Barkly Highway State School - Term 2 Week 10
Principal's Welcome
As we come to the end of Semester 1, I would like to take this opportunity to reflect on the wonderful achievements of our students and staff.
Firstly, I acknowledge the hard work and dedication of our teachers and support staff. They have worked tirelessly to provide our students with the best possible learning opportunities every day.
Our students have also shown great resilience and determination throughout the year. They have embraced new ways of learning and have continued to make progress in their academic and personal development.
We have also had some exciting events and activities take place this term. This week our junior sports day and athletics day, were both a great success, with all students participating in a range of fun and competitive events.
Congratulations to the winning sports house for 2023, BOWEN and spirit award to ABEL SMITH.
As we look forward to the second half of the year, we have many more exciting opportunities planned for our students. We will be continuing to focus on our Annual Improvement Plan targets, as well as offering a range of extracurricular activities to enhance the overall learning experience.
I would like to take this opportunity to wish all our families a safe and enjoyable break over the midyear holidays. We look forward to welcoming our students back for another exciting term.
Our first day of term 3 is Monday 10 July.
Deputy's Report
CELEBRATING MATHEMATICS LEARNING in our classrooms
Our staff’s Maths Professional Learning Community this year, is focused on building our capabilities to teach using Open-ended and Inquiry-based learning activities to improve the mathematical problem-solving ability of our students.
Highlighted below is some of the Open-ended Inquiry-based Mathematics learning that’s been happening in Prep Gold and 2 Blue recently:
Nicole Liu (2 Blue’s class teacher along with Jillian Seymour– see photos below) has had her students answering open-ended questions about Time, for example, “Read the time on the analogue clock e.g. half past or 30 minutes past. What time could it be? Record as many different times that you can think of for this clock.”
Sarah Tanielu-Smith (Prep Gold’s class teacher – see photos below) has had her students answering open-ended questions about Shape, for example, “What is a 2 D (dimensional) shape?” They have been learning about orientations of shapes, shapes in our environment as well as features of shapes.
I plan to continue to share more of the effective research-based practices that our teachers use to improve our students’ learning outcomes next term.
SEMESTER 1 REPORTING NEWS: Language Other Than English (LOTE) – Japanese
YEAR 5/6 students receive Japanese language lessons from Cairns School of Distance Education (CSDE) and a Semester 1 report will be emailed to each student from Cairns SDE at the beginning of Term 3. All our year 5/6 students are enrolled in the CDSE as well as our school, so please expect a report from the CSDE to let you know how your child/ren are progressing with learning Japanese. This will be a separate report to our school’s Semester 1 report that we plan to email out to parents and caregivers in week 2 of next term.
Looking forward to everyone returning to school on Monday 10 July happy, healthy and ready to continue learning.
Enjoy the winter holidays.
Kind regards,
Cheryl Gallagher
Admin Notices
ABSENCES
Know your child is going to be away from school for an extended amount of time? Has your child become ill and needs to have a day off to recover?
There are a few different ways of letting the office know your child will be away.
Phone: 07 4437 3633 (speak to someone in the office or leave a message on the Student Absence line)
Email: admin@barklyhighwayss.eq.edu.au
QParents: Enter an absence in QParents (If you don't have QParents but would like to sign up please let the office know)
If for some reason you can't contact the office you will recieve an SMS to explain your child's absence, this message costs you nothing to reply.
When informing the office of your child's absence please give a brief reason of why and how many days the absence will extend over.
LATE SLIPS
If your child/ren arrives to class after the 08:25 school bell they will need to attend the office to get a late slip.
VOLUNTARY CONTRIBUTIONS
The Voluntary Contribution Scheme's major focus is to provide an extremely cost effective and efficient strategy, for parents to assist the school in providing enhanced learning opportunities in the following areas:
- Supplementing additional classroom consumable recources
- assisting in maintaining technology across the school learning enrvironment
- accommodating a range of school based and workplace programs to enhance student skill development - major focus on English, Mathematics and Science.
Voluntary Contribution envelopes go home with each student at the start of the year and then a reminder envelope will go home every term with students who have not yet made a contribution.
Prep Bush Tucker Walk
Our Prep Cohort visited the BushTucker garden at Outback at Isa! Uncle taught the children about many different bush foods and what they are used for. We then went for an explore through the gardens where we were offered a sniff and taste! We even got to bring some back to school!
Athletics Day
Hello families! What a wonderful turn out our Junior and Senior Athletic Days were. It was so good to see the students participating and cheering each other on. What I found most amazing was watching our students run alongside other students while encouraging them to keep going. It just goes to show how caring and supportive our students and community are. A big thank you to Mr Benson who organised the day as it is a HUGE job and he ensured it ran smoothly. I hope everyone enjoys their mid-year break. Remember to stay safe and return to us for a brand new term.
Kind regards,
Donna Freestone
The Queensland Child Oral Health Study
The University of Queensland and Queensland Health have partnered to conduct a large study across the whole of Queensland to determine the oral health status of Queensland children. The Queensland Child Oral Health Study (QCOHS) 2021-2024 will involve checking the teeth of over 5000 children aged 5 to 12 years from randomly selected schools across Queensland.
Barkly Highway State School was selected and the
participation packs will be sent by email and I encourage families to give permission to take part in this important study if you are contacted. More information will be available next term. Find out more about the study here.
Events & Flyers
Want to know what's happening within the school? Check out our School Calendar to keep up to date.
https://barklyhighwayss.schoolzineplus.com/calendar/1
Follow us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/barklyhighwaystateschool
