Weetangera Primary School Newsletter | Week 7, Term 3 2023

From Julie

Dear Families

Week 7 of Term 3 is upon us and while much has been accomplished  there are still events to look forward to. Please put this date in your diaries, an upcoming event that provides opportunities to connect with your children as they describe, show and share how they learn, what they are learning and what a day of learning looks like for them. Come along, from 4 – 6pm and be amazed by their learning spaces and artefacts.

Galleries of Learning, Wednesday, 13 September, 4 – 6pm

National Science Week was a big part of classroom areas of focus last week. The theme was:

Innovation: Powering Future Industries

It will incorporate the advancement in technology in all industries, especially using artificial intelligence (AI). This will involve the application and intersection between science and technology.

Children’s Book Week was filled with a myriad of events enjoyed equally by students as by staff. Connecting our students with high-quality literature and engaging their interest in words, read-a-louds and sharing stories with family members is a big focus at our school. Thank you to everyone who supported the various events, assisted children with innovative dress up options and for sharing the excitement of book week. I am only sorry I was unable to participate in the staff presentation of the reader’s theatre presentation; The Day the Crayons Quit!

Reader’s Theatre by the Staff: The day the crayons quit

Masked Readers: Ask your children if they can remember who the masked readers were.

Reading with family morning. Thank you for attending.

Book Week Dress Up and Parade: Very exciting.

Name the Chickens: The chickens are finally here and are looking for their names. Come to the front office and add your favourite chicken names to the suggestion  box.

School Satisfaction Survey

The annual School Satisfaction and Climate Survey opened on 18 August 2023. Each year, the Education Directorate surveys all parents and carers, school staff and students in Years 4 to 12 about their experience of public education. The survey results will help us to continue to make quality informed decisions about how to improve our school. No personal identifying information will be provided to any school or college. Genuine survey invitation emails will have the title "The 2023 School Satisfaction & Climate Survey is now open!" and will be sent from EDU Surveys & Evaluation with 'from' address EDU@qualtrics-survey.com. If you do not receive the survey invitation, please check your Junk email folder; if it is not there, please contact us via email: info@weetangeraps.act.edu.au.  

 Friday Afternoon Singing:

One of the activities I look forward to each week is Friday Afternoon Singing.  Every Friday Preschool to Year 2, followed by the Year 3 and 4 students spend a 40 minutes session with Mel, Anastasia and myself. The students have been introduced to musical rounds; Kookaburra sits on electric wire is a firm favourite for P – 2, years 3 & 4 are inspired by the singing game: Icka Backa Soda Cracker and maintaining a rhythm that includes various actions and a count of 7 is a challenge that year 3 & 4 are beginning to master.

The Father’s Day Stall was held today and I know that there will be some very happy and some very surprised dads, grandads and uncles that will receive some truly amazing gifts. To all of our families who celebrate Father’s Day and to all dads, grandads and parents everywhere enjoy your Sunday, celebrate with your people and embrace the special moments together.

 We welcome several new staff to Weetangera. Kate Buckmaster has joined the team and comes to our school with a broad experience in NSW at both Hay Public School and Moama Public School. Kate is the new teacher of the Small Group Program and is a delightful addition to our staff. Additionally, Sam Williams has joined the teaching staff and has been welcomed into a diverse role working across the school. Thank you to both Sam and Kate for joining the team.

Farewell to Nicole Terry. Nicole has been a staff member at Weetangera for more than 7 years and has held a variety of positions; supporting students in intensive intervention programs, teaching various year levels and in leadership positions Nicole has led both the senior and junior teams. Most recently Nicole has been the very skilled and knowledgeable teacher leading the small group program. Nicole leaves our school to take up a permanent leadership position at The Woden School. Her expertise, leadership and knowledge will be a welcome and amazing addition to The Woden School and we wish Nicole all the very best when she leaves our school at the end of Week 8, Friday 8 September. Thank you for your work at Weetangera Nicole.

Have a fabulous rest of the week, I leave you with the most recent Thought for the week shared with staff:

Enjoy your weekend.

