Wendy’s Class: Week 1 Term 4
It was lovely to hear the children’s holiday stories on Tuesday and see them looking refreshed and relaxed… and in some cases significantly taller! Starting Term 4 is bringing some mixed emotions for our Year 6s as they contemplate moving on the high school next year. It’s also a mixed bag of emotions for me with the start of my last term of full time teaching.
It was also lovely to see so many changes around the playground … the timber playground poles and outdoor tables look great, and so does the new decking above our room. Lovely to see new plantings too!
Even so, we’ve had a great week getting into writing our class play and moving back into our usual routines. We start doing some Rock and Water exercises and had some fun with this. It’s a brilliant psychophysical social training program designed to develop resilience and empathy with a series of fun activities and games. We’ll be doing some of these each week this term.
We also began our PIPs and everyone has a topic already, some already meeting their target number of words!
It’s good to be off to such a strong start because it’s going to be a very busy term! The concert is in just five weeks and then, immediately after concert week, is our Year 5/6 camp at Jervis Bay from Monday 24th to Friday 28th November. So far I have Annie and Gina as our volunteer helpers and I need at least two more parents to come with us and camp for the week… or at least part of it. I would like to hold a meeting to tell parents more about this camp and discuss what is involved when you volunteer as a helper. Please let me know if Wednesday 22nd October at 6pm would work for this. There is an induction discussion that I must also have with anyone who is going to stay overnight with us so please speak to me or email asap if you are interested. This is part of our child protection policy.
Our Year 4 students will be going on camp with their age cohort in Week 8, setting off with Jess and Sarah for three days to a camp in cabins. Our camp is in tents for the four nights and children will need sleeping bags, maybe a light camping mattress and they’ll need to share a tent. Some will bring tents from home and the school has some we can lend.
Swimming starts on Tuesday… please make sure children have swimmers, towels, easy to manage clothing and slip on shoes that day. We’ll be going in the morning and back by morning tea time.
Hope to see many of you at the Famous Faces Ball on Saturday night!
With love, Wendy
PS I completely forgot to take photos this week but here are two photos from the ADEC conference in the holidays at Coolangatta. It was a brilliant gathering of around 60 like-minded educators and students (I was very proud of Emme and Mabel for their presentation which was very well received!) from around Australia. Such an enthusiastic and welcoming atmosphere with new ideas and old connections blossoming side by side.