8 August 2017

Newsletter Articles

From the Principal

Hello everyone,

Parents and Friends Ladies Night Out

Congratulations to Liz Jordan and her dedicated teams of helpers on another successful Ladies Night Out. It was a great night of shopping with over 40 stalls showcasing a large range of local and handmade products from which to browse and purchase! There were lucky balloons, fantastic raffle prizes and plenty of food to nibble on! I wish to pass on my sincere gratitude to the Liz Jordan, Amanda McEvoy, Cindy Dunn, Susan O’Leary and Sarah Clarke for work they did to ensure the night was such a great success. Thank you also to all the other parents and friends who helped out and made generous donations.

Indigenous Children’s Day

Last Friday we celebrated National Indigenous Children’s Day. This has been an annual event for Exeter Primary School which we adopted to compensate for NAIDOC Week often falling within the school holidays. Each year we aim to involve our students in a range of cultural activities to help them deepen their appreciation for our indigenous culture. This year students were very lucky to have Uncle Murray, Lola Greeno and Rex Greeno visit our school. Students learnt about the significance of shell necklaces, canoe making, ochre painting and how to represent colours of the Tasmanian bush. Thank you to Mrs Emms for organising this event. Every year Mrs Sims introduces a special art project to coincide with this day. This year every child will produce some finger knitting or french knitting that will be used to create a woven installation in the courtyard. We look forward to seeing this emerge.

Achievement Assembly

Congratulations to all the students who received letters of commendation at last week’s Achievement Assembly. Students were acknowledged for adopting a Growth Mindset, having 100% attendance in the first half of the year and receiving an A rating in their Mid-Year Report. Thank you to all the parents and families who came along to share the assembly and proudly support their children. At Exeter Primary School we believe that all children can achieve great things with the right attitude and a Growth Mindset. Typically students with a Growth Mindset show resilence during challenges and see mistakes as a necessary part of learning. Learning is about continually moving forward and enjoying the challenge that learning brings.

Achievement Commendations

Education Act

On 10 July 2017 the new Education Act 2016 was passed in parliament. The new act has a number changes in relation to student attendance, dual enrolment, student behavior and home education. I have included some information below or alternatively you can visit the Department of Education Website for more information.

Excursions

Last week all our Grade 3/4 students visited TastroFest in Ulverstone. This is an annual science festival that provides a range of astronomical experiences. Students visited the portable planetarium, learned about the night sky, talked with astrophysicists and even experienced a live link to a working space station!

Country Gold

Congratulations to all those students who were selected for the Country Gold Carnival last week during the selections at South Georgetown Primary School. Exeter sent a team of 20 students and 15 of them were selected to represent our school in either Football, Hockey, Netball or Soccer. This is great effort. Thank you Mr Habel and our Grade 5/6 Team for the great coaching!

XSTEAM Challenge

Our STEAM programs for Term 3 have started and we are very excited to have 2 teams participating in the Launceston College XSTEAM Challenge along with a number of other local primary schools. Each week the 3/4 team and our 5/6 team are presented with a challenge to complete. Their work is then marked and their results ranked against all the other teams. Please see the article below for more information.

Parent/Teacher/Student Conversations

Don’t forget that if you were not able to make our Parent/Teacher/Student Conversations appointments can still be made to meet with your child’s teacher via the following link.

Science Week

Exeter High School Science Fair

Next week is Science Week and to mark the occasion Exeter High School students will be facilitating their annual Science Fair in our Performing Arts Centre. This is a great event with students teaching students using hands on activities to illustrate scientific concepts.

Kind regards

Launching into Learning

What an exciting and fun couple of weeks back at Launching into Learning. It has been wonderful to see so many families and their children involved at many of the Launching into Learning sessions. All families with children from babies to 4 years are welcome. Join in and have some fun!

