July - Issue 11

11


Message from the Principal

Introduction

Dear Parents/Carers,

I am thrilled to be the Acting principal at Mentone Park Primary school. It is an honour to join such a friendly and caring school community. I have been warmly welcomed by our beautiful students, and I feel very privileged to be able to spend each day at Mentone Park Primary School.   

I am passionate about creating a nurturing and stimulating environment for our students, where every child can thrive academically, socially, and emotionally.

I am committed to:

- Promoting a safe and inclusive school environment at Mentone Park Primary School.

- Building strong partnerships with parents, staff, and our broader community.

- Encouraging innovative and consistent teaching and learning practices.

- Supporting the professional growth of our dedicated teachers and staff.

I look forward to continuing to meet each of you and working together to continue the strong community feel at Mentone Park Primary School. Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions. Together, we will ensure that our students have their very best journey as MPPS as we set them up for their future success to be lifelong learners.

Thank you for welcoming me into this wonderful community.

Kind regards,

Leisa Higgins


AEDC

Building a national picture of a child health

From May 2024, our school, along with thousands of others across the country, will participate in the Australian Early Development Census (AEDC).

The AEDC is a teacher-completed census (similar to a questionnaire) which provides a comprehensive picture of how children have developed by the time they start their first year of full-time school.

The AEDC is an Australian Government Initiative and is completed nationally every three years.

Children don’t miss any class time while the AEDC is completed, and parents/carers don’t need to supply schools with any new information.

The data collected through the AEDC is used by schools, communities and governments to better understand children and families’ needs, and identify the services, resources and support they need.

AEDC data is reported at a school, community, state/territory and national level. AEDC results for individual children are not reported and the AEDC is not used as an individual diagnostic tool.

Some teachers have found that completing the AEDC made them more aware of the needs of individual children and their class, and that the data was useful for planning for transitions to Year 1 and developing programs.

Participation in the AEDC is voluntary, however the AEDC relies on all schools with children in their first year of full-time school participating in the collection. Parents/carers don’t need to take any action unless they choose not to include their children in the census.

To find out more about the AEDC and how it is being used to help children and families visit: www.aedc.gov.au.

If you have any questions, you can contact Leisa Higgis on 9583 4935 or mentone.park.ps@education.vic.gov.au.



Foundation

In the Spotlight 

Hello Foundation families! 

What a great start to Term 3 we have had. It has been lovely welcoming you all back and hearing about all your Holiday adventures. What a busy Term we have ahead, we are looking forward to our STOMP performance, our 100 days of Prep and Swimming lessons. We are so proud of how far they have come and how much they have grown up!    

Reminders: 

100 Days of Prep: 

Just a reminder that our 100 days of Prep will be held next Friday 2nd of August. Students are encouraged to dress up as if they were 100 years old and we will be participating in many fun activities around the number 100. We will be having a Prep party to celebrate their 100th day. Please keep an eye out later this week, for a slip that will outline a food suggestion for your family to contribute to the party. 

Swimming Program:

With our Foundation Swimming Program fast approaching it is safe to say the excitement levels are rising in the Foundation area. The program will run for 9 days from the 29th of July to the 9th of August with a break day on the 2nd of August. It will aim to develop each child’s water confidence, swimming ability and awareness of water safety. In addition, the swimming program will foster independence and life skills such as the ability to organise themselves in the form of arranging their belongings in their swimming bag and drying themselves. We would highly recommend the week leading up to swimming to best prepare them, that you encourage your child to practise organising themselves in the form of dressing themselves and packing their own school bag, as a stepping stone to our swimming lessons. We would like to note that swimming caps and goggles can be worn but are not compulsory to enter the pool. Although, we do ask that all students come to school with a pair of thongs/sandals in their bag, to wear going to and coming back from the pools. 

We kindly invite parents if they wish to attend, at the end of the swimming lessons to render assistance with dressing, but we would like to reiterate that this is also an integral time and learning opportunity for your children to practise critical problem solving and the independent skills of dressing and organising themselves. 

If you have signed up to render assistance at the change rooms, please feel free to come along if you have sent through your Working With Children’s Check.

