Passfield Park School

Diary Dates………. April 12 Last Day for Term 1 April 29 Staff Development Day April 30 Students return to school May 6,7,8 High School Camp May 13 High School Sailing excursion May 16 School Photos June 5 Staff Development Day

Dear Parents and Carers Parents and Friends Meeting Next Friday, April 12, please join us in the staffroom at 9.15am for a meeting of our Parents and Friends group. It’s a great opportunity to share stories and tips with other parents, and to enjoy morning tea. We can also celebrate the great result from the Easter raffle - $673 raised! Many thanks and congratulations to everyone for a great job. Staff news Leelum Moodley is our counsellor this year. Leelum is very busy getting to know all the students, and is already a valuable member of our learning and support team. Leelum is at school each Thursday and alternate Friday afternoons. Rachel Pollock has been working with Sukhraj on Red Class whilst Sharon has been on leave. Thanks to Rachel for a great job, and we look forward to having Sharon back next term. We are really fortunate at the school to have a talented group of casual teachers and SLSOs who are able to work across the school so that quality learning programs continue when staff attend professional training or are unwell. Morning routines Our bell rings for supervision of students by staff at 8.45am, and the bell for lines rings at 9.00am. Could you please support the school by waiting on the silver seats with your child before this supervision begins, and then let the students line up by themselves. This allows all the school community to listen to any announcements from the teachers on duty. If you need to talk to your child’s teacher, please make an appointment as teachers on the playground in the mornings are there to ensure student safety. Thank you. If you arrive at the school after 9:00am, please take your child to the office where the classroom will be contacted. We try to keep interruptions to class routines to a minimum, so please do not go up to the classrooms. To ensure student safety, all visitors need to sign in our visitors book, even parents! Thanks for supporting student learning by following these requests. Holidays I wish everyone a restful break this holiday, and encourage everyone to drive carefully in this wet weather. Enjoy the time spent with family and friends. Kind regards Julie Raciborska Principal

April 5, 2013

Check out our school website www.passfield-s.schools.nsw.edu.au

Peanut Allergy Just a reminder not to pack peanut related foods for your child to bring to school. This includes nutella sandwiches. Some of our students have severe peanut allergies. Thank you for your consideration.

Orange Class Bouncing Around

Sport has been a very popular in Purple Class this term. All students are enjoying our ten pin bowling sessions each Wednesday and are showing im-provement in their bowling skills, turn taking and following directions. Swimming Scheme was a great success this year. We were very proud of the progress our students made over the two week program. Their water confidence and swimming abilities improved dramatically and their smiling faces showed us how much they were enjoying themselves. A big thank you to Mrs Hobson and her helpers who arranged another great Easter Fun Day last week. Purple Class joined with Silver Class and had a wonderful time following the rabbit’s foot-prints over the obstacle course, doing the chicken dance, competing in egg and spoon races, hunting for Easter Eggs and lots more. We hope you and your family enjoy the holidays.

Di, Jeanette and Kris

I trust everyone had a great Easter break and didn’t overdose on Easter eggs. Blue Class along with the other classes, participated in Easter ac-tivities. We teamed up with Red Class to provide some peer support. We all enjoyed egg and spoon races, throwing bean bags, parachute, doing the chicken dance and an Easter egg hunt. For Harmony/Multicultural Day, Blue class repre-sented Ireland. The class wore green, orange or white clothing topped off with a green hat and green garland. We made green cakes with green icing and green sprinkles and also enjoyed green jelly. We sang “Puff the Magic Dragon” for our multicultural sing-along.

We have com-menced our liter-acy and numera-cy groups with

Green Class. The students are placed in small ability groups enabling individualised lessons. We have also commenced our Board of Studies sub-jects and the students look forward to the teachers com-ing in to teach in their subject area. Birthday wishes go to Aimee who celebrated her 12th birthday.

