Filter Content
Our students have almost completed a full term of learning and improving in their skills and understandings. This fits so well with our school values of To Dream – a culture of high expectations and high achievement, To Believe – accepting challenges and embracing opportunities, and To Grow – improving by always learning and finding better ways to do things. How fortunate we are at Somerset Primary to have committed teachers and students. We are not perfect, but our commitment to inspire and support all learners to be connected, resilient, creative and curious thinkers is certainly evident.
As we draw the term to a close we can look at all we have achieved so far including the establishment of classes, the athletics carnival and inter-school athletics, some class excursions including leadership days, the messages we share about Bullying – No Way! and Harmony Day, Clean Up Australia Day, and our assembly.
Friday the 12 April is a student free day. Teachers will be attending professional learning with 4 other schools moderating student work and ensuring a consistency with the Australian Curriculum across the schools in line with the Department Of Education’s expectations.
Students will return after the school holidays (which includes Easter and ANZAC day) on Monday 29 April.
Thank you so much to the parents and community for valuing the safety of our students by adhering to the expectations in the carpark at drop off and pick up times. This does make it safer for all.
Early in May is Mother’s Day. Our parent group will again be organising a Mother’s Day stall for our children to purchase something special for their loved person. This organisation requires support from all our parents. You can support by providing some food donations (clearly labelled, no nuts) or by volunteering an hour to help run the stall. A notice will be coming out early term 2 for you to indicate how you can support.
Bravehearts
Monday 20 May 2019 for Kinder to Grade 2, 9:15am or 10:00am
Plus a parent session at 8:45am in the staffroom
EDUCATION PROGRAMS FOR EARLY YEARS & LOWER PRIMARY
Children can begin learning valuable lessons to help keep them safe from as young as 2-3 years old. Providing age-appropriate information around body ownership and the right to be safe from an early age allows for these messages to become part of the child’s everyday language and helps to build self-esteem and resilience in children.
Ditto’s Keep Safe Adventure Show is Bravehearts’ personal safety program for young children. Starring Bravehearts’ lovable lion cub Ditto, alongside a specially trained presenter, this fun, interactive live show teaches children essential personal safety skills and knowledge using age appropriate language, song and dance.
ABOUT THE DITTO SHOW
Ditto’s Keep Safe Adventure Show is aimed at children aged 3 to 8 and is delivered in early learning centres and lower primary schools to children of all abilities. This fun and interactive personal safety program has reached hundreds of thousands of Australian children since its inception in 2006.
Delivered by experienced facilitators, the show duration is 30 to 40 minutes.
What will children will learn?
Following is an overview of the Ditto show content. Both the Early Years and Lower Primary School versions of the Ditto show are underpinned by the following six principles of personal safety:
- Differentiating ‘yes’ and ‘no’ feelings
- Recognising the bodies ‘warning signs’
- Body ownership
- Helping children identify language and feelings associated with secrets
- Reinforcing that there is no secret that children cannot tell someone
- What to do if you feel unsafe or unsure
We aim to teach children these essential principals through songs such as ‘Run and Tell (someone you can trust)’ and ‘Private Parts (they belong to me)’.
Children also learn ‘Ditto’s 3 Rules’, which are:
- We all have the right to feel safe with people.
- It’s ok to say NO if you feel unsafe or unsure.
- Nothing is so yucky that you can’t tell someone about it.
Every morning Prep A goes for a walk somewhere around our school grounds. We have made lots of observations which has lead us into discussions and leading our own learning. In our classroom we have a Floorbook where we record our observations. From looking at pears growing in our school orchard and noticing galahs on our school oval of a morning, we have been inquiring into what is a living and non-living thing and what they do. We originally thought people and animals were the only living things but now we think plants are living as well because we now think all living things grow.
We also notice a rain gauge when we were walking so we have been recording the daily rainfall at Somerset Primary in a graph.
Using our fingers as a frame to see what living and non-living things we could see.
After noticing lots of different birds in our school grounds we had a go at making our own bird beaks and tested them to see what they could pick up.
We carefully pulled sunflowers apart to see if they had any seeds.
3/4C have been enjoying science and related STEAM challenges this term. We have been learning about natural and manmade materials and their properties. We conducted a science experiment to find out what was the most absorptive material in our class room. We tested paper, paper towel and cleaning cloth. To make sure the test was fair each material was cut to the same size and then we poured 5ml of water onto each material, waited 5 minutes and checked to see how much water was left on the table. The cleaning cloth was clearly the most absorptive material, followed by paper towel.
In STEAM we had to build a shelter using natural materials. We only had bark, sticks, string and PVA glue (though not natural). As a team we had to design our shelter first before we built it, it was actually a very tricky challenge.
Another challenge was to build a bridge that would hold at least one toy car. We had three choices of materials; pasta and playdough, newspaper and masking tape or bark, string and sticks. One of our bridges held up to 12 cars.
In Writers Workshop we discussed Bullying No Way day and how we can stop bullying. From this discussion we then wrote narratives about Bullying. We hope you enjoy them.
Parents and families are invited to attend a forum to provide information about and discuss Educational Adjustments.
From 2020, there will be a new approach in Department of Education schools to assisting students with disability to access, participate and engage in quality educational programs.
Forums are scheduled for Term 2. Light refreshments will be provided.
See details of locations and timing and how to register at: REGISTER HERE
For paper based newsletters please use the full web address to register:
Dear Parent/Guardian
NAPLAN is moving completely online in 2019. This means moving NAPLAN from paper-based assessments to online-based assessments. NAPLAN Online will provide better assessment and more precise results. The assessments feature a tailored test design where the questions a student receives will depend on their answers to previous questions.
Tasmanian schools will participate in NAPLAN Online from 2019.
NAPLAN Online testing will be held from the 14 to 24 May 2019.
NAPLAN Online 2019 will include four components, Writing, Numeracy, Conventions of Language and Reading. For 2019 Year Three students will be completing a paper based Writing Test. Online Testing will be available for each of the NAPLAN year levels (3, 5, 7 and 9)
Schools will receive results and reports for participants following the completion of NAPLAN Online 2019. Individual Student Reports will have the same format as the results from the paper based testing. The same report format is used for every student in Australia.
Individual student performance in NAPLAN is shown on a national achievement scale for each test. The performance of individual students can be compared to the average performance of all students in Australia.
Security and privacy are key requirements for the delivery of national testing. The online assessment platform has been designed to comply with relevant national data security policies and guidelines as well as data encryption standards. It meets the requirements of the Australian Government’s Protective Security Policy Framework and Information Security Manual to protect privacy of data, including any personal student data, required to be used.
Please see the Department of Education’s NAPLAN Online Privacy Notice
for more information.
Thank you, in anticipation, for you and your child’s participation in this important national initiative.
If you have further questions, please contact Amanda Lloyd at the school.
We currently have a large amount of unnamed items in our lost property, including jackets, drink bottles and glasses. If these items are not collected by the end of the term they will be donated to a worthy cause. Please ensure that all items are clearly named, perhaps in more than one area, to enable these to be returned to the rightful owner.