Weetangera Primary School eNewsletter

From Mel

Dear Weetangera Families

Unbelievably, we are almost at the end of term 1. And what a great term it has been so far! The learning is in full swing and there are many exciting things going on. All of our students have been learning about the global concept of personal responsibility, but it looks different for everyone. For some it's about managing emotions through the Zones of Regulation, for others it's how we look after ourselves and be healthy, how we look after the environment and how we stay safe and participate responsibly online. It is always wonderful to walk through our school, hear the buzz that is engaged learners and and talk to students about their understanding. How lucky we are to do this work!

We are also lucky to have lots going on outside of the classroom. Last week we celebrated the different cultures that come together in our school, culminating in a fantastic assembly hosted by the Brain Breakers class. This week alone we have had students participating in the Belconnen zone swimming carnival and the FUTSAL competition, and there are TWO excursions happening today. Our 5/6 students are enjoying a day focused on teamwork, communication, leadership, confidence, healthy living and community. We expect that they will come back inspired, exhausted (in a good way!) and a little bit dirty. Or possibly a lot dirty. You'll hear more about that in our next newsletter.

Our year 3 students are visiting Questacon today too. A Canberra institution that not only guarantees a great day of learning, but also lots of fun! I'm sure you'll hear more about that soon.

By now you will have noticed the big, beautiful birds that have started appearing on posters, in our newsletter and in huge form in the office windows at the front of the school. You may have also heard your children talking about the 'responsibility magpie' or the 'inclusion rosella'. These birds are our new PBL mascots, and they will be appearing more and more around our school as we embed PBL.

PBL is a framework used by many schools to support positive outcomes for all learners. Over the last year, our staff, led by the PBL team, has been developing a set of consistent expectations, common language and acknowledgement system for our school. This is aligned to our school values of respect, responsibility, inclusion and resilience, and each of these is represented by one of the beautiful birds that are common to the Weetangera area (and regulars in our playground):

Why not have a chat with your children about what these birds (and these values) mean to them, and about what they are learning about these at school.

I think everyone is ready for the Easter break. And no matter what that looks like for you, I hope you get some time to stop, relax and enjoy the company of the people that mean the most to you. We'll see you on Tuesday next week!

Mel

MelanieBezear@ed.act.edu.au

Parent Portal at Weetangera

1.Parent_portal_poster.pdf

Parent Portal is now available. It is a secure online platform used to share student information between you and your child’s teachers.

Some reminders about Parent Portal:

If you already have a Parent Portal account, use this Parent Portal access link to start using the great features.
You can’t access Parent Portal directly through the ACT Digital Account website, you need to use the link above.
When you are logged into Parent Portal, we recommend saving the browser as a favourite or to the homepage on your mobile phone for quick access in the future.
The website can only be viewed using a web browser on your computer, mobile phone or tablet. An app is not available at this time.
If you still need to register, you will need an access key and a Parent Portal registration link via email to link your existing account to your child’s records. If you haven’t received this, please contact the school’s front office team for assistance.

Head to our website for all the details:

https://www.weetangeraps.act.edu.au/For_Parents/parent_portal

What's Happening in the Terrific Turtles

Hello and welcome to the Terrific Turtles 😊

We have loved our first term of Preschool! Getting to know new friends, discovering our preschool space, making connections with our teachers and learning new and exciting things everyday as we play and explore.

We have had an overarching focus of ‘Belonging’ for the first part of this term. We have been finding out about each of our preschool friends through our ‘All about Boxes’ and learning new and fun things about each individual Turtle. It has been great to discover everyone’s individual personalities and what engages them the most.

We are currently focussing on our emotions! We have been reading ‘The colour monster’ books and have really connected with the colour monster and how different colours represent different feelings. We are currently working together as a class to create a ‘feelings zone’. In the zone and we are coming up with things that help us feel safe, calm and relaxed. We currently have relaxing music, soft toys, blankets and cushions 😊 We are working towards creating our own ‘sensory bottles/bags’ for the area.

