Term 2 Week 4 2023
- Principal's News by Tracy Egan
- Team Mango We All Belong!
- Prep News by Michelle Alcorn
- Year 1 News by Melinda White
- Year 2 News by Kylie Vaughan
- Year 3 News by Ellaine Warner
- Year 4 News by Danielle O'Brien
- Year 5 News by Emma Crawshaw
- Year 6 News by Ben Mills
- Curriculum News
- Sporting News by The PE Department
- News from our Partners - Copy
- Community News - Copy
End of Semester Awards
Our school community values excellence and awards Principal Excellence Awards at the end of each Semester for Year 1-6 students. The criteria for this include:
- Commitment to effort in multiple subject areas
- Outstanding Behaviour and
- Consistent compliance with the School Dress Code.
There are also awards for Academic Excellence and the Deputy Principal Encouragement Awards. Please read the attached criteria with your child and support them to achieve their goals.
Mother’s Day
Today and tomorrow the P & C will hold a Mother’s Day stall. Each class will visit the stall and students may buy gifts priced from $1 -$6. Students can buy two gifts and on Thursday at first break, leftover gifts will be available for students who would like to purchase extras. Please send along a bag for your child to put their gift/s into. Special thanks to the P & C for organising this event and to all volunteers who have assisted.
On behalf of the school community, we wish Mums and other loved ones, a very happy day on Sunday!
Date Claimer
Have a wonderful week
Tracy Egan
Principal
tegan4@eq.edu.au
Cybersafety Parent Information Session
Our school will be hosting a ThinkUKnow cybersafety presentation on Wednesday 17 May at 5:30pm in the Wandani Centre. All parents and carers are encouraged to attend.
ThinkUKnow Australia is an evidence-based education program delivered nationally to keep children safe online.
ThinkUKnow Australia is a partnership between the Australian Federal Police, Microsoft Australia, Datacom and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. The program is delivered in collaboration with policing partners New South Wales Police Force, Northern Territory Police, Queensland Police, South Australia Police, Tasmania Police, Western Australia Police, as well as Neighbourhood Watch Australasia.
This is a fantastic opportunity for you to learn more about young people and the online environment, and how you can help them to be safe and responsible users of technology.
For more information, you can visit www.thinkuknow.org.au
Focus of the Week
The Care Class focus that will be delivered this Friday is ‘Present, Centred and Grounded’. We will also be consolidating this focus throughout next week.
Learning how to be “Present, Centred and Grounded’ means we can calm ourselves and bring our minds and bodies into the moment to choose the right behaviours so we can continue with the learning. We will be tuning-in our bodies to the learning, teaching to be mindful of how our body feels, plus listening to the signs our body is telling us.
Activities like gardening, dancing, meditation, deep breathing, or even listening to instrumental music like classical or jazz, can help you to ground. Grounding re-establishes our connection to the earth and ultimately keep us in the now, away from excessive thinking, and anxiety. Yoga is another fabulous activity which focuses on the body and breathing which leaves you with a centred, grounded feeling.
Upcoming Mid-Year Concert Details – Year 2 and Year 4
We are very excited to inform you about our Mid-Year Mango Hill State School Concert which will be held on Tuesday 13 June in our school’s Gigum Hall. The concert will be a celebration and showcase of the students’ performing arts skills and talents and it will be a great opportunity for all our Year 2 and 4 students to be on a stage in front of a large audience!
We look forward to seeing you all on the night!
We Love to Play!
Play, both structured and unstructured is critical for child development.
We incorporate as much playfulness into our school day as we can but like everything in life, the more practice, the better! Learning through play helps us engage in our learning and strengthens our oral language, social skills and emotional development. Allowing children to play gives them autonomy and collaboration practice (they make their own decisions in the play as well as having to compromise with others), they build their oral language skills and they build literacy and numeracy skills.
As our little friends are still building their toolkits they need us to model the way. Sometimes they will need our support to engage and interact and other times they just need us to be patient as the explore and have a go on their own. Providing a range of opportunities for us to play and explore at school and at home will help us grow, develop and support our learning.
