Term 4 Week 4 2022
- Principal's News by Tracy Egan
- Team Mango We All Belong!
- Prep News by Melinda White
- Year 1 News by Kylie Vaughan
- Year 2 News by Ellaine Warner
- Year 3 News by Michelle Alcorn
- Year 4 News by Ben Mills
- Year 5 and Year 6 News by Martin Winney
- Curriculum News by Suzette Holm, Jessica Rivett and Danielle O'Brien
- Sporting News by The PE Department
- News from our Partners
Day for Daniel – Wear Red on Friday
On Friday all staff, parents and students are invited to wear red on Day for Daniel and bring in a gold coin for this important charity. The key child safety message on Day for Daniel encourages children to Recognise, React and Report if they don't feel safe. It provides a message of strength and hope that together we can make the world safer for all children as a legacy to Daniel and his family.
Celebrating World Teacher’s Day
This Friday we also celebrate World Teacher’s Day. We are so grateful for all our wonderful teachers – their dedication, their kindness and their commitment to helping every student in our school succeed. Thank you to our P & C for their generous donation earlier this year which will fund a breakfast for our teachers on Friday. I encourage all students and parents to show their gratitude with a kind word for the teachers this week.
Planning for 2023 – Booklist and Student Resource Scheme (SRS)
Very shortly all students enrolled for 2023 will be invoiced $100 for the 2023 SRS. The Student Resource Scheme funds are used for photocopying, eLearning subscriptions and art supplies.
On top of the $100 SRS, a stationery and booklist is attached below. Parents are welcome to purchase these items from the supplier of their choice.
Last Friday we celebrated our school’s annual Diversity Day parade and then in their classes, students celebrated Diwali. Thank you to all the parents who supported their children to wear cultural dress that day, attended one of the parades, or helped in a classroom. If you were able to attend one of the parades, you would have seen one of our amazing Diversity Captains speak and “interview” selected students. Ipshitha, Johan and Areesha spoke incredibly well and were inspiring! Our performers, Rhythm Culture, travelled from the Sunshine Coast to play music from Africa for us so we could enjoy part of the culture from another place in the world. Our students loved it and there was lots of clapping, dancing, and singing.
We would love to hear about any cultural performance groups in our local community for future events. If you know of such a group who is available to perform in schools, please let us know by emailing Ellaine Warner on ewarn23@eq.edu.au. We hope everyone had a Happy Diversity Day and our school and a Happy Diwali Day.
Focus of the Week
The Care Class focus that will be delivered this Friday is ‘The 3 R's (Recognise, React, Report) - Day for Daniel’. We will be consolidating this focus throughout next week.
Day for Daniel, Friday 28 October, is a national day where the main objective is to raise awareness of child safety. Day for Daniel is a fun day with a serious message, where schools, businesses and communities participate in activities aimed at making the world a safer place for children.
The key child safety message on Day for Daniel encourages children to Recognise, React and Report if they don't feel safe. ... It provides a message of strength and hope that together we can make the world safer for all children as a legacy to Daniel and his family.
More information can be found at https://danielmorcombe.com.au/
BYOxLink - Company Portal: Parent drop-in sessions
Don’t wait until it stops working. Get your child’s iPad connected now!
To support the continued roll-out of the Company Portal app across the school, our IT officer, Mr Laurie, and Head of eLearning, Mr Mills, will be available every Tuesday afternoon in the Wandani Centre (in the Piazza, opposite the tuckshop) between 2.30 and 4.30pm, from Weeks 4 to 7, to support parents and carers who are having difficulties connecting with the app.
Bring your child’s iPad, school username and password along and we will help you get onboard!
Think U Know Cybersafety presentation for parents
Save the date in your calendars! On Wednesday 30 November, we will be hosting a cybersafety presentation for parents, presented by the team at ThinkUKnow. For more information about what they will sharing with us as well as access to resources, checkout their website: http://www.thinkuknow.org.au/
Vacant Positions
At Mango Hill State School we have 3 vacancies in our busy front office to fill for 2023.
There is one permanent position https://smartjobs.qld.gov.au/jobs/QLD-NCR451446-22P and two temporary positions https://smartjobs.qld.gov.au/jobs/QLD-NCR451453-22T
Please share with anyone that may be interested in joining the team at Mango Hill State School.
For more information and how to apply follow the links above.
Trying hard to be creative
Thank you to our fabulous Prep teaching team for the care and expertise they bring to Prep Land! Supported by our talented Prep teacher aides and Prep Inclusive Learning team, they all work hard, each and every day, to make your child’s first year of school the most successful it can be!