Our Learning Community - Book Club

Book Club Issue 5

The fifth issue of book club for 2017 has been sent home. If you would like to place an order, please put your child's and teacher’s name on the front of an envelope, place the order sheet with money inside the envelope and bring to the school office. Last day for ordering is Wednesday August 9th

Support Services

Notice to Parents of Kindergarten Children

As part of the school speech pathology service, all children in kindergarten will be screened for speech and language difficulties during Term 3. The screening takes approximately 15 minutes per child and will screen receptive language skills (ability to understand information and instructions), expressive language skills (use of words and sentences), and the child’s ability to say sounds in words.

Following the screening, parents will receive a report advising whether a full assessment of speech and language is recommended. If you do not want your child to be screened, please advise your child’s kindergarten teacher by 11th August, 2017.

Literacy

Book Week

Escape to Everywhere Story Day

K-6 classes will enjoy story sharing in the PAC with Buddy Readers to celebrate Book Week.

K-2 student’s are welcome to dress as their favourite book character on this day and share their story at Buddy Reading time.

Thursday 25 August 2017

Mathematics

Problem Solving at Exeter

We hope you enjoyed our segment on Problem Solving in some of our previous newsletter. After taking a short break we are back and in this edition we are looking at the Problem Solving Strategy of Making a Table. Here is an example of making a table to solve a problem, in this example they use the information to make a simpler case before solving the problem.

Your turn, here are some problem solving questions that could be solved using this strategy, why not have a go with your child. Look out for the answers in the next newsletter.

1. Susan and Marilyn both go to the gym each week. Susan goes every three days but Marilyn goes every fourth day. If they both attend on Monday when will they next be at class together?
2. Nicole is baking 100 biscuits for the school fair. She becomes bored with decorating the biscuits so she decides to vary the decoration. She tops every third biscuit with a nut, ices every fourth and places a cherry on every fifth. When she has finished all 100, how many biscuits will have all three decorations?
3. Jessica is rowing along the coast to Sunshine Cove. Each day she rows less because she gets more tired. On the first day she covers 38 kilometres, on the second day 35 kilometres, on the third day 32 kilometres and on the fourth day 29 kilometres. How many days will it take her to cover the distance of 203 kilometres to Sunshine Cove.

Answers: For Guessing and Checking

Answers show possible ways to find the answer to our Guessing and Checking problems.

1. Forty students are going to a camp. There are twelve more boys than girls going. How many girls are there?

ANSWER:

2. Lisa keeps parakeets and mice as pets. She has eleven pets altogether, and they have 36 legs between them. How many mice does she have?

ANSWER:

3. Mrs Harrison sold 48 animals at the market. Her pigs sold for $20 each, her hens for $5 each and her sheep for $10 each. She collected $505 from the sale. How many of each type of animal did she sell?

ANSWER:

Sport

Students nominated for Tamar Teams for Country Gold Trials

Congratulations to:

The Country Gold Carnival is to be held on September 21/22 in Launceston against 5 other regional associations in Northern Tasmania.

S.T.E.A.M

XSTEAM CHALLENGE

Exeter Primary School has been very lucky to enrol two teams in the very first (Cross) XSTEAM Challenge which has been organised and coordinated by Launceston College. Each week the team is given a new challenge with links to Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics. They are given information that will help them make some decisions about how to complete the challenge. Each team is also given a number of ways to earn points and even some ways to earn bonus points! The STEAM skills of teamwork and collaboration are scored highly.

By the end of the week, each team must have completed the challenge and submitted their work online in the form of a video.

Week One Challenge: To plan and build a model of a raft that will successfully float the frame across the river and into place. The frame needs to hold a weight of 3.2 kilograms. There were of course several other specifications the teams needed to follow.

Our Grade 5/6 XSTEAM Challenge Team: Isaac Leslie, Harrison Kley, Kynan Bonnice, Katie Grant-Dehaan and Layla Jetson.

