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Dear Franklin Families,
It was wonderful to see students dressed as their favourite book characters for Book Week’s parade. The variety of brilliant costumes was certainly proof of the imaginative, resourceful and creative skills of our parent and staff community. Thank you to all our families for supporting a celebration that brings children and books together and highlights the importance of reading.
Student Wellbeing Survey
The wellbeing of our students is very important to us. To get an understanding of how students across Tasmania feel about their own wellbeing, all students in Years 4-6 will be taking part in a wellbeing survey. The Student Wellbeing and Engagement Survey is part of the Department of Education’s Child and Student Wellbeing strategy. The survey is being undertaken over the next two weeks and will be done in class time. More information for families will be sent home with students. The results of the survey will help the Department of Education to develop valid and reliable measures of child and student wellbeing to inform future effort and planning and will help schools to better understand how to support students.
Finally, I have the pleasure of announcing that Mrs Emily Leaman, AST, has received a Teacher Leadership Award from the Australian Council for Educational Leadership for excellence in teaching. The award is recognition of her outstanding contribution to education especially in the area of leadership and the delivery of high quality educational programs for students and teaching colleagues. Congratulations Emily.
Have a great week
Linda Heerey
Thank you to everyone who supported our book fair
We have sold approximatelY $2800.00 worth of books, posters and trinkets.
This allows us to buy books for the library up to the value of $800.
What an amazing effort for our little school.
Also a big thank you to everyone who put so much effort into our book week parade....the costumes were truly amazing!!
Leanne
The LiL group went to the Woodbridge Marine discovery centre last Monday. The children had a great time exploring all the different marine creatures.
We are learning so much from our collections inquiry! We have started to count many different collections, exploring ten frames and number charts.
In small groups, children are learning how to share a collection equally and this week we will be exploring number lines to 10.
We took advantage of the beautiful weather on Thursday to go on a walk along the river. We spotted many different birds – Mason being our number one bird watcher! And discovered lots of native plants out in flower. The local Landcare group were beginning their work as we were leaving and they took the time to chat to the children which was lovely. We all thanked them for their hard work.
Exploring our local community helps children build stronger connections to it, as well as helping them to establish their identity within in.
Why are we surrounded by apples?
This question will allow us to make connections with the place in which we live (The Huon Valley), climate, food production and how trees grow and change with the seasons.
We began with a list of all the things we already know about apples and posed further questions to explore. Some of our wonderings include:
‘How do apples grow?’
‘How many seeds does an apple have?’
‘Do apples change colour from green to red?’
‘Why do they have stickers on them?’
We have observed what apple trees look like in each of the different seasons and researched their life cycle. We have collected seeds (luckily having some sprout for us) and visited Willie Smiths to look at some of the Huon Valley’s apple growing history.
We have begun to collect stickers from the apples children bring to school and place them on our map of Australia, after researching where they grew. We have discovered that apple stickers are very good sources of information.
And we have spent time observing the changes to some slices of apple left out in the air. Lots more science to come!
We have been enjoying our letter and sounds program in Grade One, students have completed a word investigation using their newly learnt blends. We have been exploring procedural texts and most recently combined our writing topic with an inquiry unit question, what are Meteorites made of? We followed a recipe for edible meteorites to explore their properties.
We have introduced maths rotations to our Wednesday numeracy session, students are loving the hands on activities. Introducing Studyladder with individual learning programs has been very popular in our classroom.
We really enjoyed listening to the three young Tassie scientists who came to talk to the Year 2-6 classes last week. After their visit to our school, we drew some pictures and wrote about them to show our understanding of what each of these scientists does.
In response to the question – How do we communicate to others about how to make a native Bee Hotel? – a procedural text has been typed up after a lot of reflecting on our own recent experience with making some Bee Hotels and small team collaboration to write up the steps.
We have been working on the last of our Language Inquiry based on procedural text - some of the creative and published (typed up) procedural texts that have been written independently by the students are pictured here. After picking Maddi’s name out of a hat, we look forward to following her method for making a 'Dirt Cake' very soon. We also linked our Inquiry to Maths by collecting data to put into a bar graph of the types of procedures that we found and brought in from home. Now for our next Inquiry...
Last Friday 2/3 Y went for an excursion to wayraparattee for an On Country experience and to listen to a traditional story on the creation of trowenna (Tasmania). Sharyn was kind enough to read the story to us. It follows Tasmania’s creation from a sandbank, existing through ice ages and as the sea rose, the sun flashed across the sky. At night, his wife, the moon shone as it moved across the sky. The continued like this, crossing the sky, creating day and night. The moon couldn’t move as fast as the sun, so he shone his light onto her to help her move. These days were when the sun and the moon were in the sky together. They had a son, the great South Star. An audio version of the story is available via the ABC website.
We got to cook some damper, print with ochre, build some toy bark canoes, and do some beading. We had a great morning out, and learnt some new skills, as well as an indigenous story around the sun, moon and stars.
Many thanks to the parents who accompanied us on the day.
The Year 4/5 class have been very busy celebrating Science Week. We invited a volcanologist, an immunologist, and a marine chemist from UTAS to run workshops with our school. We also we collaborated as table groups to design, build and test solar ovens in class. We entered our ovens into a competition at the Huon Valley STEM Expo and one of our groups won. A very special congratulations to Lincoln, Sofia, Ravelle, Jackson, Lily H, Lily C for designing and building the winning solar oven. They won a class book and a class excursion to Fat Pig Farm – well done!
In Maths we have been focusing on fractions and learning through games, hands on activities and collaborative learning tasks. In Literacy we have enjoyed writer’s workshop and the students have published a fantastic range of texts.
Students put in a huge effort this year for our book week parade, you all looked fabulous.
Our 5/6 class has had a busy couple of weeks with a visit to the STEM Expo last week, where we rode bicycles to cook donuts and cheered our amazing 4/5 solar oven winners. Taking the tips we learned at the Expo back to class we designed our own solar ovens and successfully cooked (melted) some chocolate and marshmallows on our front deck during a fairly brief sunny patch earlier this week. Our Inquiry investigations have continued with a look at the cultural traditions of various countries and some more student-led presentations on their chosen country. This week we celebrated Book Week with a collection of wild and wacky costumes and we have also participated in the Growing Up program, learning important information about our bodies and relationships. Some of our students attended the Winter Sports Carnival on Tuesday and we are all excited about the upcoming volleyball and ‘Come and Try’ sports event at the Kingborough Sports Centre next week.
The Mexican cultural festival of Dios los Muertos dates back over 2000 years and is celebrated on November 2nd each year. On this day, Mexican streets are filled with brightly coloured skull masks, decorated with symmetrical patterns and flower motifs. Our artists have been learning about the festival and creating their own amazing highly-patterned skull artworks.
Monday 30th August | School Association Meeting |
Thursday 2nd September | Father's Day Breakfast 8am |
Monday 20th September | Year 5-6 Camp - Orford |
Friday 24th September | End of Term 3 |
Monday 11th October | Start of Term 4 |
Thursday 21st October | Hobart Show Day Public Holiday |
Friday 22nd October | Professional Learning Day for Teachers Student Free Day |
Thursday 18th November | Botanical Gardens - Whole School Excursion |
Thursday 2nd December | End of Year Assembly |
Monday 13th December | Year 6 Leaver's Dinner |
Thursday 16th December | Colour Fun Run - Last Day of Term 4 |