A Letter to the Community
“Thought for the Week”
SCHOOL NEWS
No.21 17th July 2020
Covid-19
As the Queensland govern-ment has decided that all schools would re-open to
all children as it was safe to do so, we are still insisting on good hygiene practises for all children and staff,
and social distancing prac-tices with all adults. Our
extra cleaning regimes for the school will remain the
same as it has been throughout the Covid-19
pandemic.
Rathdowney State Primary School
143-155 Mount Lindesay Highway, Rathdowney 4287
Phone: (07) 5540 4333 E:[email protected]
Principal: Tina van Bennekom www.rathdowneyss.eq.edu.au
Reporting to Stu-dents and Parents
Because our term has been
interrupted by Covid-19, our end of semester as-
sessments and the reports that go home to the stu-
dents will be a little differ-ent this year. We hope to have all assessments com-pleted by the early part of
term 3 and report cards will be sent home on the
13 August. This allows the teachers the best oppor-
tunity to report on all sub-jects for this semester.
There will be no parent-teacher interviews as we
would usually do, but par-ents are most welcome to make times to meet indi-vidually with the teachers
if they want to.
Block C Refurbish-
ments
The builders have almost finished refurbishing the classrooms upstairs and downstairs. The toilet
block has been painted and the rest of the painting
work still needs to be com-pleted. After that it’s the tidy-up and then all works
should be finished for this year.
It’s all looking great so far.
Year 3-6 Class
The class has been working quietly and well through all
their weekly tasks this week. Ms v B has been re-
stricted to admin duties only for one to two weeks
at present, due to vocal load on her voice with
classroom teaching as well.
So Mrs O has taken on teaching the class for the
next week or so.
Seat Team Visit
Yesterday, Wayne Horkings from the Spinal Education Awareness Team visited
the school to speak to stu-dents about keeping safe
so as to prevent major spi-nal injuries. The students
were interested and learned lots from Wayne’s
visit.
Principal’s Report for the P&C Meeting
14. 07. 20
Staff and Students
With the Covid -19 outbreak this year, this is only the sec-
ond school report for the P&C meeting. We have been bus-ier than ever at school. Dur-ing the last week of term 1, the government declared a
pupil-free week to allow teachers to prepare for learn-
ing at home. This was achieved and we started term
2 with some children of es-sential workers at school and other students learning from home. Our photocopier was running hot during all those weeks and we all learned
some new skills as teachers in order to provide meaningful and productive work for the
students to do at home. We all breathed a sigh of relief
when, after 5 weeks of learn-ing at home, all the students could return to school again!
Super Spellers 3-6- Max, Erin, William, Harlow, Montana Super Spellers P-2 – Harrison, Colin, Amelia, Ryan, Noah P
Sight Word Smart-ies- Dustin, Austin, Noah T,
Billie, Liam
Ms VB took 3 weeks of long service leave at the end of
term 2 and is intending to take a further 3 weeks at the end
of term 3 and term 4 this year. She was replaced in the
classroom by Mrs O and Ka-sey was acting principal in
Tina’s absence.
Student Council The Student Council will again be offering healthy
lunches this term. This week’s lunch menu is curried sau-sages and rice with Doritos
and juice. There will be an or-dinary meeting in the next
week or so to decide on pro-jects and activities for what is
left of 2020. The Student Council raised funds by hav-
ing an ice cream stall at school on Fridays at
lunchtime during first term.
School Events Swimming lessons started for the year in term 1 and all stu-dents had lessons on Mon-days, Wednesdays and Fri-
days each week. We shared
the pool on Thursdays each week during term 1 with Ma-
roon State School. Instead of the Christmas Creek sports carnival, this
year we are hoping to hold a gala interschool sports day on
the last Tuesday of term 3. The Christmas Creek cross-country was held at Darling-
ton State School on 12 March, for all 9 -12 year old students. The event was
held after school from 4:00pm - 6pm.
After the students returned in term 2, we had yoga/wellbe-ing classes run by Dance Fe-
ver on Friday afternoons. This term Dance Fever will return to run Dance classes
at school on Friday mornings. There will be social distancing during the classes with mostly line dancing and hip-hop style
and other individual dance routines taught.
Mrs Janine Reilly has again agreed to take on organising Book Club for our students
this year. This is proving to be
very successful with a signifi-cant number of students or-
dering books on a regular ba-sis.
The annual School Opinion Survey has been changed
this year. It is a pulse survey with a lot less questions about
the school in general and more about how the school managed things during the
period of lockdown. The sur-vey was sent out last term, while I was on leave but is available for you to do until
the end of this week.(17 July) It only takes 5 minutes to do on line and we are encourag-ing all our parents to please do the survey. Your opinions will make a difference to fu-ture planning for the school. School reports will be going
out on 13 August. This is later than normal because Covid -19 interrupted our learning for a while. We are just now test-ing the students on what they had learned last semester. In the next few weeks, we
hope to have a leadership in-duction ceremony where our
school leaders will be pre-sented with their badges and serve afternoon tea for par-
ents and guests in the school’s staffroom. Please keep reading your newslet-
ters for information about this. The only homework ex-
pected from our students is the nightly reading and
spelling/sight words the stu-dents do. We, as a staff, be-lieve that the students’ nightly reading and spelling is essen-tial for their learning and we didn’t want to compromise the success of the school’s reading and spelling pro-grams by making this op-
tional. This term we are highlighting the third of our 3 school rules, “Be Respectful” with the stu-dents on weekly parades. We will also be focusing on the HI-5 response to teasing and bullying as part of our
school’s behaviour manage-ment plan for the year. The students have really taken
these strategies on board and
they have been used very ef-fectively in the school play-
ground. Every year we focus on one of the Australian val-ues for the year. This year’s
value to practise is RESILIENCE and
POSITIVITY. We are encour-aging our students to keep practising the 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 values of KINDNESS, HONESTY,
RESPECT, TOLERANCE and INCLUSION while add-
ing on the 2020 values of RESILIENCE and
POSITIVITY. The school has received
about $16 000+ of govern-ment grant money to improve literacy and numeracy with
our students as the Investing for Success Grant (also
called I4S money). Because of the shortfall in staffing this
year, we have decided to use the funding to purchase teacher and teacher aide
hours to support our students’ learning.