Regards

Julie

Julie.cooper@ed.act.edu.au

Chief Minister's Reading Challenge

What's Happening in the Alpacas

It has been a busy term, but we have had so much fun and are very much looking forward to the changes that come with Spring! In Maths, we have been making links to our inquiry unit by closely observing special places in our school. Each fortnight we have been visiting Weetangera’s Yarning Circle to observe and discuss the differences we are observing as the seasons change. We then create an artwork that depicts this place on the day of our observations. Here are some of our artworks from this term.

Our Inquiry Unit ‘Our Place’ has been the driving force for our learning this term. We have been inspired by the book Our Island by Alison Lester, which was created with children from Mornington Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria, to create our own class book called ‘Our Place of Learning’. During this process, we have thought deeply about our connection to our school and how we can express that through words and illustrations. We have been extremely busy creating sentence and illustrations for our book and we have some very important decisions ahead about which illustrations we will use! We have included a sneak peek at some of the pages that will become part of our book.

Lauren Domio & Michelle Robinson

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What's Happening in the Kookaburras

This week the Kookaburras would like to share what we did to celebrate ‘Book Week’ this year.

Our week started with discussing the theme “Read, Grow, Inspire’. We thought about how reading helps us grow and completed a craft activity to show our response. Check out the photo of the ‘Garden of Readin’’.

Then, each day after that, we engaged in an activity in response to some of the shortlisted books. We read ‘A is for Australia Reefs’. This story uses the alphabet to share information about, yep you guessed it, Australian reefs. After we read it, the Kookaburras wrote or drew a word or picture for as many letters of the alphabet as they could! Someone managed to get 15 of the letters!

We read Bev and Kev - looking at the illustrations and discussing how they helped the animals appear big or small, and lastly we read ‘Snap1’. This book is all about onomatopoeia - words that sound like the sound they represent! We made our own collage using the main character and added onomatopoeia.

The best day by far of Book Week is always the dress up day. We loved heading out with the rest of the school, showing off our costumes and getting hi fives from everyone!

Isabel Dunn and the Kookaburras

What's Happening in the Dragons

A big hello and welcome from the year 2 Dragons,

We have had a fantastically fun term so far and we expect to have just as much fun going into the last three weeks of this term. We started our term celebrating NAIDOC week, which occurred during the mid-year holidays. During that week, we started creating our own year two acknowledgement of country. We also learned about different indigenous actors and drew a picture which represented how an elder helps their community.

In week two to four, we focused our mathematics learning on division. At first, this was a daunting concept, but once we unpacked what division actually means it became quite easy to understand. Please ask your child what strategies they remember from this learning. In literacy, we created procedures. It has been so much fun to make fairy bread, jam toast and chatterboxes, then write our procedures that matched. We started to use the Chromebooks during this time. We love them. In these weeks, we learned how to log on and off, how to join classrooms and how to use headphones.

In week five, we attended the Hall School Museum excursion as a part of our Now and Then History unit. While there, we learned what school life was like in the past and how it compares to modern schooling. We also celebrated Science Week by creating binary bead bracelets and designing sustainable smart farms. Ask us about these fun experiences.

In week six, we celebrated Book Week. It was so much fun to dress up as our favourite characters on the Wednesday. Some of us welcomed our parents and family to read to us in the morning before our whole school parade. Every day, we viewed two new Mystery Readers and had to vote on which teachers they might be. At the whole school assembly, hosted by year 4, we had a mystery reader reveal and were shown the results of the vote. It was great! We were all really excited to find out who the teachers were.

This week, we have been focusing on a new maths concept. We started to learn new strategies to do with multiplication. These have been hard to begin with, but we are confident that we will get the concepts as we progress through this unit. We have started to learn how to type using a typing game. Wow! Typing is hard but we are progressing so fast in our learning. We have also started to relate our procedural writing to the book possum magic. It was exciting to think about the different procedures we might complete using this book as a mentor text.

Ask us about all the fun things that we have done, we love to share our learning!!!   