Our Grade 3/4 XSTEAM Challenge Team: Jackson Greenhalf, Daniel Anderson, Edan Jamieson, Chelsea Gethin and Flynn McEvoy.

The XSTEAM Ladder below reflects the current results and as you can see both our teams have done very well. Well done to both teams!

Apple for the Teacher

Christine Alcock, David Duncan, Jen Radford, Julie Doyle, Shanley Freeman and Thomas Clark who have been nominated for Chilli FM’s Apple for The Teacher. If you would like to vote for any of our wonderful teachers, follow the link below to do so.

What’s Happening in Our Classrooms?

In 1/2 Radford/Koch we have been learning to write information reports. We made habitats and animals to go with our reports.

School Association

Parent Direct Toy Catalogue

Thinking of Christmas…….

Kinder to Grade 2 classes will receive their catalogue this week.

This is a school fundraiser with 20 cents of every dollar you spend being donated back to our school. Through parent purchases last year we received a voucher to enable us to purchase classroom resources.

Just to let you know that you will only receive one catalogue. Chalk have combined all their top products into Parent Direct to create a single shopping destination.

If you are a parent of a child from Grade 3-6 and would like to have a look at the catalogue, feel free to contact us in the office and we can send it home to you.

If you do not wish to place an order could you please return the catalogue to the office.

All orders need to be handed into the school office by Monday September 11 to avoid disappointment and guaranteed delivery.

Ladies Night Out

On Friday July 28, Exeter Primary School Parents and Friends committee held our major fundraiser for 2017, LADIES NIGHT OUT.

Liz Jordan, Amanda McEvoy, Susan O’Leary, and Cindy Dunn along with a multitude of helpers, have created an evening that brings many people from our community together to help raise funds for our beautiful school.

This fundraiser enables the committee to assist the school in providing extra programs and equipment that benefit our children. We are currently working together to up-grade elements of the school playground to ensure they are safe, engaging and lots of fun. We are extremely happy to say that through this event we raised over $4000 to add to our P&F bank account!

The Ladies Night is an evening of browsing (and buying) from the many quality stalls offering local, and handmade products, whilst sampling excellent Tamar Valley wines.

This year Beautiful Isle & Moores Hill vineyards, generously donated the wine for the evening and we thank them very much!

We are also very grateful for the many generous donations from businesses within the Tamar Valley and Launceston region which enabled us to offer good quality prizes with our “Pop a Balloon” stall and our raffle.

Please take a quick look through our extensive list of businesses that kindly donated prizes as local business we encourage you to support them whenever you can.

We feel it is important to say THANK YOU to all the parents, staff and students who contributed to the success of Ladies Night. Whether the contribution was helping with decorations, collecting donations, setting up, packing away, or providing or serving food we are very grateful as, every little bit counts. The success of the evening is a collective effort and we could not have done it without everyone’s support

If you would like to know more about what the Parents & Friends committee do, we have an email address you can subscribe to: exeterprimaryparents.friends@gmail.com and we can add you to our contacts list.

Meetings are held on the 2nd Thursday of every month at 7.30pm in the staff room at the school. EVERYONE IS WELCOME.

Most importantly, we would like say a special thank you to the creator of this fabulous fundraiser, Liz Jordan. This is Liz’s last year of fundraising at our school, as her youngest son will be moving on to high school next year. We are very sad to see her go, but extremely grateful that we have had the chance to work beside her and watch her work her magic.

Liz has made a significant contribution to our school over many years and there is nothing we can say or do that will show our appreciation of her in a meaningful way. So, we simply say Thank you and we wish her all the best.

Community News

Music

Life Centre Music is currently taking new enrolments for Term 3. Our music classes for children 3 months - 9 years are fun, engaging, interactive and educational. We have been specialising in early childhood music in Launceston for 30 years; classes are taught by a fully qualified, registered teacher. Visit the link below or call Natalie on 0448 517 719 for further information, or to try a class for free.