We have also created our ‘Bug Emporium’ 😊 This space is very exciting for the Turtles! We have shown a massive interest in bugs, insects and mini beasts so we created an area to focus on our interests. We have also left room for the children to create and add to the room as the learning goes along. We are using Eric Carle as our main author to inspire creativity and questioning about insects and bugs and explore lifecycles of a variety of mini beasts.

Thank you to all our Turtle families for all their support so far this year 😊 It has been fantastic to have such a welcoming and caring community.

That’s it for the Turtles!

Laura Vernon and Katrina Van Der Sterren

Nine weeks of Kindergarten, learning and fun. What a joy it has been getting to know everyone one.

With our start up program, our code of cooperation was born. Our class motto guides and inspires us each day - be kind, it’s the wombat way!

The Global Concept of Belonging helped us to learn more about each other. We asked questions, gathered data and made comparisons, like, do you have a brother?

Step by step, we learnt about the school values of respect, responsibility, inclusion and resilience. Are you being a magpie, galah, cockatoo or eastern rosella?

Class Dojo has helped us to stay on track, working as a team. And just in time, we crossed the line. We reached 1000 at the end of Week 9!

We are embracing the skills we need to read and write, by blending and segmenting and learning words by sight.

Writing, counting and recognising numbers to 10 has been our goal. And who could forget learning about squares, circles and rectangles.

We’ve splashed about during the water play afternoon, and we celebrated Harmony Day. But who could forget, our favourite time of the week, Inquiry Play!

The Global Concept of Responsibility has helped us learn more about our emotions. Learning about how we may feel at school is helping us to stay calm and use a tool.

As we head for Term 2, there’s so much left to do. We can’t wait to see what the Kindy Wombats learn during our next Global Concept, Community.

Lauren Domio and Michelle Robinson

Welcome to the Year 2 Marvellous Matildas classroom.

Class motto – We stand up and give it a go!

It has been a wonderfully productive start to the year. The Marvellous Matildas have been enjoying getting to know each other and inquiring into our learning.

We have enjoyed completing word study sessions together. This is where we investigate the phonology (individual sounds), morphology (meaningful parts), etymology (word origin) and orthography (spelling rules) of different words. One of the activities we really enjoyed was exploring our inquiry words, breaking up their consonants and vowels, and clapping out their syllables.

We also experimented with building words by adding meaningful parts to the start and end of base words, like un-lock-ed and re-writ-ing. This led to a conversation about how the -ed in unlocked sounded like a ‘t’ and the rule is to drop the letter ‘e’ when adding -ing. You might like to ask your child what the meaningful parts are in the following words and what they mean: replayed, uncovering and unpacked/repacked.

In Maths, we have learn about the jump strategy and how it can be used to solve addition problems. So far, we have used closed number lines, open number lines and 100 charts to support this understanding. The jump strategy is also useful when working with large numbers. Numbers are added in groups of tens (jumping) and ones (hopping) until the answer is reached. We are becoming very confident with skip counting off the decade in 10’s!

Harmony Week Visit

On Wednesday 20^th of March during Harmony Week, our Year 2 Unit had a visit from two wonderful parents to share their cultural traditions with us. We had Nazgol from Iran who talked about Nowruz, the Persian New Year’s celebration. This was extra special as the celebration occurred at 2pm on the same day of her visit!

Our second visit was from Polly, who shared how Easter is celebrated in Greece. Over Easter, eggs are painted and cracked as a symbol of good luck (if your egg doesn’t break). The whole of Year 2 had the opportunity to participate in this tradition and it was lots of fun!

We enjoyed looking for the two countries on the world map and asking many questions about their culture and celebrations. Thank you to Polly and Nazgol for taking the time to share their wonderful cultural traditions with us. This was a wonderful learning experience that will launch us into our next Global Concept about ‘Community’ next week.

Please enjoy our photos from the past few weeks.