Ripponlea Excursion: 

On the 14th of August the Foundation students will be attending Ripponlea Estate as part of our Inquiry Unit focusing on the Past and Present: History 

Students will be exploring the past through family history, children's life, schooling and domestic work. It includes toys, games, sports, clothing and exploration activities. They will engage in activities that include pinpointing similarities and differences between the Ripponlea Estate and their own homes, experiencing the life of people of different walks of life from the past through servants’ activities and historic children’s games. In addition, students will have the unique opportunity to examine primary artefacts that align strongly with local history of both the upper class and domestic servants.  

The students will participate in four one-hour sessions covering all the exciting parts the Ripponlea Estate has to offer. Students are broken up into four groups to rotate through these activities, led by experienced education facilitators.

If you haven’t provided consent via Compass and permission via QKR, please kindly make sure to do so as soon as possible as it was due on Monday 22nd of July. 

STOMP: 

Stomp is an externally run program where students will learn a dance routine which will be presented on the last day of Term at a whole school performance. This is an exciting opportunity and will be so much fun!

Below are our current focus letters/sounds and words. Your child would greatly benefit from practising these at home!

Letters/Sounds: Ll and Kk

Vocabulary: Rattle, Crumble, Sighed, he, she, we, be, me

Writing: This fortnight we have been focusing on Narrative writing as well as introducing Recounts.

Maths: We have been looking at place value and making numbers between 10 and 100.  We have been practising counting on and counting back.  We have been so clever and counted by 10’s all the way to 100.

Thank you for reading our Foundation Newsletter!

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Junior School

Welcome back to a jam-packed Term 3 at MPPS. We hope you had a restful break! We are happy to share that the students have returned enthusiastically, seamlessly settling into routines and their schoolwork. Their positive attitudes are fantastic to see. This term is packed with exciting activities!

Our Term 3 Inquiry topic is ‘Past and Present Connections.’ To support and engage the students, our upcoming excursion to Rippon Lea Estate promises to be an enriching adventure, providing valuable hands-on learning experiences outside the classroom. Please see the Compass link if you are interested in coming along to help.

Stomp returns to Mentone Park this term from the 16th of August. Stomp Dance Company is an innovative, fun, and energetic dance and performing arts program for schools. The students love this program and they will attend one lesson a week for 5 weeks. There will be a whole school performance on the last day of Term 3, more details to follow closer to the time.

Our school swimming program will offer a fun and healthy way to stay active and safe around the water. The P-4 Swimming program commences next Monday the 29th of July and concludes on Friday the 9th of August (there is no swimming on Friday the 2nd of August). Detailed information about our swimming program went out this week on Compass - please have a thorough read. Swimming makes for extra hungry students - you might like to pack an additional snack each day to help them through!

Literacy:

We warmly welcome grandparents/parents to come in from 8:50 - 9:05am each day to read with individual students from your child’s class. They love having you come into our building and read with them and it is also very beneficial for their reading development. Please ensure you have an up-to-date WWCC and send a copy to Jen in the office.

A big thank you to Jase and Zara for donating phonics and chapter books to the Junior Hub. We are all very grateful!

Writing:

Write a personal and imaginative recount using sequential events, past tense, and adjectives.

Students have been writing personal recounts about their fun adventures during the school holidays and are now writing imaginative recounts based on The Three Little Pigs. Students have been taught to record events in sequential order, use past tense, and use adjectives to add detail to their finished pieces.

 

InitiaLit Year 1:

Tricky Words (sight words): baby, work, children, after, before, these

Split Digraphs: a-e - make, e-e - pete, i-e - like, o-e - spoke, u-e - tube

Terminology: Vowel, Consonant and Suffixes - s

Wow Words: hover, firmly, legendary, annoyed, grateful, shrieked

 

InitiaLit Year 2:

Trick Words (sight words): through, only, every

Digraphs/Trigraphs:  ‘ear’ (bear, near), ‘eer’ (cheer), ‘air (hair), ‘are’ (beware)

Grammar: Adverbs, how we use adverbs to create depth and description in our writing.

