Term 2 Week 9 2020

Teachers are currently working hard assessing student progress this semester. Unless your child is sick, please ensure you send them to school every day so they can participate in all assessment tasks.

Due to the COVID19 Pandemic and learning from home this term, the report cards will be delayed to allow maximum time for students to complete all learning and assessment this term.

Report cards will be sent home on Monday 3 August and will include information about your child’s behaviour and effort. We will provide an update on their progress on English, Maths, Science and Technology subjects. The other subjects will not be reported on this semester.

Our teachers have been working hard analysing student work samples and moderating against the standard to ensure accurate reporting and plans for each child’s next steps. Below are some of the Year 3 teachers recently working collaboratively analysing assessment tasks.

Parents and Caregivers are invited to participate in this year’s School Opinion Survey and have a say about schooling during the COVID-19 lockdown.

You are also given the opportunity to provide feedback about our school more generally.

Participation in the survey is anonymous and you are encouraged to take this opportunity to have your say. The survey form has been designed so that it can easily be completed on a computer or smartphone. The online survey will be available until Friday 17 July 2020, and should take less than five minutes to complete.

To access the survey, please click on the link below or copy and paste it into your web browser:

Parent survey – https://survey.qed.qld.gov.au/form/Parents-HaveYourSay

Please contact the school if you have any questions about the survey.

Have a wonderful week 
Tracy 
tegan4@eq.edu.au

The focus of the week beginning this Friday and revisited each day throughout next week is ‘Managing Our Big Emotions’.

We care for self and care for others by managing our big feelings. Managing our big emotions can also help us care for our learning. Sometimes we have big feelings which are hard to manage. It is important to use our strategies to help us to recognise, control and manage our emotion, learning how to self- regulate. With the support of their class teachers, students will be creating a Ready to Learn Plan which helps them to identify strategies that best suit them to be ready in the learning environment. 

The official statement will be released from the organisers of the Wakakirri Festival on Monday 22 June as to the organisation around the competition this year. As soon as we recieve this announcement , Glenda Kostoglou will be in contact regarding MHSS's team arrangements. 

The students have continued to rehearse diligently at lunch times (in smaller groups) so we are confident that they will be performance ready! After all, the show must go on!

Mango Hill State School will once again be participating in the 2020 ICAS Assessments. ICAS is designed to target students’ higher-order thinking and problem-solving skills in English, Mathematics, Science, Spelling and Digital Technologies. Each assessment celebrates students’ accomplishments by providing opportunities for recognition. Top performers will be eligible for medals and the opportunity to attend a special award ceremony to have their academic excellence publicly recognised.

Please find attached the details regarding registration and Online Parent Payment System. Specific details of assessment days and times will be released in the near future.

We’ve been promoting and celebrating kindness at Mango Hill over the past few weeks. Our Prep classes decided to celebrate kindness in their rooms by holding a teddy bears picnic. We combined this with our recount writing for the term; giving our students something super exciting and enjoyable to write their sentences about!

When we talk about kindness, we talk about respect and understanding. School is a place where we learn a broad range of life skills; it’s not just about learning English and Maths. We learn to get along with others, take turns, compromise and share.  We learn about difference and valuing others for their differences. We learn to embrace diversity; because everyone being the same would be so boring, wouldn’t it? Our differences are what makes us stronger as a team!

We can learn a lot from our youngest students about embracing difference and about empathy. Young children always seem to sense when someone in their class isn’t travelling so well, or needs some help. It’s lovely to be a part of a student community that is empathetic, caring and kind.

This week, we’d love you to support our work by talking about kindness in your home. How does your child contribute to your family team?  How does she show kindness to you and to siblings? How does he show kindness and care to your broader friends and family network?

If you have a story to share about how your Prep child has shown kindness in the home; I’d love to hear them! Email me at mwhit37@eq.edu.au and share. 

Have a lovely week
Melinda 
mwhit37@eq.edu.au

How do we engage nearly 400 students each playtime?

Our Year 1 and 2 students are having a ball at lunch time as we have introduced some new activities to engage and foster their play skills. With the expansion of our play areas to include the Piazza, we have had to reeducate the students on the expecations in each area. 

In the Piazza, we now have our Student Engagement Teacher facilitating games and also some construction materials to spark the imaginative play of our students. At Second break students can participate in Hand Ball or Dance Clubs. The Junior area has a mixture of an obstacle course and chalk drawings depending on the break time, to support our students gross and fine motor skills (in a fun way) and the sandpit is hosting more equipment. Yay! Our indoor club, facilitates a mixture of drawing, big box construction and other hands on play, helping our students to negotiate and work with each other. 

Of course, we still have the ever popular Soccer Club, Junior Playground and using the class equipment to kick a ball or throw a vortex on the grassed hill. Our staff work very hard to engage our little pople, facilitate play opportunities and celebrate kindness of our littlest! 

Can you help us ? WANTED!

Have you seen any of these items lurking around your home and don't know what to do with them? Well good news, these items are desparately wanted by our Year 1 and 2 students for real world play.

Description of wanted parts: old pots, pans, measuring cups, measuring spoons, mixing bowls, cooking utensils, cake pans, sifters, colanders, baking trays, plastic pipes (No glass, broken ot sharp objects please).

Last seen: Lurking in the back of your cupboards, drawers or even your shed!

