Dear Students, Families, and the community of Franklin Primary, 

Welcome back to another exciting school year! I hope you all had a wonderful and restful break. It’s a great pleasure to see our school buzzing with enthusiasm and vibrant energy once again. The first two weeks have flown by, and I wanted to take this opportunity to extend my heartfelt gratitude to everyone who has contributed to a smooth and successful start to 2025. 

To Our Students and Families: Thank you for your continued support and engagement. Your commitment to education is evident in the eager faces we see in our classrooms every day. It is your enthusiasm and positive attitude that set the tone for a wonderful year of learning and growth. Together, we will make this year remarkable! 

To Our Incredible Staff: A big thank you for your tireless efforts in preparing the school and classrooms for our students' return. Your dedication to creating a welcoming and stimulating environment does not go unnoticed. It’s because of your hard work and passion that our school is a place where students thrive and feel inspired to embark on their learning journeys. Your commitment to excellence is truly appreciated. 

School Updates: We are thrilled to announce the completion of the new upper primary outdoor decking and cover! This addition provides a fantastic space for outdoor learning, relaxation, and socialization. It will undoubtedly enhance the school experience for our upper primary students, offering them a versatile area to enjoy throughout the year. We look forward to seeing this new space come to life with the activities and creativity of our students. 

As we move forward into this new year, I am confident that together we will continue to achieve our priorities of student safety, attendance and improved results in reading. Let’s embrace the opportunities that lie ahead and support one another in our collective journey of learning and growth. 

Thank you once again for being part of our wonderful school community. Here’s to a fantastic 2025! 

Warm regards, 

James Milne Principal 

This fortnight our beautiful kinder children were welcomed to the Franklin community. We have begun the term playing, learning and growing together. 

We have spoken about ourselves and our families. As we are just getting to know each other we learnt about everyone's favourite things, our hair and eye colours and we spoke about our families and why we love them. 

The kinders were also huge fans of our new garden program with Mrs Stagg and doing some ball skills with Mr Mitchell. 

It has been such a wonderfully smooth transition to school and I really thank the families for having your children so well prepared for their schooling journey. 

What a wonderful start Prep/1 have had to the year! We have hit the ground running and been testing out our new phonics program “UFLI foundations” with the Getting Ready lessons. These have been really useful to get us noticing where the sounds come from in our bodies when we make them. Part of this Getting Ready section has been making sure we are able to prepare our bodies for writing. We have been making large whole arm movements and practicing the pre-writing shapes that will help us when we get down to writing the letters on a page. All the children have embraced this learning and the adults in the room have been learning alongside them! 

The Grade 1’s in our class have been instrumental in helping the Preps settle in to our routines and have been wonderful role models. Congratulations to Finley and Leia who are our Term 1 class captains! 

Besides preparing for reading and writing we have been engaging in lots of play to initiate and consolidate some new friendships and to give us all time to get to know one another. While play can look like nothing but fun, it is a really important part of early childhood in particular. Lots of skills are learnt, tested and cemented through play.  

Ms Bec 

The last two weeks in 2/3 Witts we have been working on getting to know each other and our environment and looking at our emotions.

We started with our Beautiful Birthday Butterflies – where we were able to celebrate our interests and strengths.  We made our Zones of regulation wall and came up with a class contract.

Our Zones wall is a go to when we are having trouble expressing ourselves.  We can speak about and point out where we are.  Next, we will work on our strategies and tools to move between the Zones when needed.  Students investigated how different emotions feel in different parts of their bodies and minds.

Mrs Witts

Welcome to Term 1, Week 2 in Class 4/5!

We’ve had a fantastic start to the term, focusing on building relationships and getting to know each other. It’s been wonderful seeing students settle in and begin demonstrating their writing abilities.

In English, we have introduced The Twits as our class novel. Alongside this, we’ve started our vocabulary cycle, where students explore four new words each week—learning their definitions, synonyms, using them in a sentence, and representing them with a picture.

In Math, we have begun our unit on abundant numbers, encouraging students to develop their number sense and problem-solving skills.

A quick reminder that swimming begins next week. Please ensure students arrive at school wearing their swimmers under their uniform and bring:

✅ Bathers (worn under uniform)
✅ Swimming cap
✅ Towel
✅ Plastic bag for wet clothes
✅ Any necessary medication

If you haven’t yet returned the Major Excursion Consent form or the Single Aquatic Activity Consent form, please do so by this afternoon. 

At latest, a photo of the signed forms on Seesaw will be accepted for this weekend but please send in the hard copy Monday morning.

Speaking of Seesaw, if you haven’t signed up yet, please follow this link to join our class: https://app.seesaw.me/s/140-671-591. This will be our primary platform for sharing updates and student learning.

Looking forward to a great term ahead!

Class 4/5 Donnelly

What's Happening in Our 5/6 Classroom?

Wow! What a busy and exciting start to our term. We’ve been working hard to establish our classroom routines, exploring what helps us learn best so that our lessons run smoothly and align with our different learning styles. This has involved lots of discussions, reflections, and some trial and error—but we’re getting there together!

In English, we have begun our novel study on The Silver Donkey by Sonya Hartnett. We've read the first two chapters and have been diving into figurative language, which we’ve also applied to our choral reading passages about our unexpected (and slightly hairy) class pet… David. David isn’t a fluffy rabbit or a cute little guinea pig—he’s a huntsman spider! Yes, you read that right! We’ve (somewhat) lovingly adopted him as our classroom pet, and he has already inspired some wonderful descriptive writing.

Speaking of writing, we’ve also started looking at narrative writing, focusing on using descriptive language to bring our stories to life. You may have heard that I’ve been using AI in the classroom to support our lessons—one of the ways we’ve been using it is to check our descriptive writing. After crafting paragraphs full of imagery, we’ve asked AI to generate a picture based on our descriptions. This has been a fantastic tool for providing immediate feedback on whether students have used enough descriptive language to make their writing as vivid as they imagined.

In Maths, we have launched into our Place Value unit with lots of hands-on group activities. These have encouraged our students to use metacognitive language—talking about how they solve problems, not just recording the answers. It’s been great to see students sharing strategies and learning from each other.

In Geography, we have been discussing diversity and how different cultures and backgrounds come together to form a community. To help us understand this, we explored different metaphors to describe diversity, such as a salad bowl, a mosaic, a melting pot, and a symphony orchestra. Each of these metaphors helped us think about how individual differences contribute to something greater—whether it’s unique ingredients in a salad, different tiles in a mosaic, various instruments in an orchestra, or blended flavours in a melting pot. This discussion has led us to reflect on our own class community and the cultural diversity within Franklin. Your child may have come home with questions about their own heritage, as we begin an inquiry project into our students' cultural backgrounds. If your family has any traditions, stories, or experiences you’d like to share, we would love to hear them!

We are so proud of how engaged and enthusiastic the students have been in their learning so far. We can’t wait to see where our inquiries, discussions, and David’s adventures take us next!

Warmly,

Mel Cherry

Our Garden Program is off and running with Mrs Stagg.

The Year 1-2 class braved the heat on Thursday and spent the afternoon in the garden.