Lots of festivities for Blue Class

Olena and Mandy

Purple Class having lots of fun

Orange Class is continuing to settle into the class-room routine and has made great progress in all areas. Zeke celebrated his birthday with a party in the amphitheatre with his class-mates. A good time was had by all. Dipta, Addison and Aidan partici-pated in Swimming Scheme and really enjoyed the experience as well as gaining valuable experience in water safety. The students have been experimenting in ‘bounce therapy’ which involves sessions on the trampoline with a teacher. These activities are designed to provide sensory stimulus and calm and relax the students. We all en-joyed Easter activities before the Easter break—and we even had a visit from the Easter bunny! We wish everyone a happy, safe and enjoyable holiday.

Belinda, Mat and Kris

Learning Links is holding a free workshop which explores the symptoms displayed by children and adolescents with depression and/or anxiety. It ex-amines treatment, diagnosis, causes and related risk factors. There is a focus on what parents can do to support these children. Date: Tuesday 14 May, 2013 Time: 6.00pm-8.30pm Venue: Learning Links Mt Pritchard– Lvl 1, 46B Reservoir Rd, Mt Pritchard Suitable for: Parents and Carers ONLY For enquiries and bookings please phone Dana on 8568 8200. This workshop is funded by the De-partment of Education and Communities.

My Kitchen Rules for Pink Class Swimming Scheme during Weeks 6 and 7 was thoroughly enjoyable and it was wonderful to see

the progress made by the students over the ten lessons. On the last day, we spent 15 minutes playing in the water sensory area where everyone had a great time. Recently Pink Class changed from doing

cooking sessions in the classroom, to cooking in the school kitchen. Spreading, pouring, stirring and slicing skills will continue to be the major focus, but access to cook tops and ovens provides the opportunity to cook food that could not be cooked in the classroom. Sinks, taps and cupboards, at a height

customised for infants classes, enable us to work on washing up, drying up and putting away dishes. This move also provides greater scope to develop awareness of kitchen safety.

On the Thursday before the Easter break, Pink Class and six other classes participated in Easter activities. They enjoyed following rabbit feet around an obstacle course, dancing the chicken dance, egg and spoon races, eggs in the basket, rob the nest, sack races and parachute games. Their favourite activities were the sack races and parachute games and a visit from the Easter bunny caused excitement and interest.

Silver Class Dance Zorba

Yellow Class Celebrations The last month has been jam packed with activi-ties and learning opportunities for all students in Yellow Class. Cassandra, Emily, Jackson, Ja-cob, Leiatia, Mahib, McCallum and Ron-nan all had a dy-namic time during their participation in the two weeks of water safety sessions at Bradbury Pool. These pool sessions were an enjoyable time for

each student as they relished the pool and made gains in their water skills. I was very impressed by each student’s participa-tion and their ability

to change quickly and care for their belongings. We also celebrated Harmony Day with other clas-ses all presenting items, artwork, songs or dances from other countries. Yellow Class learnt about Germany, learnt a song with a few German words, made flags and an artwork of Germany and Aus-tralia to represent the many people who have come from other countries and now live in Austral-ia. The visit from the Easter bunny on Thursday before Easter was a big surprise for all the stu-dents and a nice way to finish the afternoon of games, danc-ing and Easter egg hunt.

Cheryl and Rob

Silver Class is well and truly settled into class now. Students are working hard each morning to spell and write their names, letters and numbers, complete puzzles and practice reading and sign-ing. We have been focusing on identity with our ‘Me’ program. We have made paper plate faces and personal books, measured and compared our heights and looked at our different facial features. Silver Class students have enjoyed the special activities occurring throughout the whole school community, such as Harmony Day and Easter ac-tivities. The students were fantastic performing ‘Zorba the Greek’ dance and encouraged many to come up and join in. Their Easter hats looked out-standing and the children really enjoyed making them. I am very proud of all the students’ perfor-mance throughout Swimming Scheme. They have all accomplished so much in their own way.

