thrilled to welcome AFL Tasmania and Rumin the Devils mascot to our school. Their visit brought excitement and energy to our grounds, and it was fantastic to see students engaging with sport, teamwork, and community spirit. These moments of connection help build pride and belonging in our school.

Finally, it’s survey season—a valuable time for us to hear from you. Your feedback helps us understand what’s working well and where we can grow. We encourage all families to take a few minutes to complete the survey and share your thoughts. Your voice matters, and together we can continue to shape a school that reflects our shared values and aspirations.

Thank you for being part of our journey. Whether through camps, parades, sporting visits, or thoughtful feedback, we are truly embracing community and growing together.

Warm regards,
James Milne
Principal – Franklin Primary School

Term 3 week 6 Awards

P/1

Albie for showing growth in his reading and writing. Albie has been practising hard at home too which is wonderful to see. Excellent work Albie!

Matilda for showing increased responsibility towards managing her time on tasks and being open to strategies that help her transition between tasks. Well done Matilda!

Lawson for showing courage with some things he finds challenging. Lawson we are very proud of you and enjoy having you here each day!

1/2

Oscar for growth - for his persistence with UFLI tasks that is helping him to read and write with confidence.

Mila for courage - for working hard on her sentence writing in class, including some wonderful descriptive language and being brave to have a go on trickier words by herself.

Levi for responsibility - for his positive engagement with our choral reading tasks recently. Levi demonstrates a great understanding of the tasks and helps those around him to learn too.

2/3

Conor for responsibility – Conor has been making strong choices to take responsibility for his own learning! This is reflected by his focus during our study of verb groups.

Alexis for courage – Alexis has been challenging herself to practice multiplication and division processes. Tackling new maths skills can be daunting but Alexis has courageously embraced task with a smile

4/5

Jesse for showing courage by pushing himself during maths learning, to try harder maths that challenges him and celebrating his successes and working through the challenges.  Keep it up Jesse!

Marlee showing responsibility and connection; helping her peers by explaining, demonstrating and supporting their small group maths learning.  Marlee you are becoming a great leader!  Well done.

5/6

Jedd for outstanding courage and strength at camp. Jedd approached every challenge with determination, giving everything a go and always putting in his very best effort. His positive attitude and bravery inspired those around him.

Liam for demonstrating remarkable courage on the abseiling wall. Liam pushed through his fears and showed resilience by stepping outside of his comfort zone and giving it a go. His perseverance and bravery were a true example of strength.

Xzavier embracing change with courage and an open heart. Xzavier faced new situations at camp with resilience and positivity, adapting with strength and showing others the value of tackling challenges head-on.

Tadgh for going out of his way to notice someone in need and offer them assistance. Well done Tadgh, these things make our school such a wonderful place to be!

ART 

Razel for her courage to try new things and always experimenting in art lessons. Keep up the great work Razel!

Maisy for growth as an artist, taking care and pride in her work and always doing her best. Well done Maisy!

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade! I had the pleasure of making fresh mint infused lemonade with the P/1s last week to celebrate their 100 days at school.

The lemons were kindly donated by Alby’s family and the mint was picked fresh with their little hands from our school garden!

It was such a success with many thumbs up that I thought some of you might like to recipe to try at home.

For the simple syrup:

• 1 cup of sugar
• 2 tsp lemon zest
• 10 fresh mint leaves (we added more)
• 1 cup of boiling water

For the lemonade:

• 1 cup of lemon juice
• 4/5 cups of cold water

Instructions:

1. Place sugar, zest and mint leaves in a large jug.
2. Pour in 1 cup of boiling water and stir until sugar dissolves
3. Let it sit for 10 minutes while you juice your lemons
4. Juice lemons and add to the jug
5. Add your cold water and put in the fridge for an hour or more to infuse (we left ours overnight)
6. Strain and enjoy!

Weeks 5 and 6 have been very full in Prep/1. We have been continuing on with our routines, practising our fluency reading, and exploring addition and subtraction strategies.

We have celebrated our 100^th day at school this year by making up bags of 100 snacks, threading necklaces with 100 beads (just counting them took us a while!), and making cookies with 100 on them. It was a very full-on morning which unfortunately resulted in not many photos being taken. We did have a great time as well as working on consolidating the idea that 100 is made up of ten groups of 10.

This week we have begun to explore natural and manmade features of the special places we have around us, beginning with our school. We took a walk down to the foreshore boardwalk to observe some of the features along the Huon River at Franklin.

Finally, it is looking like we might get to experience a trip to Fanny Cochrane-Smith’s church on September 9^th. This has been a long-awaited excursion, with an equally exciting fossicking activity at a nearby beach to finish it off.

Week 5 and 6 have been action-packed for 2/3!