On Friday, please take a moment to thank your child’s teachers for their care and effort. We often hear about the things we get “wrong” but don’t always hear about the things we get “right”.
In English, we are trying really hard to be creative! We’re writing the next thing that could happen in the books that we are reading. We have to consider what could happen - keeping in line with the theme, setting and story of the book. Then we have to write as much as we can, remembering to remain on topic, and use all the “mechanics” of writing we’ve been learning all year. The cognitive load is high!
That’s why we’ve been trialling mind maps to write down our best ideas. Together, we can review our ideas and eliminate the ones that don’t quite fit. As grown ups, we do this naturally when we write. I knew the theme of this newsletter article that I wanted to write for you, for example. In my head I planned out that I wanted to share about World Teacher’s Day and where we are up to with writing. Should I also tackle other topics...? In my head, I discard this idea and think, no those two things are enough... and voila - here’s my thoughts, coherently on the page for you.
Young writers can’t do this yet because they can’t hold everything in their minds. They need to build automaticity of key skills so they don’t have to think about it, as they write. I’m not considering how to type this, or how to spell as I write this; these skills are automated for me. Sometimes I go a bit rogue on the punctuation and throw in some colons and semi colons where they shouldn’t be and our very capable English Head of Department gracefully removes them. But by and large, I only have to consider the thoughts, not the mechanics.
For our youngest learners, writing is one of the most cognitively demanding thing they need to do at school, because it is so complex and because they just don’t have all the automated skills yet. Some of our little ones avoid the “hard thing” (don’t we all try to do that?!!).
One thing you can do at home, especially if you have a less keen writer, is to praise the effort, not the outcome. It takes time to build automaticity and writing stamina - a very long time for some students. Try to make the writing you do at home as meaningful as possible. Cards are a great example. We have a reluctant writer in Prep who is writing three cards to three different people everyday. Is she able to do the task writing yet? Not quite. But is she writing? Yes! Three cards a day, to three different people is quite a lot of writing for her!
We welcome as many cards as we can get as Prep educators. So if you have a reluctant writer in your house, think of all the different people you could write cards to at school. We’d love to receive them!
Deputy Principal - Prep
mwhit37@eq.edu.au
Learning All About Time in Year 1
This term the students in Year 1 are learning all about o’clock and half past times. They are learning to show times on analogue and digital clocks as well as read times that are written in words. Not only are the children learning to read times, but they are developing their understanding of duration words like second, minute, hour, day and week.
Some ways you can help your child to learn about time include the following.
- Note the time of day you do particular things with your child (e.g. What time do we wake up, have breakfast, drive to school, go to bed?)
- Note how long events take by discussing their duration using the words minute, hour, week, month, year (e.g. You could say ‘That movie took a long time to watch. It took two hours.’ ‘Gee you tied your shoes up quickly. That only took you two minutes’).
- Try drawing your child’s attention to clocks in their world (e.g. clocks on their iPad, phones, car, wall clocks, T.V., computer screens). Ask your child to read the o’clock and half past times on these different types of clocks.
Celebrating Diversity
On Friday we came together to celebrate diversity at our Diversity Day Parade. It was wonderful seeing so many children dressed in traditional dress. So many colours and so many beautiful styles! It was such a treat getting to listen and clap along with the performance troop Rhythm Culture. Some children even got to dance with them!
World Teacher's Day
We are so lucky in Year 1 to be taught by so many amazing teachers. This Friday we will celebrate their contribution at World Teacher's Day. Please consider getting your child to write their teacher a letter, card or picture to let them know just how wonderful they are!
Learning in Year 2
Part of learning and doing our best academically is learning and using the skills that help us to be Ready to Learn with our teacher and our class members. These are often called soft skills and we read about them in the media because these skills are acknowledged to be critical in all fields of endeavour. One of the critical skills for our students is being able to self-regulate their feelings and their focus. While students develop their strategies in different ways and over different time frames, all our Year 2 classes embed practices that support students to get Ready to Learn. From predictable and soothing routines in the morning such as dimmed lights, quiet music, mindful brain break to practices such as gratitude journals we get Ready to Learn.
Special events
We loved Diversity Day parade and Diwali activities last Friday. Our current special events are as follows.
- Italian Gelati Experience for Year 2 students – we are underway with our Italian incursion held over today and tomorrow (26 and 27 October).
- Day for Daniel – students wear red on Day for Daniel and donate a gold coin.
- Swimming on Thursday – please pack everything your child will need for swimming.
