Welcome back

I would like to welcome families back to Term 3 and hope everyone had a relaxing and restful holiday together. It is important to recharge the batteries and a great opportunity to spend quality family time together in our beautiful community. Staff and students have settled back into the school routine and are actively engaged in the work for the term ahead. Last week, we celebrated NAIDOC day with a range of learning and fun. The culminating event was our school parade. Can I thank Karenne Williams, Danielle Upkett and Alison Conway for their organisation and local Juru and Girudalla representatives who came and supported the activities.

Feedback and SMART goals

This term we are building on our Explicit Improvement Agenda and continuing the work around reading and maths. We have seen positive growth in our data across the school. This is pleasing to see that the work we are engaging in is having a positive impact on our students. Weekly conversations around the next steps and feedback has seen a positive response from students and accountability to improve their knowledge.

This term we are continuing to ensure that students receive regular feedback. We know that the research tells us that when students are receiving feedback that is needs to be Timely, Specific, Understandable to the learner and Actionable.

A great quote by researcher Hattie (2012) I recently read around this states: feedback needs to be “just in time, just for me”. We know that the learning and next steps must be diffentiated to every child’s needs.

As part of giving feedback, setting goals for the next steps is important. One of our key strategies in our Explicit Improvement Agenda this year is Students can recall their reading goal and explain their next step in learning.

Goals are part of every aspect of life and provide a sense of direction, motivation, a clear focus and clarify importance. We believe by setting goals, students are providing themselves a target to aim for. When guiding our students through the process of goal setting, we talk about SMART goals. SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.

Teachers are using recent data to set new goals with students and we look forward to ways we can share these with our families. Students will be working hard to action their goals and improve their reading and problem solving skills. Check in with your child around their goal this term and use these as part of weekly homework tasks and reading in the environment

Great Attendance Equals Great Results

Welcome back to term 3! It has been great to see most of our children back at Bowen State School bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready for learning.

Last semesters reporting results have been finalised and are due out to parents soon. I would like to personally congratulate the majority of our students for their excellent academic results, effort and behaviour from the first half of the year.

When I was going through our results with a fine comb I noticed a very obvious pattern. The vast majority of students who were achieving at year or above, all had attendance rates of 90% or above. Furthermore, of those students who were not achieving at year level expectations here at Bowen State School, nearly all of them had an attendance rate of less than 85%. This trend mimics all of the research out there, however makes it all the more real when it’s our students being affected by this.

School is official open and it is business as usual. If you are still weary of sending your child to school because of the current global health situation, then please contact the school as soon as possible so we can discuss alternative arrangements for your child’s education.

Great attendance equals great results. 

1 W/P

1 W/P are learning about Australian coins. We are learning to recognise our coins based on their colour, size and value.

5H

Students in year 5H have been listening to, reading and viewing a range of poetry, including, anthems, odes and other lyric poems from different contexts. They will interpret and evaluate poems, analysing how text structures and language features have been constructed by the poet, for specific purposes and effects.

6F

Students in Year 6 are studying the award-winning book, My Place. It details continuity and change within a community over many decades, in the context of the history of Australia. This unit of work has been adapted in 2020 to allow students to create their own entry to the collection, where they record their own history, detailing the experience of COVID-19 at 'their place'.

Curriculum News  

This term we are continuing our focus on reading across all Prep to Year 6 classes. At our year level meetings, we looked at our reading results from semester one and tracked individual student movement on our data wall. All year levels have recorded a growth in student reading achievement. This is due to the combined effort of all our fantastic teaching and support staff.

This term we are hoping to build on this growth by refining student goals and the feedback we provide to them around their achievement. Research tells us that effective feedback to students about how they are learning is one of the most effective ways to improve achievement.  Our staff meeting this week included Mr. Callaghan explaining the importance of giving our students effective feedback. 

Our older students are helping at Reading Hub each morning and play an active role in giving feedback to the younger students about how they can improve their reading skills.

Reading Comprehension Focus-Weeks 1 & 2

Predicting

This term we are commencing a whole school comprehension focus. This will involve all students being taught the strategy and then given opportunities to independently use the skills across the curriculum.

Report Cards

Semester 1 report cards will be emailed at the end of Week 3.

Please ensure that the office has your current preferred email address.

Maxine Hillery

Head of Curriculum

Emily, Ellie, Kydenn, Clare, Bella, Raiden, Xena, Seleena, Jacob, Brandon, Georgia, Rashaard, Kasey, Sarah, Grace, James, Mia

Bowen State School NAIDOC 2020 July 13^th – 17^th

NAIDOC 2020 theme - Always Was, Always Will Be. - recognised and celebrated that First Nations people who have occupied and cared for this country for thousands of years. NAIDOC 2020 has been challenged with the COVID Pandemic but despite this, we were able to provide an entire week of activities for every student at the school. Check out the photos, everyone at the school was excited to get their pictures in our newsletter.

The week was extremely successful with the focus being on linking every student into learning and then engaging in experiencing what life was like for our first Australian children, what they did, what tools did they have, what foods did they eat, what games did they play?

These activities invited all students to embrace the ancient history of this country – a history which dates back thousands of generations. A through study of James Morrills’ documentation of living with the local tribes for over 17 years, gave the students insight into daily life over 100 years ago.

Students were able to do a tour of the Mural of James Morrill, have their faces painted in traditional face paint. Many thanks to the senior students who participated in the Master Class with Gareth Prior from Girudala. These students then took over the role of painting the entire schools students.

Providing visual displays and hands on Artefacts allowed the students to grasp what life was like 200 years ago. The Bowen Museum provided photographs of Artefacts that were made in the 18^th Century, this allowed for the theme of “Always was Always will be” This activity allowed students to compare the traditional ways of making hunting weapons from Artefacts from the museum to modern day replica’s. This activity was done in the Library where there were displays of Artefacts and a multitude of reading opportunities of Dreamtime Stories.

The school was supported by the Traditional Owners who work with Juru Enterprises to provide each student with the opportunity to plant a Native Medicine tree that is native to Juru Country

The exercise has given the students the opportunity to feel what it is to be part of “country”. The exercise gave ownership of planting and then the care of the trees and finally participating in planting these trees “on country” with each student’s name on them.

Students continued to show interest in their trees, the ownership that the students are experiencing has given them much insight into the intrinsic sense of what caring for country and of being a First Nation student.

North Queensland Bulk Ports, Project Manager Julie Kean, ended the week with a presentation on the Environmental work the organisation does to ensure that the environment continues to be sustainable. The Presentation gave our students insight into how important caring for country is to all Australians.

The final presentation was gifted to the Bowen State School to be used in curriculum studies for the entire school. Queensland Bulk Ports has also provided Polo Shirts with the Logo’s of Juru and NQBP. These will be given to the senior students who will participate in the planting of the Medicine trees “on country”.

The week was completed with a whole of school parade and winners of the NAIDOC competition, and the Quizz were presented with prizes by NQBP Julie Kean. Every students, teacher, and staff had the opportunity to sample several different dampers made for the occasion.

Feedback from Teachers, Parents and Students has been very positive and the school looks forward to planning next year’s NAIDOC celebrations.

I speak from my own perspective that this year was a great learning experience for all, we can only continue to build on what we have achieved this year, watch this space as we form a NAIDOC Committee let’s see how we can continue to shine.

Thanks to everyone for their support.