We enjoyed dressing up to celebrate our favourite book characters during Book Week. We have also been exploring some of titles shortlisted by the Children’s Book Council of Australia for 2025.

Our knowledge of multiplication and division is growing, and we embarked on a treasure hunt in the bottom playground searching for arrays. We calculated the totals and documented our thinking using number sentences. There are some photos below!

In English, we have been learning how to bump up our writing. This means we can take a simple verb and create an exciting and descriptive sentence to give our reader much more insight into our writing!

Camp Adventures

The past two weeks have been full of adventure, challenges, and a few unexpected twists for our Year 5/6 class. Our time at camp was packed with leadership opportunities, teamwork, fun, and plenty of silliness. It was fantastic to see every student step up — whether it was tackling the abseiling wall, trying something new, or supporting a classmate. The courage and cooperation on display made us all very proud.

Camp Food Highlights

• "I’d go back just for the pizza on the first night!"
• "The spaghetti bolognese was so good I went back for seconds… maybe thirds!"
• "Best camp ever — the food tasted better than home!"

The Week 6 Bug

Unfortunately, camp memories weren’t the only thing that came home with us… a nasty bug swept through the class this week, and at one point we had only 11 students in attendance. While it hasn’t been ideal, we made the best of it by focusing on revision and consolidating our learning. Hopefully, we’ll all be back on deck (and germ-free!) very soon.

Jumping Jacks Performance

A huge highlight of this week was a special visit from the Jumping Jacks skipping team from Illawarra Primary. The girls wowed us with their incredible rope tricks, teamwork, and athletic ability. Our students were amazed and inspired — some even came away determined to practise their own skipping skills at recess and lunch.

Book Week

Some of our Year 5/6s felt a little too old to dress up, but congratulations to those who did — you looked fantastic! We marked the week with a Harry Potter spell trivia challenge, with great support from Ryan’s wizarding knowledge, which was a fun way to celebrate together.

Learning Update

With so many students away this week, I chose to press pause on our new Math unit and novel study so that everyone can learn these important concepts together. This way, no one misses out on the shared experience, and I won’t need to reteach the same lessons to two different groups. Once we’re back to full strength, we’ll pick up where we left off and continue our learning journey as a whole class.

This week we focused on revising the four operations — addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division — as well as the dreaded fractions, decimals, and percentages, which many of the students were very relieved to finish.

Next week, we’ll be starting Length, Mass, and Conversions. Students will use their Word Origins knowledge of morphemes such as milli (thousandth), centi (hundredth), deci (tenth), and kilo (thousand) to support their understanding of metric measurement. We’ll be exploring how to:

• measure and estimate using metres, centimetres, millimetres, kilograms, and grams
• convert between different units (like metres to centimetres or kilograms to grams)
• apply this to real-world problems such as measuring distances, reading maps, comparing weights, and scaling recipes.

As one student said after spotting the new measurement resources on the floor: "Yes! Fractions are over — bring on measuring stuff instead!"

Looking Ahead

Fingers crossed for a healthy, full class in Week 7 so we can dive back into our new units with everyone on board. In the meantime, please continue to encourage plenty of rest, water, and handwashing at home – we’ve had enough excitement with this bug to last us the term.

Congratulations to Hunter for being selected in the recent Huon & Channel Winter Sports Carnival.

WOW!! We had the most amazing Book Week Parade, the students all looked amazing in their costumes and the Staff Wallies kept on popping up in the most bizarre places around the school throughout the day.

Thank you to all the parents, Grandparents, Carers and Special People who came along and supported the parade and supplyiing the great costumes.

The Scholastic book Fair has been a great success! Thank you to all who have supported our fair again this year.

The school library will get a percentage of the sales to buy new books to update the library.

Craft Highlights 

Over the past two weeks, students have been busy bringing bugs and butterflies to life through craft! They carefully coordinated colours to create bright and cheerful pom pom caterpillars, showing great patience and fine motor skill.  Our bug-making project required cutting and assembling delicate wings and added delicate antennas, which students tackled with focus.  We also created striking butterfly artwork using cut-out designs.  A fantastic fortnight of creativity and effort!  This fortnight we are going to tack some origami with the assistance of one of our grade six students.

Keep being creative!!!

Issy and Michelle 

Brixhibition

Thank you to the students (and parents for getting them to school) who have already submitted their Brixhibition entries - your creativity is fantastic!

If your child is interested in entering but hasn't yet, please check their bag for an information sheet that was sent home recently.  It includes all the details needed to take part.

Important:

All entries must be completed and on display at school by Monday, 8th September.

For those who have been attending Lego Club and working on their models during that time - there are only two more Mondays left to finish them up.

Keep building, we can't wait to see all the amazing creations! 

Issy

Free ferry passes are available... to go into the draw for one of the passes, please contact the school and leave your name.