Term 2 Expo

During the final week of term we will be running our Term 2 Expo, an opportunity to visit your child's classroom as they share their term's work. The sessions are 

Monday June 22nd 3.30am-4pm

Tuesday June 23rd 8.30am-9am

World Cup 

The World Cup has kicked off today and we have joined in the action. All 19 classrooms, 20 classroom teachers, 5 specialist teachers and a variety of other staff each had a competing national team drawn for them at today's assembly. While many of us will be following Australian, and others will have sentimental or historical teams to follow, this is a way for everyone to have a team to follow through the tournament. We'll see when we return in July who was lucky enough to draw the winner!

Playground thank you

Next Friday, June 19th we will be holding a ceremony to thank everyone for their efforts to get the junior playground redeveloped. It was a long journey but many hands helped out. The ceremony will start at 3pm next to the playground.

Specialist news

This week elsewhere in this APS News you can read up on the latest in some of our Specialist areas - Japanese and STEM. Check them out!

Commitment to Child Safety: Annual Policy Review

At Ashburton Primary School, the safety, wellbeing, and empowerment of all children and young people are our highest priorities. In line with the Victorian Child Safe Standards, we are currently undertaking our annual review of our Child Safety and Wellbeing Policies. 
To ensure our approach is effective and up-to-date, we regularly evaluate our child safety procedures, risk assessments, and Codes of Conduct. 

We Value Your Input
Keeping children safe is a shared responsibility. We highly encourage parents, carers, and community members to have a voice in shaping our child safety practices. 

• View our current policies: All of our Child Safe policies, procedures, and Codes of Conduct are available to view here.
• Provide feedback: If you have any feedback, questions, or ideas for improving our child safety measures, please reach out.

SMILE Booster Sessions focus

Each month, staff utilise a Staff Meeting to review whole school behaviour data and then drill down into their own cohort and class's behaviour data. After completeing a Problem Solving Data Analysis template and brainstoring supports and interventions, they design a Booster session that speciifically targets their year levels needs. Based on the last month's data, here's a snapshot of what each year level is focusiing on:

Rachel Roberts

Assistant Princpal

Our Year 3 and 4 students have been developing their computational thinking and problem-solving skills through coding lessons on Code.org.

Year 3 students have been working through Course D, where they explored sequencing, loops and debugging while creating programs and solving increasingly complex coding challenges.

Year 4 students have been completing Course E, extending their understanding of coding concepts through more advanced problem-solving tasks, algorithms, events, and nested loops. They have demonstrated resilience, creativity, and logical thinking.

Students are now preparing to showcase their learning at the Expo by creating instructional screen recordings that explain how to complete coding tasks and challenges. We look forward to sharing their impressive work and celebrating the skills they have developed throughout the semester.

Our Year 5 and 6 students have been combining their skills in engineering, design, and coding through an exciting bridge-building challenge. Working collaboratively, students designed and constructed bridges using balsa wood and recycled materials, carefully considering strength, stability, and functionality throughout the design process.

Once their bridges are built, students will use block-based coding to program a Sphero robot to travel across their structures. This required students to test, evaluate, and refine both their bridge designs and coding sequences to ensure successful navigation.

Through this hands-on project, students developed their problem-solving, critical thinking, creativity, and teamwork skills while exploring the connection between engineering and digital technologies. We look forward to showcasing their innovative designs and coding solutions at the Expo!

Japanese – Week 8

Prep students have been learning numbers through songs and games. They have been having lots of fun while building their Japanese vocabulary!

Year 1 and 2 students have been learning the days of the week, with a focus on recognising and writing Kanji characters. They especially enjoy playing the Kanji memory game.

Year 3 and 4 students have been exploring the three Japanese writing systems: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. They are currently creating colourful posters to showcase their understanding of these characters.

Year 5 and 6 students have been developing their role-play and performance skills through skit activities. They have been practising their Japanese speaking and reading skills by working with scripts and are doing their best to film their skits to share at our Expo.

On Monday 18th May, Olivia from Love Me Like a Reptile visited us with an amazing range of animals for the students to enjoy. We met a green tree frog, a lizard, a very friendly python named Bella, a long-necked turtle, a baby crocodile, a rare marsupial called a bettong, and a tiny sugar glider. It was wonderful to see students who were initially feeling anxious step outside their comfort zones and bravely handle the animals. Olivia was very impressed by the students’ knowledge of animal habitats and features, as well as their impeccable manners.

