Currambena Primary and Preschool

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

Thank you to everyone who was patient and helpful with the survey takers at the gate yesterday. And special thanks to the survey takers themselves, especially Isla and Lillian who remembered to come in early after the long weekend to do their shift at 8am! Children will be conducting the survey today and then again on Friday after which we will begin to collate the results.

A huge THANK YOU to everyone who donated goods or food for our Mini Fair last Friday… and thanks to everyone who came and spent some money with us! We raised over $300 for Pias and his community in Uganda. A great effort!

Friday’s more relaxed timetable worked very well for the Mini Fair event and also allowed me time to hold a conference/interview with each of my students about their work and current progress in all the curriculum areas. We will probably trial this again this week.

Next week, on Thursday, the travellers will be off to Laura in central Queensland and those remaining at school will begin a very special week of Aboriginal studies activities with Olivia and Rowena. It is hard to guess who will be having the best time… but we will certainly have a lot to share when we get together again on Friday 26th!

In our class time at the moment, we are studying fractions in Maths, beginning Personal Projects and reading recounts in English. We are  working on our Spelling and Maths text books, writing stories and plays and investigating cultures. We are also having very long Class Meetings…a situation we are attempting to remedy… suggestions are welcome!!

I hope everyone is coming  along to the social on Friday night to say farewell to Willem and Luuk who have been such a  delight to have as part of the school community for the past six months. I have it on good authority that there will be some VERY special entertainment….

Entertainment is also being planned for the big 40th Anniversary Reunion BBQ on Sunday 5th July so I hope you all have that date in your diaries already.

And lastly a reminder that school does start at 9am for all children. It helps immensely if children have had that first half hour to settle in and re-connect with friends before Inside Time.

Have a great week.    Love,   Wendy

Week 5 already! It’s hard to believe!

This week’s big event is Lane Cove Children’s Voices for Reconciliation in the Plaza tomorrow morning. A couple of our children will be making speeches about reconciliation issues and the rest of us will be teaching all the other schools a call and response chant… to get everyone doing something together. After the performances and speeches we are hosting the students and teachers from Alexandria Park School for a BBQ lunch back here at school. There will be sausages and bread rolls, fruit and cordial.

We had a wonderful day at Kinma last week and enjoyed a range of activities with the children and teachers there. It is great to see that both our schools are thriving!

Meanwhile back here at Currambena, our group is working on so many things just now! We are planning a workshop/simulation (or two) to demonstrate the issues of poverty in Third World countries; we are planning a Mini Fair on Friday 5th June to raise money for our sponsor child in Uganda; we are writing stories, completing work book pages, learning about electricity, 2D shapes and about other cultures, including aboriginal ones, and yesterday we had what could have been the longest Class Meeting agenda in history! We are very busy as usual!

Some requests this week… Olivia and I would love some help with driving to Ice Skating and Rock Climbing on the next two Mondays (1st and 8th of June). Please let us know if you can help. Please also remember to let the school know as early as possible in the morning if your child is going to be absent for the day. An email is also good. This is very important for all sorts of reasons. Please also make sure your children come to school with plenty of food… even when there is canteen or Friday’s walking up to the shops. They almost always get hungry before the food is in their hands! Many in the class do seem to be needing extra food at the moment… and extra sleep, too… maybe they are growing quickly or maybe it’s the cooler weather. And lastly, please have a go at retrieving some of the lost property around the school. There are two boxes full in the front foyer and we need someone to take it away, wash it and take it to St Vinnies please.

And thank you… to Peter’s mother, Margaret, for covering some books for our class…and to Kerrie who is doing a fantastic job of keeping the school library looking wonderful and welcoming!

Have a good week everyone.    Love,    Wendy

Hi everyone.

Thank you very much to Rowena for taking the group last week when I was away. Next Tuesday, Rowena will again step in for me when I take a day to visit a school in Mittagong which uses similar methods to ours with secondary students. This means there will be NO GUITAR NEXT WEEK.

Yesterday we had Janelle from World Vision at school in the morning running a simulation with us about the global food crisis and its effects on markets and tribal workers in Kenya. We learned a few words of Swahili and were ably assisted by Luuk, Willem and Alyce in various roles. I hope you will have heard about it at home last night.

Last Friday we had a talk about the MS Readathon and some of the children were very keen to sign up for this. Parents will need to be involved when the money is ready to be sent.

Tomorrow we have Information Morning. Thank you so much to everyone who worked so hard today making the school look so well-loved! I hope  we have lots of visitors to appreciate it.

On Friday is Walk Safely to School Day. Lane Cove Council is hosting a breakfast from 7:30am in the plaza for families who register for the event. Do this asap if you are interested. There will also be some breakfast here at school thanks to Fran’s group!

Next week, as I said above, I will be away on Tuesday. Then on Wednesday, we have someone from the ABC coming to interview the kids about BTN. That should be fun! On Thursday, we will be going with Olivia’s and Fran and Jo’s to Kinma for the day, by bus, and that will be fun, too, I am sure.

Our two student teachers finish up this Friday for the term but will be back later next term. They have both created some great lessons for us and we are now really getting into electricity, aboriginal studies, 2D shapes and review writing! Sport with Willem and Luuk has been fantastic lately, too, and so we are all getting fit as well.

Have a great week. 

Love, Wendy

Welcome back everyone!

I hope you all had relaxing and fun holidays. Special welcome to Holly (returning) and Peter (starting) who will be with us for the rest of the year.

It will be another busy and fun-filled term for us with a highlight being the week of Aboriginal studies either here at school with a rich program of activities or in Queensland at the Laura Dance Festival in June. Today we will be discussing our holidays and making plans. Luuk and Willem will be leaving in June and so one of the plans is to use their remaining time as well as possible! We will all miss them when they go!

By all reports the AAPAE conference in Christchurch was a great success and certainly generated some good discussion at our Co-ordinating Day meeting yesterday. It’s great to have the opportunity to meet teachers from other schools like ours and share ideas and compare issues.

I have a  couple of jobs needing doing for our group which could be taken home. One is covering some books and the other involves sorting and washing/cleaning some games. Please let me know if you would like to do one of these.

See you all during the week.  Love,  Wendy