Welcome Back to Term 2!

I hope you had a chance to enjoy the beautiful autumn weather over the school holidays and spend some quality time with your family.

Over the past three weeks, I’ve been warmly welcomed by our students, staff, and families—thank you! If you see me around the school, please feel free to stop and say hello. A special thanks to the parents who attended our recent drop-in sessions; it was a pleasure speaking with you and seeing connections forming among families. If you'd be interested in more of these sessions, I’d love your feedback via this short survey:

https://forms.gle/aigJcy788vq4MT8u5

I’d also like to take a moment to introduce myself to the wider school community. I began my teaching career in Melbourne in 1998 and moved to Canberra in 2003. Since 2004, I’ve worked as both a teacher and school leader in the ACT Education Directorate. I’ve taught at Higgins, Florey, and Kingsford Smith School and later served as the EAL/D Executive Officer, supporting programs across the system.

My leadership roles at Duffy, Mawson, and Forrest Primary Schools have shaped my passion for inclusive, culturally rich learning environments. At Mawson, our team introduced a bilingual Mandarin program, reflecting my strong belief in the value of bilingualism and maintaining home languages. Most recently, I served as acting principal at Forrest Primary for 10 months.

I’m thrilled to now lead this inclusive, culturally diverse IB World School—a role that brings together the things I’m most passionate about in education.

ANZAC Day Assembly

Thank you to our specialist team for collaboratively organising a meaningful and respectful ANZAC Day assembly. This important national occasion gives us the opportunity to honour the past, present, and ongoing sacrifices made by servicemen and servicewomen.

Two of our Year 6  students also shared thoughtful essays on what ANZAC Day means to them—contributions that added a powerful personal element to the ceremony.

 

Athletics Carnival

Congratulations to all students who participated in our Athletics Carnival—it was a fantastic day of energy, enthusiasm, and sportsmanship. A special thank you to Mr O’Dwyer for his flawless organisation and to all the parents and carers who volunteered their time to support the event.

A heartfelt thank you to the CWSC P&C for hosting a beautiful Mother’s Day breakfast last Friday. It was wonderful to see so many families enjoying breakfast together, creating cards, and selecting special gifts for mothers and significant women in their lives. We are grateful to our dedicated parent volunteers for making this event so special.

Staff Professional Learning: Dr Shelley Moore

In Week 1, members of our leadership and teaching teams had the privilege of learning with Dr Shelley Moore, an internationally respected educator and researcher in inclusive education. Based in British Columbia, Canada, Dr Moore shared practical strategies and inspiring stories that deepened our commitment to creating truly inclusive learning environments. Her visit was a reminder of the incredible work our staff do every day to support all learners.

Kind Regards

Laurel 

School Calendar from Weeks 4-6

Week 4

19 May - Year 6 Ban Combined Rehearsal - 12pm-2pm

21 May - Year 2 - "How the World Works" Learning Journey - 8:45am-9:30am

21 May - National Simultaneous Storytime - "The Truck Cat"

Week 5

26 May - National Sorry Day

27- 30 May - National Reconcilation Week

30 May - Senior Assembly - Year 4 Host - 9:15am start

Week 6

2 June - PUBLIC HOLIDAY

3 June - South Weston Regional Cross Country

5 June - School Newsletter

5 June - World Environment Day

Helping Kids Thrive: workshops on Anxiety

As we all know, the parenting journey is one of continual learning.  We all need a little support occasionally to navigate the challenging times during our child’s development.  If you are struggling with difficult behaviours, school ‘can’t’, anxiety, or just want some more tools in your kit to support your child, here are some options.  This term, the School Psychologists at Hedley Beare Centre for Teaching and Learning in Stirling are offering a range of workshops.  You can register directly for these workshops using this QR code. 

All Charles Weston families also have free access to the MindUP for Home platform. MindUP™ was created in collaboration with university scientists and school-based educators and has consistently been rated as one of the best Social and Emotional Literacy programs in the world. MindUP™ helps children understand how their brains work and how their thoughts and feelings affect their behaviour.  It has five goals:

1) To foster a cohesive, caring classroom climate

2) To boost focus and mindful awareness      

3) To build emotional literacy

4) To increase qualities like perspective-taking, empathy, gratitude, and kindness

5) To increase optimism, well-being, and resiliency

To access the MindUP for Home resources for free, you can register here: Bringing MindUP Home.  You can also check out the new Brain Buddies video.  

I hope these resources provide some support on your journey. ?

Cheryl 

PRE-SCHOOL

We are excited to be exploring ‘How We Express Ourselves’ in Preschool during Term 2!   To launch our Unit of Inquiry, each Preschool class were invited to bring in works of art created by children, family members, or other artists, for our very own Art Gallery.  We even had works of art by staff members from Preschool and Kindy!  We are all artists when we express ourselves through the arts.

Preschoolers then had opportunities to explore the art gallery.  The children were interested in what materials were used to make the art works, the colours used, and particularly sharing their family artworks.  You can also see how focussed and respectful the children were in visiting the gallery.  

