A Letter to theCommunity

SCHOOL NEWS

No. 20 28th July 2017

“Thought for the Week”

Christmas Creek Athletics- 20, 21

July

The annual Christmas Creek athlet-ics carnival was held last week at Hillview. Students from ages 9 to 12 travelled to Hillview on Thursday, 20 July to participate in the 800 metre sprints, and all field events- long jump, high jump, dis-cus, shotput - and 200 metre heats. On Friday, our whole school, staff and students, attended the second sports day at Hillview. The first event of the day was the schools’ marchpast which was judged by our Mayor, Mr Christensen and our local member, Mr Krause. Darling-ton school won this year’s marching

Rathdowney State Primary School143-155 Mount Lindesay Highway, Rathdowney 4287Phone: (07) 5540 4333 Fax: (07) 5540 4300 Principal: Tina van Bennekom www.rathdownss.eq.edu.au

trophy. Tamrookum school won the war cry with the trophy being awar-ded by councillors, Mrs West and Mr Enright. Our school band led the march. The rest of the day included all the 200metre finals, sprint events for all ages, relays and mini-Olympics for the junior students who were 8 years and under. The day finished with trophies and place ribbons being awarded to the age champion boy and girl in each age group. Trophies were awarded for the fast-est boy and girl over 800m, the Arthy relay and the parent relay. The school scoring the most num-ber of points over the competition was Tamrookum. The school scor-ing the highest average points was Hillview and the most improved school was Rathdowney.

Below are the results of our stu-dents over the two days of competi-tion. Well done, everyone!! We had almost 100% participation on both sports’ days! An awesome effort for our little school!

Results

For Rathdowney SSAge champion 6yrs boysLaxon Horua9yrs Boys placed 3rd Keith Hirsch10yrs Girls placed 3rd Mia Reilly

Dryan trophy fastest girl 800m Mia Reilly time 3.36.44Harry Watkins Memorial Trophy - Most improved school RATHDOWNEY

Movie Tickets to Give Away

For a number of reasons, the school has possession of 20 chil-dren’s movie tickets which are close to their lapse date. Originally, they had to be used by the 27 July, 2017. We could not get a refund for the tickets and were only able to extend the life of the tickets by a month to 31 August, 2017. We are not able to on-sell the tickets but we are willing to offer them for free to any parents who may want them on a first-in basis. The tickets can be used in most cinema chains (BCC, Greater Union, Event and Village Road-show). There are some conditions attached, including using them for

any session on all days except Sat-urdays when they can only be used for session times before 5pm.

Please contact the school office if you would like some of these tick-ets. We would hate for these tick-ets to go to waste and not be used. However, please understand, if there is a big demand, we may have to limit the number of tickets per family.

Annual School Opinion Survey

We have just received this year’s school opinion survey forms. Par-ents and caregivers, school staff and students are encouraged to have their say in this year’s School Opinion Survey by providing their opinions about what our school does well and how our school can improve.

Access details for the parent/care-giver survey are being sent home today and parents/caregivers are invited to complete their survey on-line. School computers can be made available if required. The online survey should only take 10 minutes to complete.

Last year only 2 parents completed the survey. Needless to say, we would love for every one of our par-

ents to complete it so that we will be able to plan for our school’s im-provement in the coming years..

Principal’s Report for the P&C Meeting18. 07.17

At this time our enrolment is stable.

Scripture Union Queensland has advertised for a new chaplain for our school and we hope that we will have a new school chaplain in the coming weeks. I’ll be meeting with the area co-ordinator this week to discuss a new chaplain for our school.

Mrs Wieland is currently on a week’s long service leave and will be returning on Wednesday, 19 July. The principal returned from a week’s long service leave on Monday, 17July. Ms Lane was act-ing principal in Tina’s absence. Tina’s class was taught by Mrs Goggins and Mrs Benstead during that week.During the recent school holidays, Mrs Trish Williams tendered her resignation as our school’s acting BSM for personal family reasons. Mrs Fiona Hughes now works in our school office until Mrs Janelle Schloss’, our school’s substantive BSM returns, from leave. Mrs Hughes will be here until the end of

this term, working in our office on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays.

Student Council

This term, the Council will continue to cook healthy lunches once a week at Friday lunchtimes. The Student Council will be having a meeting next week to plan a menu for this term.

