EDITION 11 May 1 2015 Valley View Dear Parents and Families I’m lucky enough to have been chosen to write about some of the workings of the Student Wellbeing Team in this edition of the newsletter. This gives me the opportunity to talk about some of the great activities and events currently happening at BVPS. Our Grade 4 Personal Development Program, which involves weekly visits to the Broadmeadows SDS next door, began operating this week. It involves 24 Grade 4 students working in groups of 2, attending Broadmeadows SDS for one hour per week and assisting students in a range of play based learning programs. The feedback on the manners, cooperation and skills displayed by our students was very positive. Well done to everyone involved. el conflicts or misunderstandings. They also refer any students who require greater levels of support to the yard duty teachers. Conversations with the grade 6 students have indicated they are enjoying their role and the responsibility that comes with it. Other students, particularly younger ones like the interacting with the mediators and having a calm process to assist them to play safely. essential to the smooth running of the school, to the achievement of optimal learning opportunities and to the development of a supportive and cooperative school environment. We aim to build a safe and happy learning neighbourhood environment, educating students to act responsibily and to make good choices. We model, encourage and acknowledge positive behaviours whilst responding to and managing students engaging in inappropriate behaviours. We speak and act in a fair and respectful way to each other at all times. Our fabulous Parent Ambassadors are working feverishly to make sure the Annual Mother’s Day Brunch is as successful as last year. It will be held at 11.00am next Friday 8th May, so stay tuned for even more information. These elements involve: All teachers are reinforcing with their students the BVPS Playground and Learning Neighbourhood rights, rules, processes and expectations to enable positive, safe behaviour to occur. I have included the following beginning paragraphs from one of our documents for your information: If you are lucky enough to visit the school at lunch time you may see our trained Grade 6 Peer Mediators in action. They are rostered on in pairs every lunchtime to provide in- “At Broadmeadows Valley Priteraction with younger students mary School, positive and reand to help them solve low lev- sponsible student behaviour is Creating a positive learning environment Whole neighbourhood use of consistent well researched preventative behaviour management approaches. Following the behaviour management guidelines for student misbehaviour.” Kind regards, Michelle Reid Student Well Being Coordinator LN1 Newsletter It has been a very busy week in LN1! In maths we are learning about Place Value. This week we talked about trading, and how we can swap 10 ‘ones’ for 1 ‘ten’. We played ‘Sprint to 100’ in our m a t h s groups. Ege p l a y e d against Miss Cyndi and beat her! We also had a go at doing some maths problem solving in our home groups, and made predictions how far 1,000 unifix cubes would go. We had to decide how we would count out 1,000 unifix cubes, and then we made towers of 10 unifix. Then we used these to count by tens all the way to 1,000! When we had 1,000 unifix cubes in a row, we discovered t h e y reached all the way to the middle of the Neighbourhood! Some of our literacy groups have started Buddy Reading with the LN3 students. We really enjoyed visiting LN3, and having them visit us, and being able to read with the ‘big kids’. We read our ‘Just Right’ books to them, and then listened while they read their books to us. Some of our literacy groups spent a session in the Valley Kitchen with Senorita Marina this week, where they read a book about Anzac day, made Anzac biscuits, and then had had a choice of writing a recount about making the biscuits, or writing a recipe for the biscuits. It was lots of fun (and delicious!). Until next week… Amy, Cyndi, Jamielee, Jodie, Marija and Wendy. LN2 Newsletter Yet another busy week in LN2! We have been working together to achieve our neighbourhood goal of learning collaboratively. This means we are working in teams to problem solve and create. Our focus on science continues as we studied how heat is transferred and how objects move through space. The best part was that we got to eat our experiment! Ask your child to show you how heat can be transferred next time you need some help in the kitchen. Our maths sessions have been challenging and rewarding. We have been experimenting with how we can use multiplication to solve worded problems and find the area of an object. We really enjoyed playing a game that required us to use multiplication to win the m o s t area on a page. We are becoming excellent authors as we