It’s been an interesting fortnight and pleasant start to the Winter months (so far). With the temporary closure of Prossers Gorge at Orford, we’ve been busy working with the East Coast cluster schools. Sharing our teachers, has meant some practical changes to staffing and our timetables have looked a little different this week, but, I am especially grateful to our flexible and resilient staff who have been forthcoming and supportive, and at the same time, busy completing various assessments for learning and informing their report writing which is due at the end of term. As you would know our External Review has been postponed for now and so too has our after school sporting schools program, Badminton been put on hold, but we are planning for the go ahead next term.  A special thanks to those staff and students who are staying at home when they are unwell, it is helping to keep everyone as healthy as we can!  Have a happy weekend.

Mrs Kristy Hay

Principal

Today is World Environment Day.  The K/P/1/2 worked on making paper cup bird feeders.  We also made an art piece about how we can care for the environment.  Thank you to Steve from the Salvation Army and Emily Van Galen for being such amazing volunteers and helping us!

First Aid in Schools

We’ve been successful with our application for a 2021 Woolworths Junior Landcare Grant for our project, Seed to Feed!

This will also include

Wild Hives Incursion

• Beekeeper in full protective wear
• Talk about protective wear and children can try it on
• Demonstration ion of smoker machine
• Exhibition tank of bees including Queen
• Discussion about the bees Wild Hives use for their honey
• Discussion about the Native Bees and their similarities and differences with honeybees we looked at.
• Tasting different honeys to see how plants influence the flavour of honey.
• Make bees wax wraps. This will help us reduce the amount of rubbish we create as a school.
• Enjoy a morning tea of honey on fresh bread.

Swansea Primary School is one of 1,609 primary schools and early learning centres throughout Australia receiving a Woolworths Junior Landcare grant to help grow our next generation of environmental champions.

The grants are being funded with a 10c contribution from each sale of the Woolworths Bag for Good at full price, which was launched in 2018 when Woolworths went single-use plastic bag free.

The children and teachers are looking forward to working and learning from this project and we’ll keep you updated on the results.

Click on the Woolworths Junior Landcare Grant map to read about our project and others.

During literacy time in the prep/1 class we have been focusing on InitiaLit work.  Our sentence to look at last week was 'It is in the big tin.'  We investigated what happens when we took the first word away and explored ways that we could replace it with other words.  We ended up using lots of nouns to replace the first word of the sentence.  We all agreed that these substitutions made the sentence much more interesting.

During numeracy time we have been looking at the many ways to make 10.  We have also been counting to and from different starting points and exploring large numbers.

Inquiry in the Grade 2/3 Class

In the Grade 2/3 class we have been focusing on our inquiry questions for Term 2 in Science and HASS. Our current inquiry questions are:

What do we wonder about the Earth, moon and sun?

(Science)

What do we wonder about Australia?

(HASS)

We began our inquiries by adding questions to our Wonder Walls and spending time researching the answers.

We are now working on each student developing a question (from either of our inquiries) that they can research independently and create a project to share their information with the class.

In the 4/5/6 class we have been investigating how to improve our writing skills.

We brainstormed how we can tell how good a text is, and grouped our ideas into categories or criteria; spelling, grammar and punctuation, for example.

We then used these agreed criteria to examine and assess samples of writing.  There was lively discussion in small groups about the pros and cons of each piece we were critiquing.  We found out that vocabulary was an important indicator of how good a piece of writing is, as well as descriptions of settings and characters.

We will use our criteria to improve our own writing in the coming weeks!

The Red Shield Appeal. 

We raised $214.00 - an excellent effort. 

Well done!

Thanks to Steve, Linda, Jess and Craig from South East Salvos for visiting the disco and helping out.

On Tuesday 25^th of May, Swansea Primary held their annual cross-country carnival at Jubilee Beach. It was great to invite parents and carers back to the event and watch their child/ren participate in their race.

All students showed great courage, respect, and sportsmanship throughout the day, contributing to the success of the carnival.

Each event was scored for each placing and we are excited to share with you all that the winning team of day was Oyster who finished on 79 points followed closely by Swan on 63 points.

Thank you to all the parents/careers and family members who came along to the event.