In Numeracy, we have been practising recognising, making, and writing teen numbers. We also used iPads to complete our very first Essential Assessments on shapes and statistics. In addition, we have been learning about ordinal numbers using words such as first, second, third, and beyond. We have also been learning about the days of the week.

In Literacy, we have learnt the phonemes c, k, u,  b, l, j, y and v and we are looking forward to completing our single phonemes later in Term 3. Thank you for supporting your child’s learning at home — it makes a huge difference to their reading development.

We have also enjoyed learning about the difference between fiction and non-fiction texts during our reading sessions. We now know that fiction texts are made-up stories designed to entertain and usually include illustrations. Non-fiction texts provide factual information about real topics, such as space or animals, and often include features like contents pages, indexes, diagrams, and photographs.

In Writing, the students have loved using animals as inspiration for their sentence writing. Using helpful templates, they have been writing many fantastic sentences. We were thrilled to see so many students using upper-case letters at the beginning of sentences and even adding full stops at the end.

We were also very excited to reunite with our Prep Pals  and hear all about their adventures at camp. The Year 5 students entertained us with photos and videos from their time away, and we loved hearing about their experiences.

We are busy putting the final touches to our Connected Learning animal posters which we will present to our families during the upcoming Expo in a few weeks time. More information to follow about this even soon.

This fortnight, students continued our novel study of The Tale of Despereaux, developing comprehension skills while exploring the characters, setting, and key events at the beginning of the story.

In Writing, students explored Historical Fiction, focusing on creating settings and characters using descriptive language. They planned and drafted their own stories and practised adding detail to their writing.

Students strengthened their grammar and spelling skills by learning to join words ending in s, using commas in lists, and exploring the spelling patterns m, mm, and mb for the /m/ sound. They also investigated the suffix -ship and the prefix sub-.

In Mathematics, students continued developing their understanding of Place Value through additive thinking and used efficient strategies to solve addition and subtraction problems, including money-based examples.

In Statistics, students interpreted, compared, and analysed data from a variety of graphs, drawing conclusions from the information presented.

In Connected Learning, students explored Stories about the Past: Preparing Presentations, developing their research and presentation skills while learning about historical perspectives. This week, students also enjoyed a presentation by Jan Wositzky on First Nations, First Fleet, First Contact.

Students thoroughly enjoyed participating in the Year 4 kickball tournament, showing great enthusiasm and teamwork throughout. It was wonderful to see everyone encouraging one another, demonstrating sportsmanship, and having fun while staying active. The tournament will conclude at the end of the Term.

It has been wonderful to see students engaging enthusiastically in their learning, and we look forward to continuing to build their knowledge and skills throughout the term.

Mr Baker, Miss Dooley and Shivani.

This fortnight the Year 2s have been busy preparing and planning their dioramas for Connected Learning. We have each chosen one topic from this list:

• Transport
• Houses
• Games 
• Communication
• School

We have been considering the similarities and differences between now and in the past and thinking about what we will need to make to create our Time Travelling Diorama. 

In Numeracy we have been reflecting on the strategies we have learned to help us solve addition and subtraction problems and choosing the most efficient way to do it. 

We have practised:

•  Jump 10, take away 1 to add 9
• Take away ten and add 1 to subtract 9. 

We have reviewed our knowledge of analogue clocks and practised reading and making the time to o’clock and half past. 

In Literacy we have shifted our learning focus to non-fiction Good Fit texts and explored their features:

• Title and contents page
• Subheadings
• Glossary
• Labelled diagrams 
• Index
• Text appropriate language/ vocabulary

We have use a planner to plan our own information reports using each of these features and considered the purpose of informative writing. 

In Smile we practised strategies that help us to relieve stress and feel calm. We had an opportunity to meditate, practise yoga and do mindful colouring. 

We also had a booster session and we focused on our Expected Behaviours:

• I play fairly
• I play fairly and kindly 
• I interact safely with people and know that fighting is not allowed, including play fighting

We used this knowledge to play a boardgame with a partner and will take these skills outside with us to play fairly and safely with our friends.