Students and staff alike are excited to have lots of artistic exploration and expression ahead in the term.  We are planning to express ourselves through a range of forms and media: music, dance, clay, wire, painting, collage, etc.  Any artists within our school community are warmly welcome to come and share their skills and creations with Preschool - don’t hesitate to get in touch. 

The Preschool Team

KINDERGARTEN

It's so wonderful to see so many smiling faces when we open the Kindy doors each morning! Students have begun to settle nicely into our daily routines, are building friendships and developing skills to become curious and independent learners.Here’s just a snapshot of what we’ve been doing so far.

Everyday we are working on our reading skills with the Decodable Readers Australia (DRA) program. Through our daily practice, we are learning sounds, letter names and how to correctly form each. We love to sound out, stretch out and then “snap it” to confidently read two, three and four letter words, and are even beginning to read short sentences!

In Maths, Term 1 saw us building our number sense from 0-10. We practiced writing numerals, created collections of objects and learnt a range of counting strategies. This term, we are working through the teen numbers, developing an understanding of place value using tens and ones.

We have just finished a fun unit on Who We Are where we explored similar and different ways people around the world celebrate or commemorate events in our lives.This week we began our new unit, How the World Works and are preparing to become scientists who investigate the natural world. We are reading the classic book, Who Sank the Boat by Pamela Allen and  will explore materials and develop thinking skills to help us with our design project.

YEAR 1

In our ‘How We Organise Ourselves’ unit of inquiry, Year 1 students have been demonstrating their thinking skills by exploring a variety of ‘what if’ questions about push and pull forces. We have been observing how different strengths of force can affect the motion and speed of objects through a range of investigations. One of our favourites was the car launcher activity, where we measured how far our cars travelled based on the strength of the pull force applied. It’s been an exciting and engaging way to learn about motion and cause and effect!

This week, Year 1 enjoyed an exciting excursion to Questacon, where we explored our growing understanding of forces. Through hands-on exhibits and engaging demonstrations, students investigated how things push, pull, spin, slide, and bounce. Experiences like these help bring science to life and deepen our learner’s understanding of how forces affect the world around them—while also sparking curiosity and wonder!

In Maths, our current focus is on skip counting by 2s, 5s and 10s. Skip counting helps children recognise number patterns and build a strong foundation for multiplication and problem-solving. It also supports their ability to count groups efficiently—like counting pairs of shoes, bundles of pencils or coins. Practising skip counting in everyday situations helps children develop number sense and prepares them for more complex maths skills later on.

In literacy we are practising our retell skills. Retelling helps learners understand what they read or hear by encouraging them to think about the characters, setting, problem, and how the story ends. It also helps build vocabulary, sentence structure, and memory skills. When children can retell a story in their own words, it shows they truly understand it—an essential step in becoming confident, thoughtful readers and writers. As one learner said this week “so, retelling is like going home and telling my family what I learnt”. 

How many animals can you see in this image?

During our SEL MindUP lessons, we’ve been practicing mindful seeing—a calming strategy that helps us focus and strengthens our prefrontal cortex. This is the part of our brain that helps us make thoughtful choices.

YEAR 2

Year 2 has hit the ground running in Term 2!

In maths, we have begun to focus on patterns. Year 2 has explored patterns continuing by a set amount. We have loved to use physical manipulatives to represent our patterns - including paddle pop sticks, counters, blocks and MABs. Our developing skill of skip counting has been really helpful in building these patterns. Skip counting helps children recognise number patterns and build a strong and fluent foundation for further maths concepts. Skip counting off the decade (for example, starting at 3 and counting by 10s: 3, 13, 23…) further deepens their understanding of patterns and prepares them for more complex maths concepts such as algebra and mental calculations.

In literacy, we have begun a text study on Jack and the Flum Flum Tree by Julia Donaldson. We have explored the rich vocabulary of the text (including some made up words!) as well as some idioms (“Don’t get your knickers in a twist!”). Language comprehension is about how children make sense of what they read by using what they already know, understanding word meanings, and recognising how language works. In writing, we have begun to express opinions on the characters from Jack and the Flum Flum Tree by writing sentences that use modal verbs (must, needs to, should) and the conjunctions of because and so that. 

Our current unit of inquiry, How the World Works, has surrounded the central idea of ‘Science helps us understand the world’. We inquired into the function and properties of materials when we designed a package using recycled materials to keep a biscuit safe from the rain, heat and when being dropped. This term, we have also begun to inquire into sound and how the properties of a material can impact the sound it makes. We are creating instruments to make different sounds and are looking forward to sharing them at our learning journey next week. 

In Performing Arts this term, students will be concentrating on Drama. 

Kindergarten students will learn how to tell stories through songs with actions, how to use facial expressions to convey emotions, and how to create a short skit with a partner. 

Students in Years 1 and 2 will develop their skills in mime, improvisation and voice projection. 

All Junior School students will have the chance to take part in in-class performances of well-known fairy tales, using appropriate costumes, props and scenery. 

Students in the Year 4/5 musical Porridge are busy most breaks rehearsing with Mrs Curbishley or Ms Lloyd-Jones for their upcoming performance in Week 10 of this term. Details of the performance will be sent to parents/carers closer to the performance date.