Please send any donations to 1VM classroom

Have a great week 
Gabrielle
gdoug7@eq.edu.au

This week it was 4J's turn to take on the role of Rowan. After reading the chapter of when Rowan walked through the icy waters in the darkness, students wondered what that might have been like. With that in mind 4J went outside and experienced just that. They put on their blind folds and stepped through the icy bucket of water. There reactions were priceless and really got them thinking. Students quickly grabbed a piece of chalk and jotted down their sentences which they wrote with 'real' emotion and expression.
Heading back to the classroom students were very eager to have another go at their diary entries. I look forward to reading their final drafts in the upcoming weeks!

Have a lovely week 
Michelle 
malco14@eq.edu.au

This week I had the pleasure of conferencing with students about their writing.
Students in Year 5 are currently writing a persuasive essay. In the drafts and samples I have read I have been convinced to reconsider homework, that animals should not be kept in cages and that children should spend less time on electronics and more time being active. I loved the high modality language and persuasive techniques used by the students as they demonstrate their passion for their topic and point of view.

In Year 6 I was able to discuss with students their point of view on the novel Blueback by Tim Winton. Students presented their analytical essays, deconstructing the intended message of Winton. I loved reading students’ use of evidence to argue Winton’s point of view. Great work Year 5 and 6!

This week we welcome Mango Hill State Secondary College to the school. Teachers and past students of Mango Hill State School will present to each Year 6 class about the exciting opportunities that await in high school. Also, students will be given the opportunity to ask questions of the visitors so that we can begin to alleviate any nervousness students have about their upcoming adventure.

Thank you to the eager parents who attended last week’s Graduation Committee meeting. We have two more meetings this term to begin planning what will be a special event. If you are still interested in attending please RSVP through jbenf10@eq.edu.au so that we can ensure we are meeting social distancing requirements.

Have a great week 
Martin 
mwinn7@eq.edu.au

Every year, all schools in Australia participate in the Nationally Consistent Collection of Data on School Students with Disability (NCCD).  The NCCD process requires schools to identify information already available in the school about supports provided to students with disability. These relate to legislative requirements under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 and the Disability Standards for Education 2005, in line with the NCCD guidelines (2019).

Information provided about students to the Australian Government for the NCCD includes:

• year of schooling
• category of disability: physical, cognitive, sensory or social/emotional
• level of adjustment provided: support provided within quality differentiated teaching practice, supplementary, substantial or extensive.

This information assists schools to:

• formally recognise the supports and adjustments provided to students with disability in schools
• consider how they can strengthen the support of students with disability in schools
• develop shared practices so that they can review their learning programs in order to improve educational outcomes for students with disability.

The NCCD provides state and federal governments with the information they need to plan more broadly for the support of students with disability.

The NCCD will have no direct impact on your child and your child will not be involved in any testing process. The school will provide data to the Australian Government in such a way that no individual student will be able to be identified – the privacy and confidentiality of all students is ensured. All information is protected by privacy laws that regulate the collection, storage and disclosure of personal information. To find out more about these matters, please refer to the Australian Government’s Privacy Policy (https://www.education.gov.au/privacy-policy).Further information about the NCCD can be found on the NCCD Portal (https://www.nccd.edu.au). If you have any questions about the NCCD, please feel free to contact me via email ewarn23@eq.edu.au

With thanks 
Ellaine and the ILT 
ewarn23@eq.edu.au

As the term comes to an end, this is a great time to return any books that students are no longer reading. It is also a great time to borrow a book to read over the holidays. The Hub is open every morning from 8:15am and every afternoon until 3:00pm. Students are also welcome to visit during the lunchtimes (Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday for Years 3 to 6; Thursday and Friday for Years 1 and 2).

Over the next few weeks, teachers are gathering data from a range of tasks to determine which skills and understandings students have developed this term and where their ‘next steps’ might be. In English students will be busy comprehending texts as they complete their Shared Reading tasks, and demonstrating their understandings of texts, language, grammar, spelling and punctuation as they create their final pieces of writing. In Prep, students are writing a recount, in Year 1 a description of a new character and in Year 2 an imaginative recount. Students in Years 3 and 4 will soon complete their final diary entries in response to the novels they have been reading – ‘Charlotte’s Web’ and ‘Rowan of Rin’. In Year 5 and 6 students will put the finishing touches to their written arguments.

Teachers will use the final tasks (in Shared Reading and Writing), mapped against the Term 2 Marking Guides to make a judgement about each student’s progress and abilities this term. Our Marking Guides contain descriptions of various elements to be assessed in each task and are collaboratively developed by our teachers, using the Australian Curriculum.

We look forward to seeing the progress demonstrated by each student. The successes and ‘next steps’ will be shared via the Semester 1 Report cards, which teachers will begin work on soon.

This week we have seen many visitors to the Hub to return and borrow new AR books. Many students are working towards their new AR goals, and some students are very close to achieving these. We are very pleased to announce that this week Finley reached his goal of reading one million words! This is an outstanding achievement and we are very proud of Finley’s commitment to reading. He has been working very hard on reading lots of especially thick books, and taking his time to successfully answer the AR quizzes. Finley is the first Year 4 student to be added to our special AR display in the Hub this year – Congratulations Finley! Pop on down to the Hub to see his super smile on the display!

Please see below the meeting minutes from the last P & C meeting which was help on Monday 15  June