I’ve attached a link to an article about play for you to read below.
Have a great week
Michelle Alcorn
Deputy Principal- Prep
malco14@eq.edu.au
Problem Solving and Reasoning in Year 1
We’re having fun exploring how to choose the most appropriate and efficient way to solve problems in Year 1.
Multi-step problems can be tricky (in maths and in life!) so we need to remember to look at all the parts to identify whether a problem is addition or subtraction.
The explaining our thinking is the trickiest bit. We need to use mathematical language to show what we know.
Take a look at some of our problem solving experiences.
Have a great week
Melinda White
Deputy Principal- Year 1
mwhit37@eq.edu.au
Learning About Our Bodies
This term in Care Class all across the school we are learning about our bodies and self-regulation. Self-regulation is the ability to control and mange feelings and emotions.
To start off with, we explored what stress is and how it might feel in our bodies. The students sorted cards to show how the body feels when it is relaxed versus when it is stressed. They pinpointed on their own bodies where they feel stress and have identified triggers in their life that make them feel stress.
Take a look at this great work from across Year 2.
On Friday this week, we are going to explore what it means to be present, centred and grounded. Students are going to take note of what their bodies feel like when they feel present, centred and grounded and decide as a class on some strategies they can use to help them be centred so that they are ‘Ready to Learn’.
Ways you can help at home…
- Consider naming and noticing how your body is feeling across the day. ‘I’m just going to take a moment to notice how my body is feeling. My heart is beating normally. My body is still. I’m feeling calm today.’
- Use strategic questioning to support your child to name and notice how they are feeling across the day. This could be particularly powerful when unpacking conflict situations. ‘What was going on for you when you were angry? What were you feeling in your body in that moment? How is your body feeling now that we’ve talked and solved this problem together?’
We are looking forward to continuing our work in this space across the term so that we have the language to talk about how we are feeling.
Mother’s Day Stay and Play
The Year 2s have loved having their special loved ones join them for our Mother’s Day Stay and Plays. It has been great getting into classrooms and seeing these special people being pampered and showered with love. Check out these great photos from classrooms this week.
I hope everyone enjoys a lovely Mother’s Day on Sunday.
Have a wonderful week
Gratitude
Our classes continue to focus on gratitude, the theme for this term. We have a lot to be grateful for. We had a safe happy excursion with lots of learning experiences, we have families and friends who care for us and we care for them, and Mother’s Day is coming up so we get to celebrate our mums and people who are just like mums to us.
Learning in Year 3
Today, Ms Egan and I joined other leaders and teachers for the first of our Term 2 Learning Walk and Talks, visiting 3K, 3S, 3T and 3B. We talked with students about their learning in writing and we listened carefully to check that our Team Mango teaching was making a difference for Year 3 students. We heard students talk about the purpose of their writing and how they were choosing ideas, writing their sentences and carefully choosing language features that helped their readers understand and feel the mood their character is feeling. We will visit 3C, 3J, 3M, 3W and 3L in Week 6.
Playing in Year 3
Please remind your child to bring their hat to school every day. Students should wear their hats as they come to school and as they head home. We expect our students to wear their hats at break times and of course for lessons like PE.
Date claimers
Parents, you may wish to mark your calendars for 2 June as we will be participating in Colour Explosion that day. Parents are very welcome to attend and watch their child complete the Colour Explosion course. More information to come in the next week.
Take care and have a wonderful week
Ellaine Warner
Deputy Principal-Year 3
ewarn23@eq.edu.au
Guided Reading Lessons
This week, I really enjoyed visiting some guided reading lessons. Every week, students will work with their teacher in a small group lesson at least once to read, understand and answer questions about a text. In these guided lessons, teachers target the teaching of specific comprehension skills to the needs of individual students. It was wonderful to see how hard our students in Year 4 are working on their reading!
