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Hello families,
Welcome back to 2024! Franklin Primary School has had such a wonderful start to this year. Throughout our holidays our admin and support staff have been busily preparing and organising the school and our classrooms, making them look and feel welcoming and beautiful for the families of Franklin. You may have seen the brilliant new learning spaces in our early years, however, if you haven’t made some time to stick your head in and see these learning environments, you will be amazed. Our teachers have also been working hard to plan and prepare their learning programs for the students and this has been evidenced by calm, supportive classrooms with high achievement and improved outcomes the main focus for each and every student.
We have some new staff that have already made an immediate and positive impact with our community of learners. Franklin welcomes Mrs Camille Newton onto our 4/5/6 class on Monday and Tuesdays. Mrs Newton comes to us with a wealth of teaching expertise and experience and looks forward to meeting you all soon. We additionally welcome Liza Bessant who will be working mainly in our 2/3 classroom. Liza is an experienced teacher assistant who is passionate about supporting all students in achieving the learning goals. We are also all so excited to have the amazing Jennifer Myers returning Monday to Wednesday in our front office to welcome and support you with anything you may need. Continuing on from this we have added to our student support and wellbeing team with Elise Norton (Speech Pathology) and Jacinda Durden (Social Worker) joining the team with Mr Neil Holmstrom (Lead Support AST) and Samantha Hyatt (School Psychologist) already kicking major goals in supporting all of our students.
School has already been so busy, with so many updates to the physical and social environments. On Wednesday we have our meet the staff evening and it was lovely to see so many parents and students chatting about their return to school and the positive things they have experienced. I would like to say that you are always welcome to come in to school and have a chat with our parents or myself about your child’s education and wellbeing. On Thursday we had our first Assembly for the year, celebrating our values Connection, Courage, Growth, Respect and Responsibility by presenting students with a certificate to acknowledge their wonderful behaviours and learnings. We are so proud of our first award winners for the year. Well done everyone.
Our specialist classes also started this week. It was exciting to see the kids running around our garden with Ms Wood planting out our dovetail beds ready for winter growing or playing games with Mr Mitchell. Talking about exciting, our home reader and high frequency word program will start next week, going home in student’s bags, and I heard a rumour that, once again, when students read 100 nights at home Mr D is rewarding students with brand new books for them to take home. This also coincides with our books for breakfast program which is running every Thursday morning in the middle classroom on the deck. If you would like to volunteer some of your time to come along and read to our kids from 8:30am – 9:00am we would love to have you. Please sing out to our office or speak to Mr D.
Coming up this term we also have a lot of assessments occurring throughout the school. Mr D has been doing some early years letter/sounds and high frequency word work and coming up in Week 5 our Prep and Garde 1’s have the Progressive Achievement Testing for Early Years. Then in Week 6 and 7 we have NAPLAN for all grade 3 and 5 students, which will be a first for many if not all our students. To go along with all this business we have our Annual Swimming Carnival for grades 3-6 on Monday, March 8. If you have any questions about the testing or the swimming carnival, I encourage you to reach out to the office. Lastly a reminder that if you haven’t returned your child/rens validation form for 2024 can you please ensure you take the time to fill it out and bring it back in to our amazing front office.
James Milne
Principal
SAFEGUARDING LEAD APPOINTED
Franklin Primary School has recently appointed Neil Holmstrom as our Safeguarding Lead.
Safeguarding Leads have been appointed in all Tasmanian state schools to help ensure all children and young people in Tasmania are known, safe, well and learning.
Neil will support the wellbeing of all our students and help us all understand that keeping children and young people safe is everyone’s responsibility.
Please support Neil in this new role!
For further information on Safeguarding in Schools please click here
What a calm and settled start this year’s kindergarten children have had to the year. We have stagger started the group, to make the transition a bit gentler.
The children have been brave, enthusiastic, kind and resilient.
We look forward to welcoming the whole group next Tuesday.
What a wonderful start to the year! Prep/1 have hit the ground running and are already stuck into our phonics learning. This week we have covered the letters S, A and T. For each letter we learn the name, the sound it makes, and how to write it. We use little songs, sensory activities, and feeling what our mouth does while it makes the sound to help us. We have been practising our listening and speaking within play, small groups, one on one and in a large group. During maths time we have been representing numbers to 10, and using our cutting skills to order numbers and retell stories.
Lots of learning has been happening while we have been playing in and exploring our new environment. Prep/1 have been creating new friendships and relationships and generally getting to know each other. Most importantly we have been loving playing in the big playground and enjoying the wonderful summery weather!
It has been a smooth start to Term 1 in 1/2 Page. Students have settled very well and shown understanding through their action of the school values; Connection, Courage, Respect, Growth and Responsibility. We are going to have an awesome year. We have jumped right into writing and learning some effective skills that will be with us throughout the entire year. Please enjoy some pictures of us busy at work.
As we settle into 2024, we have been having opportunities to relax and re-connect with friends as well as make new friends through social play inside and outside of the classroom. We also reminded ourselves of the Zones of Regulation and the different emotions connected to each zone. We have discussed and recorded down our individual strengths, interests, wonders and how we each learn best. We expressed our own interests and unique selves in a human figure shape borrowed from a French Tessellation artist to make our own class tessellation.
We will be starting to participate in learning experiences based on our five school values and the five learning assets, which will be explored on a deeper level during the weeks ahead. The HASS learning area will be a focus where learning tasks will allow students to develop/hone/extend their skills of observing/interpreting information to produce more questions about connection to self, others, community, and culture to drive our inquiry further. They will also allow students to understand the importance of rules and to demonstrate positive ways to interact with others to help create a happy and safe learning environment to learn in.
So far, during the ‘Tuning In’ stage, we have discussed class rules together and sorted out the most frequently used words that came up so that we can investigate these further. We tried hard to make them positive and to avoid words like ‘no,’ don’t, not. Next, we will decide on our most important rules and a HASS Inquiry question to kick off our investigation.
It has been great to all be back at school and get a chance to get to know everyone.
We are working towards celebrating all our differences and have spent the last two weeks investigating what makes us, us!
We’ve done self-portraits that show how others see us and how we see ourselves.
We’ve identified and celebrated our strengths and differences.
We particularly enjoyed playing Guess Who to see how well we really knew our classmates!
We are creating a gratitude wall to celebrate those positives all around us everyday!
Mrs Witts
Swimming Carnival Huonville Pool PREP-6 | Friday March 8 |
Public Holiday | Monday March 11 |
Huon & Channel Swimming Carnival | Wednesday March 27 |
Good Friday | Friday March 29 |
Easter Monday | Monday April 1 |
Easter Tuesday | Tuesday April 2 |
Last Day of Term 1 | Friday April 12 |