Attendance
It is so important for your child to attend school as much as possible. We understand that there are times when students are unwell or on family visits etc. However, if you are having difficulty getting your child to school for other reasons, we want to support you. Please let your child’s teacher know of any concerns so we can work together to maximise your child’s attendance.
Take care and have a wonderful week
Ellaine Warner
Deputy Principal- Year 2
ewarn23@eq.edu.au
Meeting Up
In 3H we have been ‘meeting up’ with our friends to take quality time to connect and get to know our peers along with setting the scene of our circle time expectations. It has been lovely to see that 3H enjoy meeting up so much that they invited their teddy bears to join them!
STEM Construction
There has been lots of excitement across Year 3 this week as students continued to work collaboratively to construct a solar oven. It was great to see them thinking scientifically as they designed how they would design and create their solar oven by choosing the correct design materials and features. They labelled their designs using scientific language and made predictions on how they could improve their design in the future. Well done Year 3. I loved how well you worked together and your critical and creative thinking behind your designs.
Have a great week
Michelle Alcorn
Deputy Principal- Year 3
malco14@eq.edu.au
Year 4 camp
How good was camp! What an amazing experience it was for our Year 4 students who attended camp last week. The purpose of camp was to support students to develop and practise their leadership skills, autonomy and teamwork. Our students rose to the occasion. It was amazing to observe their maturity develop in such a short time.
Fun was a huge part of the week of course. There were a range of amazing activities and experiences for the students on offer. However, when discussing camp highlights with students, laser tag and archery were the clear favourites!
I know the staff that attended were incredibly proud of the way the students conducted themselves at camp. It has been wonderful to hear from students and parents alike, and to receive so much positive feedback about their experience last week.
Morning greetings between teachers and students
It is wonderful walking through the Year 4 corridors of a morning and seeing teachers and students greeting each other at the door. Walking by 4B this week, it was great to see Mr Barnett giving out fist bumps as he acknowledged his students with a positive comment on the way into the room. Likewise, Mrs Langman greets her students with a huge smile and a quick check-in. These moments seems small, but are so powerful in building and maintaining positive connections with our students.
Have a super week
Ben Mills
Deputy Principal – Year 4
bxmil3@eq.edu.au
Care for Learning in Years 5 and 6
Thank you to all of the classes that have invited me in this week. I observed some great examples of collaboration in which students drove the learning and engaged in continual dialogue. It was great listening to the conversations that students delved into and how they used these conversations to extend each other’s learning. In 6R I observed students engage in extension activities in which they planned a party together. Using concrete materials they utilised algebraic rules to decide on how many tables their group would need to seat different amounts of people. While in 5G I observed students engage in a collaborative learning structure called Centrepiece in which each person had to represent their learning and quickly show their group their thinking they represented on a whiteboard. Students could then see the peers that could or could not demonstrate a concept successfully and provide some feedback and tutoring. Great work 5G and 6R!
Year 6 Graduation
Shortly, we will be sending home the official invitation for our Year 6 Gradation. The graduation night is on Wednesday 7 December commencing at 5pm – 9pm in Gigum Hall. The night will involve the formalities of speeches and recognising each individual student as well as food vans, a disco and the opportunity to connect with friends and families and celebrate the great achievement of our students. On the night we will have child minding facilities which we will advertise once it is confirmed. We look forward to a special evening!
Student Leader Passports
A reminder that Friday 4 November is fast approaching and this is the due date for the Student Leader Passports. If a student would like to be considered for a leadership position they need to have the passport completed and submitted to the office by the end of this date. Please encourage your child to work through the process of completing the passport. We look forward to building their ability to be leaders in our school over the next 12 months,
Martin Winney
Deputy Principal –Year 5 & 6
mwinn7@eq.edu.au
Accelerated Reader
Congratulations to Willow and Holly who this week reached their goal of reading 1 million words. This is such a fabulous achievement and we are very proud of them! Super effort Willow and Holly!
This week we also made another AR poster for Amaan – who has now reached 6 million words. Isn’t that extraordinary!! Congratulations Amaan!
For some students in Year 6, after years of successful AR quizzing they have reached the very top. This has happened to Johan this week, reaching 9.0 in AR. This is a very special achievement and we are very impressed by Johan’s commitment towards reading and AR quizzes. We are confident that Johan will continue to read and quiz for the remainder of the year but now he can choose any levels! Congratulations Johan!
Hub display
This week we have a special display in the Hub including some items from the Qld Museum. These items all highlight the ways in which some cultures celebrate special occasions. Learning about and valuing diverse cultures is an important part of the Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS) curriculum for Australian students. For students at Mango Hill, we look forward to lots of opportunities in HASS, English and our Care Class topics to further explore a range of celebrations.