I also had the pleasure of spending some time in 4J, where students were looking at their diary entries based on a chapter of Rowan of Rin and giving each other feedback about what they did well and what their next steps could be. It was nice to see the growth mindset of these students as they celebrated what they were already doing well and considered what they could do to continue to improve.
One last reminder! As the weather is cooling down, especially in the mornings please remind students to be bringing in their school jumpers. I look forward to seeing everyone in full school uniform this week with the correct shoes, socks, school hat, bag and jumper.
Have a wonderful week
Danielle O'Brien
Deputy Principal- Year 4
dxobr0@eq.edu.au
Care for learning in Year 5
This week I had the pleasure of visiting 5B for a Maths lesson, where they applied their understanding of decimals to solve a real world problem. The problem related to their high jump lesson in PE the day before. It was great to see students using their strategies, showing more than one way to prove their thinking, and using mathematical language to explain their working out. It is fantastic to see our students engaging with opportunities to show their ability to problem-solve and reason. As our students continue to apply their new learning across contexts, we are deepening and extending their thinking and understanding. I love the way all of our Year 5 students are so enthusiastic about using the knowledge they have developed this term to solve complex and unfamiliar problems in maths.
Have a super week
Emma Crawshaw
Acting Deputy Principal – Year 5
ewils209@eq.edu.au
Learning in Year 6
This week I spent some time in 6L and 6V to observe the learning happening in these rooms. In 6L, I saw a Maths lesson on fractions. Students were working collaboratively to locate fractions (proper and improper) and mixed numbers, on a number line. Not only this, 6L were working with fractions with different denominators! 6L did a fantastic job at using their strategies to compare and locate these fractions on a number line, accurately. Well done to Ms Vaf on successfully teaching such a tricky concept!
In 6V, students were working on improving their writing, by focusing on including evaluative language that made the reader relate to the author’s message. It was fantastic to observe the students’ collaborating during this lesson, as the first practiced identifying evaluative language, before then including it in their own writing and then giving each other feedback. At the end of the lesson, Prasima and Nevaeh had produced an improved paragraph that included all elements of the success criteria. This example was then placed on the class’s Writing Bump-It-Up wall for reference in future lessons.
Great job 6L and 6V!
MSSC academies visit
On Tuesday, our students had a visit from Murrumba State Secondary staff and students, who shared about some of the acadamies they have on offer at their high school. Our students got a glimpse of some of the opportunities on offer for MSSC’s Football, Music, Spanish, STEM and Dance acadamies.
Graduation
Yesterday I emailed an EOI to join the Graduation Committee to all Year 6 parents. Our first meeting will be held on Thursday 18May at 5pm in the Wandani Centre. If you are able to join the Graduation Committee for 2023, please RSVP your attendance at our initial meeting to Jasmine Benfer at jbenf10@eq.edu.au .
Ben Mills
Deputy Principal –Year 6
bxmil3@eq.edu.au
Premier’s Reading Challenge
The 2023 PRC has begun! All students who participate in the challenge and submit their Reader Record Form will receive a certificate from the Premier. Forms are attached here and also available from the Hub. We have until August to complete the forms, but now is a great time to get started!
Pop into the Hub if you would like help to choose a book. The Hub is open from 8.15am each morning and until 3.15pm every afternoon. See you soon!
Scholastic Book Club
Special thanks to Mrs Brightwell, Mrs Redway and Mrs Johnson who sorted all of the book club orders earlier this week. These have all been delivered to students so please let us know if you did not receive your order. Thank you to all of the families who so generously supported book club. We look forward to processing the books that the Hub was able to choose from the sales of books.
Museum display
For the next week or so we have a special display in the Hub, with some items on loan from the Qld Museum. The display highlights leisure activities from the past. I wonder if you recognise some of these special things? This might be a good talking point at home this week… How are the leisure activities different now to when your parents and grandparents were young?
Future Science
This term our Future science students will be learning BIOLOGY and PSYCHOLOGY. For their assessment our scientists will become Neuroscientists by constructing a 2D or 3D brain model, along with a neuron model. How cool is that!
