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:admin@rathdowneyss.eq.edu.au

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