Term 2 Week 5 2021

Diversity Day Date Claimer 

Mark your calendars! Our annual MHSS Diversity Day will be celebrated by a whole school parade on Thursday, 3 June. Our parade will commence at 8:40am in the Piazza. Parents are very welcome to join us for the parade. 

Students and parents who are from a cultural background with a traditional cultural dress are welcome to wear traditional cultural dress on Thursday 3 June. What an opportunity for those students to share some of their culture and for other students to appreciate and enjoy it! 

If your child doesn’t have traditional cultural dress, they will wear their formal uniform for parade. On Diversity Day, all students get to learn about and enjoy traditional cultural dress by seeing and learning from their friends and peers who do have a traditional cultural dress. It’s also a great opportunity to remind your child that all students were able to choose and dress to reflect a group they belong to on “We all Belong Day” in Term 1.   

All parents are invited to stay after the whole school parade and have a cuppa with Emma Crawshaw, Guidance Officer and Katherine Tracey, Student Welfare Officer and members of the Leadership Team.

If you have any questions, please check in with your child’s class teacher. 

Parent Forum

Thank you to the 35 parents who attended our Parent Forum last Thursday morning. There were some great ideas generated about things we can strengthen and opportunities for improvement. Unfortunately our evening forum had to be postponed due to the severe weather warning. This forum has now been rescheduled for Wednesday 26 May from 6:30-7:30pm in the Hall. If you would like to join us, please RSVP to Vanessa Abbott on vabbo5@eq.edu.au

Thank you to our wonderful P & C

This Friday we celebrate P & C Day. I would like to pay tribute and thank our wonderful P & C Executive for their leadership and support. Renee Walls, Karen Puckeridge, Luciana Bartot and Amy Swalwell are leading the team this year and we are very grateful for all their efforts. I also thank all parents and carers who contribute to the P & C.

Bumping Up Writing

We are bumping up our writing in Prep, using the scale and our Bump It Up Walls to guide us. We are learning we all have different bits to work on, to improve. We aren’t all the same, with the same next steps! Our teachers are working hard to help us know what we need to include to be successful and they are pushing us to do our best.

We are now looking to add the following:

• more detail in our writing - we want three events when we write about something we did
• feeling words - how did that make us feel?
• beginning punctuation - capital letters, full stops
• finger spaces - to show we understand letters and words aren’t the same and that words go together to form a sentence
• more sounds for each word - the closer our spelling approximations are, the more clear our thoughts are to our readers.

In Prep J, the teddy bears had a sleep over and got into mischief! Our Prep J Preps have enjoyed writing about how they found their classroom when they arrived the next day.

In Prep M, our students are enjoying their individual blue post it notes from Miss Mac, to remind them of their individual writing goal for the day!

You can help our little ones to progress in writing by working on those letters, sounds and sight words at home. It also helps when our children see us as writers; they can see that we write for real world purposes. Make a shopping list together or write a card or a note to someone in the family. We write for a whole range of reasons in the real world.

Have a lovely week

Year 3 and 4 News

It’s been a huge week in Year 3 and 4, with NAPLAN tests, excursions and of course, learning! A big congratulations to our Year 3 students who have now completed their first ever NAPLAN tests. It was fantastic to see our students engage confidently with the online platform.

Outside of our NAPLAN sessions, learning has continued as normal and students in Year 3 and 4 are continuing to work hard at their learning goals. As we enter the halfway point in the term, students are getting the opportunity to practise and apply their learnings from the first few weeks of term, as teachers continue to provide them with specific feedback around how they can ‘bump-up’ their work. It is so exciting to see students highlighting what they can do on their scales!

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 3 and 4 are working at their reading!

Care for Learning in Years 5 and 6

It has been a big fortnight of learning in Year 5 and 6 and I want to congratulate all students for their commitment. In particular, this week our Year 5 students successfully completed their NAPLAN tests. This is a great opportunity for us to get some point-in-time data and for us as teachers to provide intervention. All students demonstrated great growth mindset in preparing themselves and working through each of the tests. Great job Year 5! This week I had the opportunity to work in numerous classes. Thank you to 6O for inviting me into their room to participate in a fractions lesson. It was fantastic observing students collaborating with each other and using all the learning prompts and assistance to succeed in their learning. Thank you to 5R who invited me into their classroom to observe their writing lesson. I had the opportunity to work with students who matched a corrected star scale to the corresponding writing sample. The students walked away from the lesson having a clear idea of what it meant to be a successful persuasive writer. I look forward to reading their writing samples in the coming weeks.

Premier’s Reading Challenge

Don’t forget it is not too late to start reading and recording your books for the Premier’s Reading Challenge. All students who participate and submit the official Reading Record will receive a certificate of completion from the Premier. Reading records are attached here or available in print from the Hub. All forms do not have to be returned until the end of August.

AR Millionaires

Congratulations to Chloe who late last week reached the outstanding milestone of 2 million words! We are very proud of Chloe and have added her photo to our special AR display in the Hub. We look forward to seeing just how many words she will be able to read this year. Chloe is aiming for 3 million, but Ms Holm thinks she can make 4 million!

Learning in HASS

This term students have been busy working on their understandings and skills associated with HASS (History and Social Sciences). HASS is a learning area that encompasses several subjects including History, Geography, Civics and Citizenship, and Business and Economics.

In Prep this includes considering students’ own personal history and also exploring the range of special days that are celebrated by families and communities. In Year 1 students are exploring the features of places and this includes a visit to Nudgee Beach – a special place close to our school and local area. In Year 2 students are considering some of the ways we communicate with people near and far.

In Year 3 students have been investigating what the first schools were like, and considering the similarities and differences with our own experiences. In Year 4 students are exploring a range of different environments around the world and considering how we can map and describe these. In Year 5 students are investigating the ways in which our communities have changed over time, especially as a result of the arrival of white settlers and during the Gold rushes. In Year 6 students have been learning about how Australia became a nation and have begun to investigate the contribution of individuals to our society.

As you can see, there are so many opportunities for students to build their knowledge and understandings as they progress from Prep to Year 6. All students will receive an overall mark for HASS as part of our Semester 1 reporting. We look forward to sharing some of their successes with this important learning area.  

Museum display

To support our HASS learning, we have a subscription with the Qld Museum Loans scheme, which allows us to borrow various kits thoughout the year. This fortnight we have a special display highlight some of the ways in which our lives have changed over time. Pop on down to see some super examples of equipment and materials from ‘the olden days’.

Book Club 

Special thanks to our fabulous group of volunteers who sorted and distributed our Scholastic Book Club orders this morning. Students should have received their orders today. Thanks to everyone who supported the book club. Your generosity has meant that we were able to choose more than $600 worth of books for the Hub. We can’t wait to catalogue and cover these for use by our students!

We would like to introduce two new items to our menu

Indian Spiced Potato & Cauliflower Curry with Pulao Rice.

We are still running a Pantry Drive for Mango Manchies and Sole Cafe. 

We are looking for donations for staple items. For example jam, vegemite, margarine to name a few and all the things we need to continue to run a growing canteen.

For each item donated your child will receive a raffle ticket.

Every Friday 2 tickets will be drawn and 2 children get to choose from our prize basket.

Louise, Bec and the Canteen Crew

Have a great week!

Belinda and Zoe
Uniform Shop Convenors

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