Hello everyone,

Term Three is always renowned for the time in which our plans for the year come to fruition. The kids are settled and focused on their learning and the school is humming along. Often though this means that it is a term where a lot of things are happening around the school and we jump from one event or week to another without really reflecting on how wonderful they were.

This newsletter will unpack and update you on some of these great things.

Let me start by saying how wonderful our book week program has been over the last two weeks and how amazing our librarian Mrs Leanne Jones is to organise it all. To see the joy in students faces when they come in and purchase some fantastic stories to take home and share with their families from the fair is just brilliant. It then goes to the next level when our students dress up as those amazing characters and share those stories with their classmates. Last week this is what happened, and it was so well supported by our parents who encouraged this love of reading, stories, and imagination.

Then this week we celebrated Father’s Day with our school association hosting a fathers, grandfathers, uncles, or significant others breakfast on Thursday morning. The turn out was huge and the event a great success with over 100 egg and bacon rolls being served, over 60 muffins eaten, and countless coffees being had to thank and celebrate those who help our students grow up.

This week was also the national week of appreciation for Teacher Aides. Not being bias but we truly have the best TAs in the world. We celebrated this at our recent assembly, where students made a video and cards to say thank you for all their work helping and supporting them. The biggest take away from the assembly was how much our teacher assistants spread joy and care for our kids and make school a wonderful place to be. On a personal note, I not only want to thank them for this but to say as well how much I personally appreciate what they do for our school and our community.

We also have some big updates in terms of facility works and school development. We have had our amazing new garden beds delivered and Rob and Ms Wood have been busily installing these in our new community garden area. They have worked with some of our grade 5/6 boys who pulled apart the old garden beds, transported them to the back area, put them back together and filled them with hot compost. They have absolutely blown us away with such a massive effort to have most of this completed within the week. Keep watching this space for continual development and updates from Ms Wood about our garden program. Not only this but Heather from the Huon Food Hub and Ms Wood have planted seven beautiful fruit trees at the front of the school which will eventually turn into an edible sensory garden space. Special mention to Matthew Tack for donating some of these fruit trees for our school to grow and enjoy in the years to come.

Finally, Ella and I received some wonderful news on Friday. We were successful in our application for a Tas Community Fund grant to resurface our top basketball court and kinder hardcourt surfaces with what is known as a plexipave court system. This is the same surface as used at the Australian Open.  We are now working with the Tas Community Fund and the department to sign off on this development before we can look at having this work completed in the not-too-distant future. Exciting times.

Lastly, I encourage all parents to fill out the satisfaction survey located in the newsletter as this let’s us know what we are doing well and where we can try to value add to our school. 

Thank you,

James Milne Principal

Communication to Families – School Satisfaction Survey 2023 - Invitation

The 2023 School Satisfaction Surveys are coming!

Every year the Department of Education conducts a School Satisfaction Survey to find out what your child(ren)'s school does well and where it may improve.

We would be grateful if you completed our online survey about Franklin Primary School. Your feedback is very important to help us inform our school-planning and decision-making.

The survey is open from Monday 28 August 2023 until Friday 22 September 2023 and should take about 5 minutes to complete.

Take the online survey by clicking this Link.  or pasting it in your browser: https://ncv.microsoft.com/ws9dZzgAst

The survey is carried out on a secure website and all responses are anonymous and confidential.

All families in this school received the same survey link and no identifying information is collected. A summary of the survey results will be provided to schools.  Responses from individuals or small groups will NOT be disclosed to any Department of Education staff.

Please contact your school if you require any assistance.

Thank you for taking the time to fill in this survey.

There were some great costumes paraded for book week!!

Thank you to everyone who participated and to all the Parents/Carers that came up with some amazing costumes.

A huge thank you to Barbara Birch Ramsay for coming along and reading her new book The Wonderful Wombats of the Huon Valley.

A big thank you to all the wombats who put in an appearance.....A group of wombats is called a 'Wisdom of Wombat's', which I think is a great description of the wonderful staff at Franklin Primary.

I would also like to thank all the students and families that have once again supported our Scholasic Book Fair. Another huge success!

Leanne

It's been a busy time at Gumnuts as usual. Slime making was an interesting experience.

Don't forget that we a going to the Mt Nelson Sustainability Centre for bush kinder on Monday 11th September at 10-11:30am.

Bryn

In Kinder we are working hard on developing our phonological awareness. Part of this is looking at beginning sounds and rhyming words.

The children have worked so hard, and enjoyed letter and sound hunts, alpha sorts and even making alphabet soup!

We have used our names to help us learn our letters and sounds.

Indie loved learning about rhyming words so much that she decided to use the chalk to decorate out playground in them!

Our highlight this past fortnight was finally revealing our characters and costumes for the Book Week Parade. Thank you to all parents and students for being creative and resourceful with costumes and celebrating the importance of reading. This week, we celebrated our Teacher’s Assistants and their invaluable role in student wellbeing and education. As a whole school, each class created cards for the TA’s that are part of their day to thank them for what they do. Without them, each student would not get the individual support that they deserve from both the teacher and TA. Thank you!

We have continued our explicit phonics/spelling rules groups every morning. In writing, we are learning and understanding how to write character descriptions by using our Book Week character to inspire our descriptive language. We focussed on character appearance, personality, actions and how they change during the story. We have also been exploring contractions and performing reader’s theatre alongside guided reading during our literacy group time.

In Maths, we have been continuing to work on using different, more efficient strategies to solve word problems after working out which operation we should use as well as exploring Mass and Length in Measurement both inside and outside the classroom.

In 3/4 Witts we have been working on improving our writing.  We have looked at various poem types and figurative language devices.  We have had a go writing poems and even wrote a whole class poem.  Here are a few we are developing.  Enjoy!

Repetition Poem

I won’t do anything.

Come on ride your bike.

I won’t do anything.

Come on play a board game.

I won’t do anything.

Come on play with your friends.

I won’t do anything.

Come on play with your toys.

I won’t do anything.

Come on do something!

Ok.  I will ride my bike!

Xzavier – Year 4

Belonging to me poem

This is my penguin.

He is blue and white.

He has two feet and fins.

He has blue eyes.

This is my penguin.

He has a beak.

His tail is small and little.

This is my penguin.

His name is Pengie.

I love him and he loves me too!

Lilly – Year 3

I’ll never eat a trifle

Atop of a boat.

I’ll never eat pyjamas

Like a billy goat.

I’ll never be a star

But will be the moon.

I’ll never eat a banana

With a hungry hungry baboon.

I’ll never be an astronaut

Swimming around in space.

I’ll never be in the middle

Of a grand police chase.

I’ll never be a cat

Even for a tail.

I’ll never eat a spikey

Spikey silver nail.

I’ll never eat carrot cake

When it is out of date.

I’ll never see a break

In fishing with my mate.

All of these things I will never do…..

But you can if you want to!

3/4  Witts – Whole class poetry