Wow Words: loyal, rummage and trample

 

Numeracy:

Build numbers using MAB and rename a two or three-digit number in multiple ways

Skip count by 2, 3, 5 and 10

Our Grade 1 and 2 students have been revising number and place value concepts. Students have been involved in hands-on activities to build two and three-digit numbers using MAB. The students have been learning how to rename numbers in multiple ways e.g. 345 is 3 hundreds, 4 tens and 5 ones or 34 tens and 5 ones or 3 hundreds and 45 ones. Additionally, they are practicing skip counting by 2, 3, 5 and 10 from 0 and different starting points.

 

Thank you for reading our newsletter and keeping up to date with what’s happening in Year 1  /2.



Middle School

Hello Middle School families,

We hope you had a lovely holiday break. We have enjoyed hearing about some of the adventures our students got up to.

Our students have settled in well, and have been working on number fluency and unit value in Maths. In Literacy we have begun our Novel Study of Storm Boy, and learning about the environment of the Coorong.

In Inquiry we have begun our new topic ‘We are one, we are many’, where students will develop a greater understanding of the importance of Indigenous culture and its significance in the history of Australia. We began this by representing the amount of time First Nations peoples have been here compared to European settlers, on a paper chain.

Our swimming program at Waves starts next Monday 29th July to Friday 9th August. Please note that there is no swimming on Friday 2nd August. 3/4A and 3/4B will be leaving school at 9:05am each morning, to be ready for lessons that start at 9:30am. We return to school at approximately 10:40am. 

Parents are welcome to come and watch their child swim. However, if you plan on going into the change room to help, you must have given Jen in the office a current Working With Children Check beforehand. Please note, after a discussion with Waves management, no photography will be allowed at the pool.

Could students please wear their bathers to school under their school uniform. Students need to bring a separate swimming bag that includes underwear, goggles, a towel, a plastic bag for wet items, and thongs/slides/crocs (to be worn to and from the pool only). All personal items must be named.

Any student who is not attending the swimming program will join another class until 3/4 students return to school.

 

Reading - To read and respond to our class novel ‘Storm Boy’.

Writing - To plan and write an introductory paragraph for an information report.

Maths - Use a range of strategies to help us solve worded problems.

Inquiry - Understand what life was like for Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander Peoples before the arrival of Europeans.



Senior School

Welcome to Term 3 in the Senior School! A wonderful start to the second semester, generating new lines of inquiry and beginning two new programs, PhOrMeS and Banqer! PhOrMeS covers the essential skills and knowledge in phonics (sound letter relationships), orthography (spelling patterns), morphology (parts of meaning), etymology (word origins) and semantics (whole word meanings). This will be a new daily component of our literacy sessions. Banqer is a financial education platform to engage students, build life skills and prepare the next generation for their financial futures.

Recent/Upcoming Events:

  • NAIDOC Week & Kingston Koorie Mob Event - To acknowledge NAIDOC Week (7/7-14/7), we researched the remarkable contributions of First Nations People, Eddie Koiki Mabo, Gladys Elphick and Vincent Lingiari. Information about their lives and achievements were presented either as an informative poster or poem. On Thursday, River in Yr 5 will proudly represent his mob and MPPS at the Kingston Koorie Mob Event. He will attend St. Kilda Football Club and participate in a variety of cultural awareness sessions and watch a footy training session. We can’t wait to hear about River’s experience!

  • State Cross Country - Our superstar cross country athlete, Hugo, competed at State Cross Country last Thursday achieving 5th and securing himself a spot as a backup runner for Nationals. Amazing efforts - we are so proud of you! 

  • Boy Overboard -  After the success of ‘Parvana’ by Deborah Ellis, our new novel study ‘Boy Overboard’ by Morris Gleitzman allows us to make text to text connections as it begins in Afghanistan. This time it follows a soccer loving boy and his family as they escape Afghanistan as refugees, fleeing to Australia.

  • NAPLAN - Congratulations to all our Yr 5 students on receiving their NAPLAN results. Please remember that this is just a snapshot of a single day and does not take into account all of the other wonderful attributes and achievements of your child!