Celeste Tunnecliffe

What's Happening in the Falcons

Year 3 has been super busy in the last couple of weeks.  We all dressed up for Book Week and shared our favourite books.  This term, Year 3 is focussing on narrative in our writing.  We have been looking at the elements of narrative, including the opening and setting, the problem that motivates the characters to action, the events that take place and how the problem is resolved into a satisfying conclusion or an exciting cliff-hanger.  The students are also experimenting with adding interest to their writing by using similes and metaphors, description, careful word choice and by including direct speech.

We hope you enjoy this first part of a series by Jack James from 3JL Falcons.

 The Dragon Wars: Blaze

By: Jack James 3JL Falcons

Part One: Snuffed

Chapter 1: The Wave

Blaze saw the wave before she realised what it was or where it was headed. It was the largest wave she had ever seen, even though it was kilometres away.  She didn’t have time to climb down the ladder of the watchtower, so she grabbed two flares from the wall and shoved them into the brackets used for torches at night and blasted towards the village. 

She hit the bare earth with a loud thud at the door of the battle planning hut.  She wrenched open the door and staggered inside.  There was a chandelier hanging over a table with a map laid out over it.  The commander whipped around as he heard the door close and bellowed, “Blaze, what are you doing here?”

Blaze’s father was a bad-tempered man.  He was opening his mouth to shout at her again when Blaze yelled, “The Water Clan is coming!”

Everyone in the room looked at her in shock. Then, the gathered warriors and chieftains instantly stood up and rushed out of the door. It was chaos outside.  There were people scrambling everywhere and shouting, “Run!” or “Help!” at nobody in particular.

Blaze ran with her father to the guardian wall that was usually ablaze with fire, but now was steaming like Blaze’s mother’s cooking pot when it was being washed.  

Blaze’s father had always been a plucky man, but may have been the bravest moment in all his life that Blaze had known him.  He ran towards the steaming wall and jumped into the haze to attack the opposing fighters…

Stay tuned for Chapter 2.

Joanne Lawson 

What's Happening in the Wonka Bars

This term, 4GK have been learning all about the elements of dance: Body, Energy, Time, Space and Action. We have explored locomotor movements where the dance moves from one part of the floor to another, and non-locomotor movements. In small groups, we have been learning a dance and adapting some of the moves to make it more unique. We are working towards incorporating as many elements of dance into our performance as possible. After practising and refining our dance, we will present it to the class and respond to other groups performances, discussing similarities and differences.

In technology lessons, we have been planning a sequence of steps (algorithms) to create solutions, including visual programs. We began by planning a sequence of steps for a basic sequence such as brushing our teeth or making a piece of toast. We then explored how we can use a sequence of steps on the digital program Scratch. Students worked with the letters of their name to explore using motion, sound, control, and other variables to move and manipulate objects and characters. We have been following visual prompt cards to create games and stories on Scratch that demonstrate our understanding of how to use sequences and algorithms.

Gabe Kearins

What's Happening in the Blazing Flames

Corinne Hannan

Book Week

Book Week is one of the most fun weeks on the school calendar. We don’t need an excuse to celebrate books and reading, but we do love the chance to dress up and have a little fun.

On Wednesday, many parents, grandparents and friends joined our students for some shared reading before school. After that, we had a wonderful Book Week parade where students and staff got to show off their amazing costume creations, based on their favourite books.

On Friday during the assembly a group of teachers shared a Reader’s Theatre performance which was very much enjoyed by the students, but not quite as much as them knowing they had guessed the ‘masked readers’ correctly. What fun!

Here are a few photos from Book Week:

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Science Week

National Science Week is Australia’s annual celebration of science and technology. This year it fell between the 12^th and 20^th of August, week 5 of this term. The theme was ‘Innovation: Powering Future Industries’. Students were exposed to lessons involving innovations that are all around them: innovations that have enabled transport, water management and medical technologies throughout history and into the future. Each year level and class were offered lessons on making Binary Bracelets, exploring innovations, designing a smart farm, designing an insect trap, making the perfect paper plane from which they choose the lessons they wanted to explore, below are some of the activities that the students engaged in throughout the week.

We hope you enjoy reading about them as much as the students enjoyed engaging in them!

