Hello to our amazing community,

What an incredibly busy and rewarding two weeks since the last newsletter. Personally, I would like to thank the work of the executive team who were responsible for the school whilst I was away. Mr Nick de Tarczynski, Ms Ella Heather and Mr Neil Holmstrom did such a wonderful job in ensuring that our students had the best opportunities and successes at school. If there is one thing that has resonated with me is just how intricate and everchanging schools are. Our staff here are so dedicated to the community and ensuring that we grow together.

PAT testing, as you aware, has been occurring across the school from P-6. This assessment is a wonderful measure of growth across the year and gives the school the students individual assessment results for Reading, Writing and Numeracy. It also gives us information on how our early years students are developing in their phonological awareness. Once all the results are in staff will sit down and unpack the results and use these to inform how effective our planning, pedagogy and assessments are.

You may have also noticed some changes happening around our school with the installation of new signs that welcome you to Franklin Primary School and celebrate our vision “Embracing Community and Growing Together”. Don’t they look amazing! We also have had quite a shift in our admin area with new offices and spaces for our community to collaborate and meet.

With only six weeks left in the school year I encourage you to continue to chat to your child about how they are engaging at school. The end of the year is a time when students can often become nervous and anxious about the holiday period and saying goodbye to their class and friends. This sometimes results in those behaviours that interrupt learning or distract others from theirs. As a school we are motivated to finish stronger than we started and look forward to celebrating all their achievements at the end of year celebration assembly.

Lastly, as the weather improves, and the sun comes out so does the need to protect ourselves from sunburn and the UV rays that cause it. Please make sure your child has a hat and a big drink bottle full of water so they can remain hydrated and healthy.

Enjoy the weekend,

James Milne

Principal

Some examples of our writing from our excursion.

Over the last 2 weeks, we have been in the finding out/researching stage of our HASS Inquiry with our big idea question being ‘How are living things connected to places?” We have been learning how to navigate Google Earth to find our own houses, observe the bird’s eye view map, and then have a go at drawing and labelling our own map of our own houses and backyards/properties in the Huon Valley. There has also been a lot of discussion on the country of Australia and what it looked like before and after early English settlement. We looked at the First Nations map, viewed and listened to a video about the First Australians before colonisation, and compared this map to what it is now the Australian map with the 6 states and 2 territories.

We have continued our phonics groups and enjoyed our double art lesson with Mrs Newton. Students chose their fabric, folded it into halves, traced the template of a snake, cut out the snake, inserted a pipe cleaner to keep the shape open while they filled it with rice, then waited their turn for Mrs Newton to sew it up on her machine.

We were also lucky to have to visits from student’s pets – we met Duke the puppy and Caspian the rabbit.