Student Council funds help to sub-sidise camp costs for all the stu-dents by paying for all the entries to the venues the students visit on their annual school camps.

The Student Council also raises funds to support their designated charity, the Queensland Cancer Fund. They organised the annual walkathon for the last day of second term. Although there was a last minute change of route, thanks to some quick re-organisation by our staff, we were able to still do the walk at school as part of a fun-filled activity and orienteering day. This was to enable the students who had sponsorship organised, to still meet there commitments.

The Student Council now also uses some of their funds to donate to the chaplaincy program in local schools.

In addition to fundraising, the Coun-cil is in charge of the school veget-able garden and helps to maintain the school’s garden beds and gen-erally keep the school grounds tidy.

School Band

Mrs Wieland has been practising with the school band two or three times each week in their lunch hours and in the after-noons to be ready for their next main event of the year, leading the Christmas Creek Schools’ march-past this Friday, 21 July at the Christmas Creek Athletics carnival. Band members are getting more excited as the sports’ day draws near.

School Events

The Christmas Creek Sports were held on 20, 21 July at the show-grounds at Hillview. The catering for these two days was organised by our school chaplains to benefit the chaplaincy program in our local schools. The Palen Creek Correc-tional Centre as well as the Christ-mas Creek Sports’ Association have worked diligently to repair the Hillview grounds so that they will be ready for the sports this week.

On weekly parades this term, we will highlight the third of our three school rules, “Be Respectful”. We will continue our focus on the HI-5 response to teasing and bullying as part of our school’s behaviour man-agement plan for the year. The students are using these strategies and they are being used very ef-fectively in the school playground. We have continued our 2016 focus on showing ‘kindness’ to each other and have added another of the Australian values by practising ‘honesty’ this year. All the students will be practising both kindness and honesty as their personal behaviour goals for the year.

Playgroup operates on Wednes-days from 9:30 to 11:30am in the old preschool building. We hope to see our very young families taking advantage of the opportunity to use our school’s resources.

This term Dance Fever will be or-ganising dance classes for all our students on Friday mornings. This will be more convenient for our older students as it’s closer to the Dance Challenge event at Chandler in September.

2017 NAPLAN test results for our year 3 and year 5 students are ex-pected to be sent out later this term.

The school will be hosting a STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) Day of Excellence for local Prep and year 1 students on Tuesday, 15 August. Local science teacher, Mr Scott Charles from Hillview will be organising the activ-ities for the day in our school hall. On the same day, selected Year 4 and 5 students have been invited to Woodhill State School and the Year 2 and 3 students are invited to Flagstone State School. Our students will be travelling to Hillview again this year to attend NAIDOC Day celebrations on Fri-day, 18 August. This is a day when all the local small schools are invited to attend to especially learn about the local Aboriginal culture of this area.

In June, we had some major works in the school pool area. All state school pools are being converted from chlorine pools to salt water pools. There are different rules for operating the new equipment and both Hans and Karen Masen were thoroughly in-serviced in its use. We are expecting other works for the pool before the start of the next swim season. Tina will be having a meeting with our head of school facilities for the region, Mr Peter Kingston and Mr Terry Cornish in coming weeks about pool matters.

The annual School Opinion surveys will be sent out again soon, and parents are asked to please log on to the site and participate. Last year only 2 parents responded.

On Monday, 28 August, our Year 3 and 4 students have been invited to attend a science day planned at Canungra by the Pullenvale Envir-onmental Centre. Entitled “Up the Creek and Down the Drain”, the students will be looking at healthy waterways, their importance and what can be done to protect them. Mr Kroll and Mrs Baker will be ac-companying the group.

Later in the term, students will be preparing their entries for the Beau-desert Show. As we do every year, our students will all be attending the AG-Ed program on the Friday of the show. Staff Professional Development

The small schools’ principals’ net-work will be meeting again in Au-gust to discuss our staff’s know-ledge of, and confidence in using, the Australian curriculum’s achieve-ment standards. In our school, the staff will be working throughout this term to measure the alignment of our school’s commercial maths pro-gram with the Australian Curriculum Achievement Standards.

Our school’s ARD, Mr Terry Cornish will be meeting with the principal on Thursday, 17 August at school.

