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Dear Franklin Families,
This week has certainly been busy with 47 of our Year 3 – 5 students traveling each day to the Port Huon Sports Centre to participate in the Swimming and Water Safety program. The program aims to engage all students in a supportive and positive learning environment which will foster enjoyment of aquatic activities. There is a strong emphasis on water safety, including boat safety, with experiences using personal floatation devices and survival swimming, as well as improving stroke development and building swimming stamina. Learning water safety is important, as our students regularly participate in leisure and sporting activities in lakes, rivers and the sea as part of family and community life.
Reports
Staff are currently completing the mid-year reporting process in preparation for reports to be sent home at the end of this term. Writing reports can be a demanding exercise, particularly when teachers are also required to maintain a high quality of learning in their classrooms. It is a considerable additional workload at this time of the year.
Winter Illness
We seem to have reached the time of year where there are a number of ‘lurgies and bugs’ about causing staff and students to be unwell. As schools seem to be very good incubators for the spreading of winter illness, I would ask parents for their support in not sending unwell children to school. The speed of which a cold or illness can impact the whole class can be quite alarming. Therefore, if a child is unwell, I strongly encourage for them not to attend school until their health has improved. This is particularly important during our current COVID-19 safety planning and hygiene requirements.
Check-In on DoE sites
To support Public Health efforts associated with contact tracing, all visitors to DoE sites need to check in using the Check In Tas app or the paper-based visitor check in or check-in kiosk.
Have a great week
Linda Heerey
At LiL activities are chosen that will not only interest children but also help them to develop essential skills. This includes the development of fine motor skills, for example, playdough helps develop smaller muscles in the fingers and hands while encouraging creativity.
As it is important for children to develop motor skills through whole body movement, bikes and an obstacle course are set during the LiL session.
The sand pit is a place for children to engage in both motor skills and nature/imaginative play.
Social interaction is encouraged in a warm, friendly and supportive environment.
Story time at the end of each LiL session allows families and children the opportunity to come together and engage with a picture book. A perfect opportunity for shared conversation and fun with words.
A little Kinder update! To follow on from our brainstorming on how the sun helps us, many children knew that plants need the sun. So, we have spent some time looking a little closer at plants and their different parts. We collaborated in small groups to design herb/fairy gardens for our playground. We explored many different herbs and spoke about what we might like to see in the gardens. Rosemary and oregano were a big winner, along with a garden gnome! We made our designs using different mediums such as, drawing, tiles, blocks and loose parts. With help, each group labelled their designs and took turns explaining their work to their peers.
This week we are planting out our gardens and we will continue to add bits and pieces as we get them.
Our inquiry into where we belong has led us to explore the importance of friendships. We agree that friendships are an important part of feeling like we belong at school. The children have identified that to be a good friend the following are needed:
- kindness
- respect
- honesty
- trust
- patience
- love
Some children describe friendship as a warm feeling and feeling safe. Another child described it as a rainbow of colourful feelings. We are having some wonderful and increasingly thoughtful conversations about fixing friendships when things go wrong and accepting that we can be friends with people who like different things to us.
Reading the story of Charlotte’s Web and then watching the movie led us to discuss the power of the words we use when we talk to our friends and how we must think carefully about what we say and how it might make our friends feel.
One child’s representation of their thinking around what friendship looks like – “It is a rainbow of feelings. There are your close friends where you feel safe and then other friends. It’s like circles. And then there are the people that are waiting to be your friends, or who you want to be friends with”
“This is a friendship heart”
Some of our colourful and delicious looking cakes and added the important ingredients.
After closely observing the Honeybee’s features by learning how to draw and enlarge a smaller picture of this amazing insect, it has been exciting to see where our ‘Importance of Bees’ investigation is taking us. World Bee Day happened to fall on 20th May. After a class discussion, we decided to design and make posters to mark this day. We watched a few videos to learn why bees are important for pollinating flowers as well as providing us with honey.
Some of us have even used our own lunch time to collaborate and create more posters and formed a ‘Bees Club’, as well as spotting Bumble Bees in the playground. Susannah and Molly, with the help of Mrs Heerey, have prepared our ‘Bee Friendly’ garden bed with straw and cow manure, and we are ready to work together in groups to plant some flowers and herbs. Next step is to dig deeper and find out more why and how bees need to be valued more – “I wonder why people kill bees…” Molly, Year 3.
We have also been very busy learning how and why good writers use speech marks to show direct speech between characters when writing narratives. Puppets, cartoons, speech bubbles have been tools we have used to help further our understanding.
We have started presenting our information reports on animals, their adaptations, environment and threats facing their environment. Students have researched, planned and written very informative reports and confidently presented them to the class.
Well done to James, Sofia and Lincoln for returning their diorama homework projects already. They did a brilliant job of making shoebox models of an animal’s environment. We’re looking forward to seeing the rest of them.
In literacy we have been focusing on conventions of language such as spelling rules and punctuation.
In maths we have been consolidating our understanding of money and mapping by creating our own Jurassic world theme parks. Student have been working with budgets to fill the park with appealing attractions and dinosaurs. Next week we will work on mapping our parks.
We have been getting to know Grade 1 buddies and each Friday we will do activities with them. Last Friday we wrote about our favourite things, drew pictures together and played games.
This week we have started our swimming program. This program will run daily during week 6 and week 7. Make sure your child remembers to bring bathers, goggles, towels and a bag for their wet things.
The 5/6 class have been busy working on their Science projects around animal communities and our text type focus: Information reports. In maths, we have become accustomed to our daily Automatic Response activity in which we are able to test ourselves across addition, subtraction, multiplication and division operations. It’s been great to see the advances being made on a daily basis with this activity. A recent STEM challenge saw groups first making their own playdoh and then sculpting either a Sydney Opera House or Eiffel Tower model, with a democratic vote going to a magnificent Opera House creation. Our grade 5’s are well into their swimming program and we are also excited about upcoming visits to the Classics Museum at The University of Tasmania and Mawson’s Hut Replica Museum in Hobart.
In Art over the last few weeks, the classes have been involved in a variety of different activities across a range of media. The 4/5 and 5/6 classes have been sculpting and painting some magnificent clay masks, while our 2/3 class produced some stunning masquerade masks. All classes have also worked very hard to create beautiful faux stained-glass images. We have some very creative students in our school and it’s wonderful seeing their dedication and ingenuity at work in the classroom.
Monday 31st May - 4th June | Swimming & Water Safety Year 3-5 |
Monday 31st May - Thursday 3rd June | Reconcilliation Week |
Monday 31st May | School Association Meeting 3:15pm |
Monday 14th June | Public Holiday |
Friday 2nd July | Last Day of Term 2 - School Reports Home |
Monday 19th July | Professional Learning Day for Teachers |
Tuesday 20th July | Start of Term 3 |