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The past few weeks have seen many professional conversations between staff including communicating learning progress with families and parent teacher interviews, the new online reporting format beginning in 2022, staff Professional Development Planning (PDP's) and our upcoming Student Led Conferences (SLC's) to be held in Week 9. SLC's are an opporunity for parents/carers/special guests to come in and learn from students about the growth they have made so far this year and their aspirational goals for the remainder of the year. This week, teachers have met to discuss new learning opportunities on the horizon and have shown courage when provided with feedback regarding the work they have been doing in the area of Mathematics. We have seen huge growth within the school and the data is both exciting and invigorating! This fortnight, in Art, all students entered the Young Archies Competition and some students in the 4/5/6 participated in the Australian Maths Competition. We wish all of our entrants, every success and thank them for representing Swansea Primary School.
Coming together with the East Coast Cluster for our Mini Olympics yesterday at Triabunna District High School was a highlight of the fortnight and one I am sure was the hot topic of conversation last night amongst a very tired bunch of kids. I am proud of the way our students demonstrated our values of Aspiration, Growth, Courage and Respect throughout the day!
We are looking forward to welcoming our Dads and/or special guests to a Fathers’ Breakfast onsite at 8am on Friday 3rd September and hope to see a great turn out.
Our next School Association meeting has been scheduled for Monday 23rd August from 3:15-4:45pm in the Reading Room and you are all welcome to attend.
Enjoy your weekend!
Kristy Hay
Principal
P/1 Literacy
This term P/1 have been making lots of progress in literacy using the literacy program InitiaLit. InitiaLit is an evidence based, systematic, whole class literacy program for teaching reading and writing. It follows a logical sequence, ensuring that there are no gaps in curriculum content during your child's time at Swansea Primary School. This program is helping your children to develop the foundation skills they need to become proficient readers and writers. InitiaLit incorporates what is known as a synthetic phonics approach to teaching spelling and reading. It has a focus on rich literary texts and the development of students' vocabulary across the whole school. We are enjoying using the InitiaLit handwriting program and have been working hard to achieve our individual learning goals in handwriting. It has been fantastic to see so many family members get involved in the students home reading programs. Home reading doesn't necessarily have to be done by parents and caregivers. Your child might enjoy reading with older siblings, aunts and uncles, neighbours, family friends or grandparents. The students have told us they are "super excited" about brand new readers we received this week and that they "can't wait to read all of them". We want to say a big thank you to Janine for getting them stamped, labelled and into our classroom so quickly.
Rube Goldberg machine: STEAM investigation
The 4/5/6 class have begun construction of a whole class Rube Goldberg machine as part of our physical sciences unit of work. Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist and designer of machines that could perform simple jobs in an extravagant way. Students have been applying their knowledge of different types of energy, how the energy can be transferred and exploring what forces act to limit or assist the work being done.
We are seeking any donations of household recycled or reusable materials for constructing our own Rube Goldberg machine. Consider if you have any old toys such as cars, ramps, marble runs, dominoes that you could give to the 4/5/6. Perhaps you have old pulleys or levers or wind up toys or tubes and pipes that could be used. We would also appreciate big, thick cardboard boxes that we can use as a back board / height construction. Watch this space for a video of our very own invention soon!
We came together on Tuesday to farewell Sergeant Marcus Pearce for his service to our school and the wider Swansea community. We will miss his bubbly and approachable manner and thank him for his contribution to SPS both as a dad and role model and advocate for our youth. Happy Retirement, Marcus!
Thank you for hosting our 1st East Coast Cluster Olympics Triabunna District School. It was a great day with students demonstrating the Olympics spirit and our DOE values of aspiration, growth, courage and respect. Thank you for organising such a wonderful event Miss Murray.