Mia and Jocelyn Reilly, as well as Indiana Cobb, have been selected as part of the Christmas Creek team to compete in the 800metres at the Beaudesert Zone athletics carnival at Beaudesert Little A’s, St Mary’s school in Beaudesert on Friday, 4 August. Jocelyn has also been selected for the long jump event on the day. Notes will be sent home with these students providing more details.

Rathdowney Music News Term 3, 2017

Year 1/2 class music lesson

In music with Miss B, students will play simple patterns with tone blocks and xylophones and explore pitch, tempo and volume changes. Students will learn the “Sing Count Us In” song. Students will continue to find their good singing voices

using our class pack of JAM 2017 books, keeping the beat and rhythm of easy nursery rhymes. Students will create and write their own rhythm patterns.Assessment Tasks: Play an easy pattern using a nice 2 handed grip on a xylophone. Sing class songs confidently and accurately. Create and play & write on music staff their own pitch patterns using tone blocks and cards & counters.

Year 3/4 and year 5/6 Mrs Van Bennekom’s class music lessons

In music with Miss B, students will be asked to use a variety of prac-tice techniques while learning to play xylophones and glockenspiels and recorders, such as play it through, play just the fingers, break it down, focus on the tricky bit, listen & watch, have another go, play it again but change one thing etc. Students will spend several lessons looking at the “Instruments of the Orchestra” and exploring what they look like and sound like. Students will also spend a couple of lessons revising reading and writing music notation (FACE, EGBDF rule practice).

This class will spend most of this term’s music lessons developing their xylophone and glockenspiel playing skills and learn to play more complex melodies, create their own

simple patterns and play in parts this term. Students may play some songs on a recorder as well and will have an opportunity to play all re-corder songs on a fife if they prefer. We will, of course, continue to sing songs from our JAM 2017 class music books.

Assessment tasks this term: play a glockenspiel melody confidently and accurately and sing class songs well & complete in-class writ-ten tasks well.

Preps

Our preps get a 30 minute music lesson with Miss B. This term we are looking at tone blocks and xylo-phones. We will be finding the right notes C, D, E, F, G, A and B (look-ing for both capital and lower case letters on the instruments). We will be trying to hold our mallets nicely and play only the notes the songs ask for to make nice patterns that sound musical. We will try to sing classic easy nursery rhymes and play easy repeated patterns using a good mallet grip on the beat of the music. We will also play some mu-sic games.

Year 3-6 News

This month’s Dragon Award for Japanese goes to Indiana Cobb

Yr 5.

This week’s Super Spellers were: RebekahIlaHannahKayleighWilliamDakotaDennisonJaydenKeenanTaylahHaleyMiaSaphina

Prep – 2 News

Last week’s Super Spellers were:

Montana MelissaHarlowSummerDaytonaMitchellAaliyahMaklan Linden

This week’s Super Spellers were:

MitchellHarlowMontanaMaxAaliyahMelissa

BrendanSummerMaklanDaytonaKeith Linden

This week the Preps-2 have started their new c2c poetry unit. In this unit, the students will explore, ana-lyse, interpret, create and recite different poems and nursery rhymes. They are really enjoying this unit so far. As the students are very excited about this unit, we thought it would be a great idea to have a dress up day on Thursday 7th September where the students come to school dressed as their favourite nursery rhyme character (NO SUPERHEROS). A gold coin donation would be greatly appreci-ated. It will go to our student council to help towards different projects that help the students of this school. This week we have been practicing the ‘ar’ sound and the different ways to represent it (ar, a).In Maths, the Preps have been learning to read and write numbers to 30 as well as some revision of concepts learnt this year. The Year 1s, 2s and 3s have been working on area and place value.In Art, the students have started getting some creative artwork ready for the Beaudesert Show. This week they made a pig in mud using different painting techniques. They

are looking fabulous. All we have to do now, is back them onto a car-board background to finish them off.

Last week’s Sight Word Smarties were:

Dustin, Brock, Cuda, Levi, Koyah

This week’s Sight Word Smarties were:

Koyah

Dates to Remem-ber – July/August Monda

Tuesda

Wed-ne

Thursd

FridayW

K 3

24 25 26(h) Janine Re-illy© ToniAldred

27 28DanceFever

W K 4

31 1 2 3 4Dance FeverDis-trictAth-letics

W K 5

7 8 9(h) Bilinda Binstead© Cathy Wi

10 11Dance Fever