Sarah and Sonia

Silver Class Activities

Cheryl and Narelle

Red Class Running Hot and Cold In the second half of Term 1, Red Class engaged in activities to build awareness of safety– water safe-ty, fire safety and safety on play equipment. It was fun and physically exhausting all at the same time. We worked hard at building our swimming and water safety skills during the ten days of Swimming Scheme. To begin with, some students were happy to do ‘their own thing’ rather than follow the

directions of the swimming instructors but gentle persua-sion and per-sistence helped them learn new skills. We are proud of our students who

all made remarkable progress in their water confi-dence. We are enjoying learn-ing about hot and cold in our Science les-sons. Students shared their experiences with items which are hot or cold. Singing and dancing to Wiggle's ‘Hot Potato’ got us ex-cited every time. The whole school fire drill helped with building our awareness of fire safety.

We worked on our gross motor skills on Thursday afternoon at Lollipops Play-land. The slides and rides were our all time favourites. In Term 2, we look forward to going to Yotala Gym for Sport.

Red Class has started visiting Minto Library to bor-row books. We are easing into the routine of choos-

ing a book, lining up, presenting our library card, receiving the borrowed book, bag-ging and carrying it to school. A big thank you to Blue Class for helping us with the Easter

activities.

Sukhraj, Sharon & Rachel

White Class Enjoys Easter Celebrations What an exciting day we had when Passfield Park School celebrated Easter. We played games - egg and spoon races, bunny hop races, rob the nest races, used the parachute to hide, danced the chicken dance, followed the bunny footprints and finally had an Easter egg hunt. To top off the cele-brations, the Easter bunny came. Thank you so much Cheryl Hobson for making it such a fun day. But who would have thought that it would have been so hot!!! We all had to stop for a cool drink. In class time, White Class has been very busy with our Can-teen Pro-gram. We thank the parents for sending in orders on Tuesdays. On Fridays we glue the order forms to the bags. On Mondays we deliver the orders to the classes and then check and stock the drinks fridge. Tuesday is our busy day when we collect and collate the orders, prepare them, deliver them and then count the takings. Not finished yet, we need to shop on Wednesday to restock. As you can see, this has become a whole of week pro-gram and each student is given responsibility for a different area. Probably the most difficult part, is the putting on of rubber gloves because we must ensure hygienic practises. We also use tongs to handle the food. Students are very aware of the safety risks of work-ing with hot appliances and are duly careful. So in our program, we cover Work Skills, Money, shop-ping, Mathematics – counting, graphing and esti-mating, social skills when delivering messages, cooking and safety. Thank you for supporting our learning.

Alison & Michele

On Thursday, March 28, we went to the Easter Show. It was a very long day because we stayed for the evening show and the fireworks, but we had a lot of fun. My favour-ite thing was the showbags and the racing and diving pigs. Hala I liked the fireworks, showbags, the pigs and meeting Alvin from the chipmunks. Denae

I liked the racing pigs and the fireworks. Farabi My favourite things were the utes, the pigs and the fire-works. Andrew I liked the animal nursery. The goat tickled my hand. Jeremy My favourite things were the animals, the moto-x, the cars, the pigs, Darcy’s Quest and the fireworks and meeting Puss in boots and Alvin. Jessica We watched the Isuzu D-max utes, the freestyle motorcross and Darcy’s Quest. The quest had very good special effects. It was spellbinding. Some people fed the animals. I was scared of the goats and chickens. We saw the racing and diving pigs. We were sitting in section 3 and our pig won the second race. When we were going to the showbags it rained. Everyone bought at least 3 or 5 showbags. The fireworks made me jump. Daniel My favourite thing was when I spilt animal food on my lap and the sheep and goats ate it. It made me laugh. I got the NRL Knights showbag and a chocolate showbag. I got Alvin’s autograph and met Puss in Boots. I saw Darcy’s Quest and the fireworks. Shada

Easter Show reports by Green Class students

Congratulations to our students of the week

Photographs taken by our high school students