In Kindergarten we looked at the innovation cards and grouped them into types of innovations and discussed what would happen if we didn’t have that particular innovation. We then drew our own design for a mode of transport.

Harrison created a house that can move on wheels so you can just pick up your house and move locations. Jocelyn made a vehicle that can go under water. Maeve created a unicorn that you can ride. Indra created a button that turns a part to wheels. Fletcher created a robot that has axes to cut down trees.

Year 1 learnt that computers store information using a binary code made up of 1s and 0s.

We learnt that the 0s and 1s are called bits and that 8 bits make 1 byte. We now know that 1 byte is used to represent one letter of the alphabet.

To support our understanding of this, we coded the first letter of our names using different coloured beads and string. We loved completing this learning activity!

Year 2 explored the idea of smart farms. We examined the technology used in the farming industry and the innovations taking this industry forward and used what we learnt to design our own smart farm. We had to choose what our farm produced and how the innovation would enable our farm to be more productive. We loved working on this and developed some very clever ideas.

Year 3 explored design and technology for Science Week.  We spent most of Monday working in teams to design and make insect catchers.  We planned our design and put it into practise.  We compared how our designs changed when we went to build our traps.  We also thought about what kind of bait we would use, what type of insect we would catch, and how to catch our insects without harming them.  We shared our designs with each other and explained our ideas.  We look forward to a dry, sunny day when we can test our traps outside.

In Year 4 we did the challenge ‘Make a Better Paper Plane’. Students used paper, cardboard, paper clips, straws, tape and scissors to create a paper plane. They tailored their plane to their own goal e.g. fly the longest, do a trick, go as high as possible. Students had time to make multiple prototypes and fine tune their designs. Everyone had lots of fun and enjoyed the challenge.

In year 5/6 we did a variety of the challenges including the hot air balloon, the insect trap and the make a better plane challenge. The Ground breakers started with the hot air balloon tea bag (of course- Ms Cottam would not have started with any other experiment!). This was cool but hard to do outside in the wind. Then we did a paper plane experiment, which was also really fun. 

The experiment we loved the most was building insect traps! Look how much fun and learning happened!

We loved innovating this week! We explored how to change the design on simple things and make them better or suit a particular purpose. Here are some photos of our amazing insect traps. They have been strategically placed in our courtyard waiting to see what they might catch!

Kate de Mey

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Canteen



Hello Lovely Families

Wow what an amazing term we have had in the Canteen, from our amazing year 6 helpers to our mums that are volunteering all most every Friday.

I am so grateful we are continuing to be able to support our school and provide the children and teacher their yummy hot lunches.

A huge Thank You goes out to everyone that orders lunches and continues to support our P&C run canteen.

BOOK WEEK

What fun it was, we celebrate literacy and the love of reading with our chosen book ‘The World Atlas’
counter service was Foods from around the World. The kiddos of WPS loved our options and were so eager to try the different choices that were available.

Our next upcoming event will be A SPECIAL LUNCH for Weetangera’s 50^th birthday, be sure to keep an eye out on Flexischool to order your child/rens lunch for next term

As always Thank You from Martina in the canteen for each and everyone of you for continuing to make our canteen available for you children an our school.

Martina Fleeton

Canteen Manager 

Scholastic Book Club

Scholastic Book Club Issue 6 catalogues have been distributed and orders are due by 6 September.

You can also access the brochure at Book Club | Scholastic Australia

The Great Book Swap

From now until Monday 4th September we ask if students could bring in a pre-loved children's book from home that they no longer need.

Donated books can be left in the collection box in units. If students bring in more than one, even better! On Wednesday 6th September we will hold the Great Book swap. Students will be asked to bring a gold coin donation and then can choose a book from the display to take home and keep.

Why are we doing the Great Book Swap?

We're holding a Great Book Swap to celebrate reading locally and support the Indigenous Literacy Foundation (ILF) to provide books and learning resources to children living in remote Communities across Australia.

All money raised will go to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation.