Our regular Wednesday play-group has begun again this
year. We were excited to see new families coming along to our playgroup. Playgroup op-erates on Wednesdays from 9:00am to 11:30am in the old preschool building. Sorelle
Jobson, one of our dedicated parents will continue to de-liver, with the help of Beau-care, a program of develop-
mentally appropriate activities for all the children in our area
aged 0-5 years. We will again have the support of the Scenic Rim Regional Council
now visiting the playgroup once each fortnight to provide their “Rhyme Time” program.
This year’s senior school camp to Moreton Island has been booked 6-8th October, 2020. The junior school
camp (for Prep to Year 3s) has now also been booked for 4th term (28-30 Oct.). Our school camps are an integral component of the curriculum that our school offers to its
students and they contribute to improvement in each stu-dent’s learning. The Prep-
year 3 students will be staying
at Brookfield in Brisbane for the annual junior school
camp (26-28 May) and visit-ing various venues around
the city
and the Sunshine Coast. Parents are invited to attend the junior camp if they wish to accompany their children. As always, our camps are heav-ily subsidised, so that cost is
less likely to be a factor in stu-dents missing out on camp. The P&C pays the bus costs and the Student Council pays
for entries to all the venues the students visit.
Staff Professional Develop-
ment At staff meetings, we hope to work on our new Behaviour
Plan for the school. Sunday the 26th, there will be first aid and CPR workshops
at school. During the Covid situation,
our meetings were held elec-tronically. Much of the PD we
do is also electronic. This seems to be the way things
will mostly be done from now on. All teacher aides and
teachers have completed and discussed their plans from last year and are in the pro-cess of planning and writing new personal development
plans for 2020.
Junior News
Welcome back to term 3. I
hope everyone had an en-
joyable holiday. The stu-
dents are very excited to be
back at school.
This week, we have started
settling back into classroom
routines. In English, the
Preps have been continuing
on learning their double
vowel sounds. This week
we learnt the sounds ‘ou’,
‘ue’ and ‘oi’. We will be
finished our double sounds
next week. Then we will be
starting our word family
program. This includes ex-
tra homework for the Preps.
So keep an eye out for an
extra book in their home-
work folders in week 3.
The Year 1s and 2s learnt
the sounds ‘n’ and ‘ng’ for
their spelling this week.
They learnt the various
ways we can represent
these sounds (n, nn, kn,
ng). Next week we will be
starting our new c2c unit.
In this unit, the students
will exploring characters in
stories. For their assess-
ment task, the students will
be required to present a re-
tell of their favourite story
through a PowerPoint
presentation. Mr Kroll will
be teaching the technology
side of this unit where he
will teach them how to use
the PowerPoint software.
In Maths, the Preps have
been continuing on learning
to recognise, write and rep-
resent numbers to 20. They
also have been learning
about positional language.
The Year 1s have been
working on place value up
to 100 and the Year 2s have
been working on numbers
to 1000.
Over the next 2 terms we
will be doing the history
part of the HASS units. In
this unit, the Preps will be
exploring the nature and
structure of families, identi-
fying their own personal
history, particularly their
own family backgrounds
and relationships. They will
also be examining diversity
within their family and oth-
ers and investigating famil-
iar ways family and friends
commemorate past events
that are important to them.
The Year 1s and 2s will be
investigating continuity and
change in technology used
in the home environment
e.g. in toys or household
products. They will com-
pare and contrast features
of objects from the past and
present. The students will
sequence key developments
in the use of a particular
object in daily life over
time. They will learn how
to pose questions about ob-
jects from the past and pre-
sent and describe ways
technology has impacted on
peoples' lives making them
different from those of pre-
vious generations.
More from us next week Kasey, Cathy & Denise
Free to good home
Our old pre-school cubby is looking for a new home this will require collection and a few repairs depend-ing on what you require it
for, Please contact the school office or Janine on
0427847955
Bookclub
Please return all Bookclub orders by Tuesday July 27,
Thankyou
Dates to Remember-July-August 2020
Monday Tues-day
Wednesday Thursday Friday
W K 2
20 FREE
Chaplaincy Breakfast
21 22 Tuckshop & Cakes
Danielle Bass
23 24 Dance Fever
Heathy Friday
Lunches W K 3
27 FREE
Chaplaincy
Breakfast
28 29 Tuckshop & Cakes
Tanya Tainton
30 31 Dance Fever
Heathy Friday
Lunches W K 4
3 FREE
Chaplaincy
Breakfast
4 5 Tuckshop
Sally Finlay Cakes: Rachel
Hardgrave
6 7 Dance Fever
Heathy Friday
Lunches W K 5
10 FREE
Chaplaincy Breakfast
11 12 Tuckshop
Janine Reilly Cakes: Emma
Williams
13 Student Reports
Available
14 Dance Fever
Heathy Friday
Lunches W K 6
17 FREE
Chaplaincy
Breakfast
18 19 Tuckshop
Amanda Lahrs Cakes: Cathy
Wieland
20 21 Dance Fever
Heathy Friday
Lunches
Building Renovations 2020
Top Related