Have a fantastic week
Suzette Holm, Jessica Rivett
shol0@eq.edu.au
Term 2 PE
Well this term is all about Sports Day (Prep-2) and the Athletics Carnival (Yr3-6). All students in PE from Prep-Year 6 will focus on preparing for these big events which are held at the end of Term 2.
More information will come out later in the term but at this stage our confirmed dates are as follows.
- Week 10 Monday 19 June – Junior Sports Day (all Year Prep, 1 and 2 students compete)
- Week 10 Tuesday 20 June – Senior Athletics Carnival – Discus, 200m/800m Finals (Some Yr 3-6 students compete)
- Week 10 Wednesday 21 June - Senior Athletics Carnival – 8 & 9 Year Old students (Year 3’s and some Year 4’s compete)
- Week 10 Thursday 22 June - Senior Athletics Carnival – 10,11 & 12 Year Old students (Some Year 4’s, all Year 5’s & 6’s compete)
Due to large student numbers at Mango Hill SS, we have a split Senior Athletics Carnival. This is to ensure students get the maximum opportunity to participate, students have enough space to compete safely and we have enough room for all spectators who attend. It will be a busy end to the term but we are thoroughly looking forward to it!
Interschool Sport (Year 5-6)
A reminder that all Year 5 and 6 students will get the chance to participate in the Pine Rivers Interschool Sports Competition. Students compete against teams from other schools in a variety of sports. The confirmed dates for Pine Rivers Interschool Sport in Term 2 are as follows.
- Friday 12 May (Term 2 Week 4)
- Friday 26 May (Term 2 Week 6)
- Friday 9 June (Term 2 Week 8)
Pine Rivers District Sporting Trials (10-12yr Old’s)
Pine Rivers District School Sport offers 10-12 year old students the opportunity to try and make the Pine Rivers District team for a variety of sports. If successful, they compete at Metropolitan North trials and carnivals, with the possibility of selection into teams competing at State events. Students must be nominated by their school in order to attend a district trial or carnival.
District trials are held at various venues within the Pine Rivers District (e.g. Les Hughes Sports Complex) and are not attended by MHSS staff. A Pine Rivers District Coach and Manager will facilitate the trial.
Students who express an interest to trial can collect forms from our PE office. They will be given the Pine Rivers District forms and the relevant trial information. Completed district forms are to be returned to the PE office by the due date. Once the forms are collated, students will be nominated for the trial. Forms are then handed back to students and must then be taken to the coach/manager at the District Trials. Students will NOT be allowed to trial if district forms are not handed in completed. Unless specifically organised by the school, it is the parents’ responsibility to transport students to and from district trials.
Most Pine Rivers District trials are limited to students turning 11 or 12 years of age and who are considered at a high level in the sport e.g. Div. 1 or A Grade. Cross Country, Athletics and Swimming trials however are open for students turning 10, 11 and 12 years of age. Sports that students are able to trial for include the following.
- AFL
- Basketball
- Cricket
- Football (Soccer)
- Golf
- Hockey
- Netball
- Rugby League
- Rugby Union
- Softball
- Squash
- Tennis
- Touch
- Triathlon
Mango Hill can normally nominate up to three students for each district sport trial. If more than three students wish to be nominated Mango Hill will select the three best candidates for the trial. The selection of these students may be either based on past performances/current club form or through a selection trial at school.
If you are interested in your child trialling for Pine Rivers District more information can be obtained from the Mango Hill State School newsletter, with regular trial updates listed. You can also contact Mr Nick Hills - nhill96@eq.edu.au (MHSS PE Teacher) so he is aware of your intention to attend the trial.
Mr Hills & Mr Newell, Miss Richards and Mr Lisha
Physical Education Teachers
PCYC Update
The focus this week at PCYC is respect. Respecting each other, respecting the environment and respecting resources.
P & C
Who's ready for some COLOUR FUN!! We have our annual colour explosion coming up on Friday 2 June. Keep an eye out for the information booklet coming home this week. You can create your online fundraising profile now at www.myprofilepage.com.au
Happy fundraising.