Kiri Davis & Chelsea Glenn

What's Happening in the Gang Gangs

The Gang-gangs have had a very busy few weeks! We had a wonderful time at the swimming carnival and some of our classmates represented Weetangera at the zone carnival yesterday. The students were amazingly resilient during NAPLAN week and worked hard to complete all tests with a wonderful attitude.

We have been learning about strategies to support our mental and physical health, with a particular focus on the Zones of Regulation. We created comic strips to show strategies to regulate our emotions. We discussed how artists use line and colour to portray emotions and made some wonderful portraits using the elements of line and colour to depict various emotions. They really are incredible and could all be hanging in a famous art gallery!

Today we are off on an excursion to Questacon and we are looking forward to being scientists and of course having fun with our friends!

Have a safe and happy Easter everyone!

Shelly Murdoch

What's Happening in the Shooting Stars

The Shooting Stars have been continuing our journey through Shaun Tan books, but this time we decided to try ‘The Arrival’. This book has absolutely no words in it- the only language is a made up one by the author so that it puts us into the mindset of not understanding the language of a new place. The Arrival tells the story of an immigrant arriving in a new country and his journey through the strange new world. It took us two weeks to read it because of all our amazing observations and discussions throughout the book!

We also noticed parallels between the book and immigrants arriving on Ellis Island in the USA, even spotting some photos Shaun Tan has mirrored in the story! We really enjoyed the book and look forward to reading more Shaun Tan books to add to our already great list, The Arrival, Rules of Summer, Eric and The Lost Thing.

Emma Cottam

Canteen

Hello Families

First off let me wish you all a safe and happy Easter long weekend.
However you enjoy this time, enjoy it with your loved ones and make memories you can cherish for years to come.

Thank you families for ordering your Easter Hot Cross Buns through our 1st fundraisers, we managed to get 16 orders in total, which for our first fundraiser, I am very grateful for.
Next up, our Harmony day Counter Sales & Special Lunch was INCREDIBLE!!
A total of 42 lunch orders and $89 on counter sales.
All the money we raise goes back into keeping our canteen service open to your children. I am always happy with how the children respond to the new flavours I try to introduce and appreciate the involvement our community shows in acknowledging and celebrating moments like Harmony Day together 😊

I plan to do one more special before we end of term one. To say goodbye to our warm weather and to hit the holidays with a big bang, the special will be on the last day of term 1.
Friday 12^th April. WPS Canteen will be having ‘Scooped Ice Cream & Topping Special’.
*Orders for our specials will be available through Flexischools and I will inform families via App & WPS P&C Facebook

As always Thank you for continuing to support our canteen and of course for allowing me the privileged to work alongside your amazing children.

Martina Fleeton

ACT Futsal

Well done to our two Year 5/6 teams who participated in the ACT School Futsal Tournament at the MPowerdome yesterday. The students all represented Weetangera in an excellent manner and were good sports throughout the day.

The girls team won two games and had two close losses and unfortunately did not qualify for the knockout stage of the tournament. Well done girls for a good performance. Our boys team played well individually and collectively in all seven games they contested and managed to make it all the way to the final where they won 1-0. Congratulations team!

A full report of the day will go in the next newsletter.

Erwin McRae

PBL

Communication at Weetangera

P & C Update

Heroes Disco

Sales End 30 March. Don't miss out!

Tickets $10 via Flexischools, includes popcorn and a drink

IMPORTANT INFO FOR ATTENDEES:

- Once sales close, wristbands will be allocated and distributed via the classrooms

- All entry will be via the rear playground doors to the hall

- Parents are required to supervise junior school attendees. Parental supervision is also encouraged for senior school attendees.

- Snacks and disco merch available for sale. Cash Only.

For General Enquiries and assistance with ticket bookings, please contact Gab on weetangera.pc.vp@gmail.com

Community Notices

Coming soon to Weetangera, the Physical Activity Foundation brings an amazing opportunity in the form of FOUR FUN FREE FAMILY FRIENDLY PHYSICAL ACTIVITIES

Weetangera_Game_on_Flyer_2024.pdf

Weetangera_Social_tiles_1Game_on.pdf