  • National Tree Day -  Our Green Gang will be meeting with members of Kingston Council this Thursday to survey our grounds and look at what types of trees and plants would be best to thrive at Mentone Park. On Friday (26th), plants donated by the council will be planted by students from each class with the assistance of Ms Zienow-Sy and the Green Gang in the areas suggested by council.

  • Green & Gold Day - In the spirit of celebrating our diverse school community, we are excited to broaden the scope of our upcoming 'Green and Gold Day.' Therefore, we encourage students to celebrate their cultural heritage by wearing the colours of their cultural background on Friday, July 26th, to mark the start of the 2024 Olympic Games. Senior students have been reminded that the day is about celebrating countries, not individual sports. 

 

Reminders:

 

  • Yr 7 Placement Forms - Congratulations to all of our Yr 6 students on receiving their first preferences for secondary school placement. If attending a public school, please return the ‘Year 7 Acceptance Slip’ as soon as possible so we can lodge it with your respective schools.

  • Netball Victoria School Championships - Our squad continues to train in preparation for the upcoming netball round robin on August 7th. A reminder to please return your transport form to school as soon as possible

  • Camp - Camp is always a combination of excitement and nerves, so if your child is feeling unsure about something, please don’t hesitate to get in contact with us. As the days count down, students have begun generating questions submitted via a question box and we will soon put in preferences for groups and cabins. Please click Here to view the packing list for camp and begin discussing with your child.

  • Health – Ensuring our students are happy and healthy is our number one priority. As you may be aware, we currently have a student and 2 parents in the Senior School who have either recently completed or are still undergoing chemotherapy treatment for cancer. Due to treatment, their immune systems are compromised, making them highly susceptible to infection and illness. In the event your child or a close contact of theirs is ill, we encourage you to please consider the following:
  • Keep your child at home until recovered or advised by a health professional
  • Inform the school of any contagious illnesses such as Covid or chickenpox
  • Discuss the importance of personal hygiene and hand washing

Further information regarding infectious diseases and the recommended exclusion times can be found here at: https://www.health.vic.gov.au/infectious-diseases/school-exclusion-table#exclusion-periods-table

We appreciate all efforts to help keep everyone here at Mentone Park safe!

Reading: Reflecting on the  social, cultural and historical context of our novel, ‘Boy Overboard’.

Writing: Planning and researching informative texts about the history of the Ancient Olympics, Modern Olympics & Paralympics.

PhOrMeS: Identify and explain parts of meaning (morphemes) in ‘port’ Latin base words.

Maths: Explore the use of brackets and order of operations to write number sentences.

Inquiry: Review the concept of Federation and the reasons behind it as well as the benefits of it.

Banqer: Explore how students can earn an income within the classroom and relate this to the real world.

Resilience, Rights & Respectful Relationships (Wellbeing): Introduce the concept of self talk and explore positive and negative self talk.



Weekly Awards

Week 11
 
FoundationNasher B
 Mckinley L
Grade 1 & 2Nikolas T
 Dustin B
 Savannah B
Grade 3 & 4Leo K
 Charlotte W

Grade 5 & 6

Luna S
 Pippa P
STEAMEve C
ArtEmma L
 PEAidan VDW
        
                                                       
                                                                 Week 1

FoundationElodie D
 Madelynn H
Grade 1 & 2Ravya K
 Billy P
Grade 3 & 4Chase W
 Jett P
 Matilda H

Grade 5 & 6

Charlize VDW
 Nicole T
STEAMJudd O
ArtKate W


Important Dates

July/August
Mon 29th July-Thurs 1st AugPrep-G3 Swimming Program
Fri 2nd August100 Days of Prep Celebration
Sat 3rd AugustTrivia Night
Mon 12th AugustCurriculum Day
Wed 14th AugustPrep Ripponlea Excursion
Tues 20th AugustDistrict Basketball
Tues 27th AugustFather's Day Stall
Weds 28th - Fri 30th AugustGrade 5/6 Camp
Find the yearly Events Calendar HERE


Community News

Mentone Park PS Trivia Night 2024

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