Weetangera Birthday Celebrations

Christian Education in Schools

Christian Education in Schools volunteers will provide a session on Weetangera PS on Monday 11 September, 1.45-2.45pm. This session will be provided only to students that have opted in via the special permission note. Please visit the school front office to get a copy of the permission form.

Communication at Weetangera

P&C News

The children have all chosen their gifts and our Father’s Day stall has wrapped for another year! Massive thanks to Angelina for once again organising the event, and to her fabulous crew of helpers – Kate, Kath, Claire, Zoe, the year 6 helpers and everyone who donated goodies for sale and stepped in as extra hands on the day. We’ll have an update very soon on the amount of money raised.

We hope all our Weetangera fathers and father figures have a wonderful day on Sunday.

A busy Term 4 ahead

Clear your diaries! We’re expecting to have THREE big events in the first half of Term 4, and will be looking for lots of cooks, sellers and general helpers to make the most of these opportunities.  

Referendum BBQ and cake stall

The P&C will host a fundraising BBQ and cake stall at the school on Referendum Day, Saturday 14 October. Don't miss your chance to be part of the best democracy sausage factory in all of Belconnen and help raise money for the playground upgrade - sign up here to volunteer: https://signup.zone/weetangera-pandc. 

You can also bake to your heart's content and drop off donations on the day.  Individual items such as cupcakes, slices and biscuits are preferred.

Lap-a-thon

Lap-a-thon is back for another year! It WILL be sunny on Thursday 19 October as our children go the distance to raise money for the playground upgrades. More information and sponsor sheets will be coming home with your child in Week 9.

We’re looking for some volunteers to help with fruit prep to feed hungry children at the end of the event, and to help with marking off lap sheets as we go. You can help for as little as 30 minutes, or stay for the whole morning and marvel at the sight of 500 children moving together! Visit our new Signup Zone page to volunteer: https://signup.zone/weetangera-pandc. 

50^th birthday!

The P&C will also be helping out with some of the school’s 50^th anniversary festivities in Term 4. Check back in the next newsletter or on our Facebook or Instagram pages for more information, including what volunteer help we will need.

2023 2024 Fete

Did you know that the school fete requires 300 volunteer hours, just on the day itself? There’s nearly that many hours again on the Friday and Saturday beforehand, plus a team of dedicated volunteers who chip away at preparing the fete in the months leading up to the day.  

With that and the many other pressures on our families’ time and money in mind, going forward Weetangera Primary School will move to a biennial fete, which is in line with most primary schools in the ACT. This means there’s no fete this year.

We’ll be starting to look for the organising team for the 2024 fete in term 4 of this year, so please give some thought to how you might like to be involved. From one hour helping on one of the stalls, through to being a stall or volunteer coordinator, or even being the head honcho that brings the whole day together, there are roles to fit everyone’s skills and availability.

Let’s Get Social!

Follow our social media pages to stay up to date with the latest from the P&C and canteen.

Facebook: www.facebook.com/weetangerapandc   

Instagram: www.instagram.com/weetangeraschoolpandc  

And don’t forget to nominate Weetangera Primary School P&C as your Southern Cross Club Community Rewards Partner. Simply set and forget to raise money for our school without even trying.

Community Notices

For any inquiries, please contact Anna Thurecht, on 0401 118 668 or email anna.thurecht@hotmail.com

“Hawker College presents the RSC musical The Wizard of Oz - a magical theatrical spectacular. Join Dorothy, Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Lion on a musical adventure down the yellow brick road. Based on the much loved movie, The Wizard of Oz (RSC version) contains all of the favourite songs and characters from the original version.

Performances will take place in the Murranji Theatre at Hawker College on Weds 13, Thurs 14, and Fri 15 September at 6.30pm. Performances are suitable for all ages. Tickets are now on sale via the following link: https://www.trybooking.com/CKIMI

Tickets - $25 full/$20 conc/$15 (under 12)

Take advantage of the special group price of $18 for groups of 4+  

THE WIZARD OF OZ
By L. Frank Baum
With Music and Lyrics
by Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg

“The Wizard of Oz” is presented by permission of ORiGiN™ Theatrical
on behalf of Tams-Witmark LLC, A Concord Theatricals Company”