First this week is to welcome Codey and Michelle and their families to Currambena and to our group! Codey visited last Information Morning and is joining us this week. Michelle is Jody’s cousin and she will be with us til the end of the year. It is great to have them both with us. We are now 19 in our group!
Secondly, thank you so much to Rowena for taking the group while I was at Laura and Cairns with the group of 25 parents and children who were lucky enough to be part of this amazing experience. The three days of the Laura Indigenous Dance Festival were filled with the colours and sounds of aboriginal dancing in the beautiful valley of the Laura River, impassable in the wet season, but a tent city of 5000 people for the festival. We saw rock paintings of quinkins and timaras, swam in the river, watched dancing by day and night and made some great contacts. Next time we go, we have been invited to visit a school in Cairns which is a Centre of Excellence for indigenous dance and sport. Our days in Cairns were filled with trips to Kuranda, Cape Tribulation, Mossman Gorge, the Daintree River (complete with crocodiles!) and the Barrier Reef and, of course, Marco Polo in the hotel pool! We have a wonderful collection of photos and will make sure we set aside an evening early next term to give a presentation about it and begin planning for next time in 2011.
I am still catching up with all the activities of the children who stayed here at school. Particularly stunning is the huge canvas they made… I am hoping we can get it up to the Lane Cove Library for the NAIDOC Week display.
This week we are all looking forward to the Reunion/BBQ/40th Birthday for Currambena on Sunday and hope many of you, our current families, will be there. I need to know which of the piano and guitar players will be there during the afternoon and wish to be part of the entertainment… so please make sure your children know their availability. The opening performance of “We’re the Believers” will be at about 1pm and the other performances from 3pm.
This week our Personal Projects are due on Friday and many children have requested extra class time to work on these. We will certainly be doing this. It is a great help if children can have their information in print form with them (books or pages printed from Wikipedia) and they can use that to create their first draft. Some children are also bringing their partially completed projects on portable storage devices (USB) so they can change or add things at school then take it home easily as well.
Please remember to help with times tables practice at home and encourage reading every night. It will be important to continue this through the holidays as well.
Have a great week … see you on Sunday!
With love, Wendy