continue to compose our narratives. We are very excited to meet a real life author next week when Peter Millit comes to visit and share his tips on how to become write a great story. We can even buy our own book to get signed! The BVPS garden looks fantastic at the moment and we can’t believe how many eggs the chickens have laid! If you are wondering the correct way to pick us a chicken just as one of the clever farmers in LN2. LN3 Newsletter Wow, what a week it has been in LN3! We started Week 3 with a bang, with the neighbourhood presenting their products from studio arts. It was such an exciting way to see all the wonderful students pumped about their work they had created. In reading, we have been learning about the QAR strategies. The QAR strategies are ‘right there’, ‘think and search’, ‘author and me’ and ‘on my own’. The ‘right there strategy’ is when a question is asked and your answer is right in front of you in the book. The ‘think and search’ strategy is when your answer is in more than one spot and you need to gather information to put your answer together. The ‘author and me’ strategy is when you ask yourself the question and make connections with the book and use inferring and prediction skills and “on my own” questions are where we just have to use our knowledge and understanding. In writing, we have continued working on our persuasive texts. We have been using things to make our persuasive texts more effective such as rhetorical questions, statistics and emotive language. Some examples of a rhetorical question are “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?” “ARE YOU CRAZY?” and “WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?” Some examples of statistics are 95% of parents read this newsletter, 2/3 of the world are sleeping now and a majority of people agree with me that our school is awesome! Some emotive language that we’ve been using is STOP THIS NOW! WE NEED TO HELP THESE POOR HELPLESS LITTLE CHIL- DREN! These are just the few of the devices we have learnt to help us persuade the reader into thinking our way! In maths, we have started a new topic which includes addition, subtraction and measurement. Some people have started with decimals while other students have been working with numbers in the billions, millions or thousands. We are learning n e w strategies for addition and subtraction that we haven’t learnt before which is pretty exciting. Some LN3 students have been running Masterclasses for students in LN2 to help students gain a better understanding in Numeracy. It is great for the LN3 students to take a leadership role and articulate their knowledge onto the LN2 students. We have finally finished “Ready for Learning” in Enrichment. We have moved on to our new topic… Science! This week students are going to be setting up our learning space to make the neighbourhood look like a spaceship, chemical lab and a forest floor. We are all really excited to start it this week and can’t wait to work with chemicals, learn about space and gain a better understanding of plants and animals. That has been our week! We hope you had a good time reading all the fun things LN3 has got up to. Signing off from… Jemma and Hannah Thank you Reminder to all Families who have not paid: The School Levy is now overdue and must paid in full ASAP. Financial assistance may be available to parents if they meet the criteria. Contact the office for more information on 9309 4066 Save the Date! Mother's Day Brunch Friday 8th May 11 - 12pm Valley Kitchen Look out for your invitation! Broadmeadows Valley Mother’s Day Stall Calendar Term 2 Mother's Day Brunch Friday 8th May Mother’s Day Stall Friday the 8th of May BVPS CAR PARK We would like to remind parents not to park in the BVPS CAR PARK to drop off or pick up their children from school. This car park is for the staff of BVPS, HCSC and the SDS. It has very limited parking for the three schools. Friday the 8th of May Multi-Purpose Hall Starting at 9.30am All gifts will be priced from 50c--$6.00 Birthdays LOST PROPERTY There are several items of lost clothing in the neighbourhoods and sick bay. Are you missing any school uniform? Joanne A Brylee G Amani Y Notice Board BECOME A FOSTER CARER! All sorts of people make great Foster Carers….tradesmen, nurses, sales reps, shop assistants, teachers etc. They are couples, singles, from different cultural backgrounds, with or without their own children. They are people who have the desire to give a child a safe and welcoming place to stay. Our next information session is on Monday 29th June 2015, 7pm-8.45pm in the Glenroy area Come along to find out more & have your questions answered. To book or to receive an information package please contact Kay Gyngell on 9301 5200 or [email protected] It’s easy to become an Anglicare Victoria Foster Carer: call us NOW to talk about how You will make all the difference!