Volunteers
We are still in need of some volunteers to help with our Scholastic Bookclub deliveries. We expect the books back sometime this week so if you have an hour or so to help out we would love to hear from you. Email Suzette shol0@eq.edu.au if you are interested in helping.
Designing a chariot
Grade 5 have been busy designing a chariot that can be pulled by a sphero and used in a class race, exploring material choices and how to make any improvements needed to their design.
Have a fantastic week
Suzette Holm, Jessica Rivett and Danielle O'Brien
shol0@eq.edu.au
A reminder of our big dates this term in PE.
Big PE Dates in Term 4
- 1 December (Thursday, Wk 9) – MHSS Swimming Carnival (8-9yrs)
- 2 December (Friday, Wk 9) – MHSS Swimming Carnival (10-12yrs)
Year 3-4 AFL Training Program
A reminder that our optional afterschool 5-week AFL training program for year 3 and 4 students started this week. Details below.
Dates/Times: Tuesdays 3.00pm-4.00pm (25 Oct, 1, 8, 15, 22 Nov)
Venue: MHSS Oval
Supervision/Pick Up: Students will be supervised by MHSS staff during the training time. Students will then be dismissed from the oval at 4.00pm. Please make necessary arrangements for your son/daughter to get home/be picked up.
Cost: Nil
Forms: If your son/daughter is interested, a permission form needs to be collected from Mr Hills in the PE Office and returned prior to the first session.
Activity Risk: Medium - Students will be playing a modified game of AFL (touch). Mouthguards are not compulsory for AFL training sessions, but are recommended.
Equipment/Uniform: No equipment is required but it is advisable for students to wear a change of clothes if they like. Students can also provide their own protective equipment (mouthguards) and can wear football boots (no metal tags), but again this is optional. If they do not have football boots, normal shoes can be worn.
MHSS Year 3-6 Swimming Carnival
Later this term our MHSS Swimming Carnival for all Year 3-6 students will be held. Our goal is to ensure all students can participate in a variety of swimming races and have an enjoyable day with their peers.
Students in Years 3-6 who are turning 8 and 9 years old in 2022 (Born 2013 and 2014) will compete on the first day, which will be Thursday 1 December (week 9). Students in Years 3-6 turning 10, 11 and 12 years old in 2022 (Born 2010, 2011 and 2012) will compete on a second day, which will be Friday 2 December (week 9).
Students compete at sporting events, including at representative levels, in age groups, not in year levels. Therefore, our carnival days run to align with this process.
Below is the initial parent information for both days. Students will receive more information at school in the coming weeks. This will include a permission and race nomination form, which will need to be returned for your son/daughter to attend. There is no cost for parents associated with the swimming carnival days.
Mr Hills & Mr Newell, Miss Richards and Mr Lisha
Physical Education Teachers
Uniform Shop News
Uniform Shop hours during the term are.
Monday - 8:00am-10:30am
Wednesday 1:30pm-4:00pm
Thursday 1:30pm-4:00pm
Friday 8:00am-10:30am
Do you have a new prep student starting next year? Appointments are now open for uniform fittings in Term 4. They are being run after each of the transition sessions on a Friday morning and are designed to save you long queue times. Bookings can be made at Wearitto Mango Hill SS | Scheduling and Booking Website (simplybook.me)
Online orders - can be placed through our website any time at www.wearitto.com.au/schools/mango-hill-state-school
Orders are packed through the uniform shop during our opening hours and an email is sent to let you know when your order is ready to be picked up, or, if you'd like your student to bring the uniforms home with them, email us at mangohill@wearitto.com.au with your student's name and class name and we can get it to them.
Canteen News
The canteen is offering a meal deal all week.
Choice of pizza sub, vegetable lasagne or spaghetti bolognese.
These come with a garlic bread and choice of juice popper.
We would love to see some more volunteers in the canteen!
If you have any spare time after school drop off we would love some help. Please either just pop into the canteen and see us or email Louise at mhsspccanteen@gmail.com
Pantry Drive
We are looking for donations towards our pantry drive.
We would love donations of the following.
Butter/Margarine
Vegemite
Jam (any flavour)
Dried Pasta and rice
Cream cheese
Sour cream
Cheese slices
Grated cheese
Jatz crackers
Plain / self raising flour
cooking chocolate
The names of students who donate will be put into a raffle and picked by Ms Egan and will receive a prize.
We would like to thank the following families who have already donated this term.
The Cantor and Morgan Families.