End of an amazing term

What an action-packed term we have engaged in with a range and variety of school activities. Can I thank our hard-working team of staff for your dedication and commitment to the learning to date. This term we have hosted many key events on the school calendar including the ANZAC ceremony, NAPLAN assessment, Under 8’s Day, athletics carnival and prep open morning. Students and staff have been working hard on the Writing sprint and the collection of student output and goal setting for “Marker Students”. Every fortnight we have been meeting as a whole staff to review the impact of our teaching and plan the next steps in the learning. We are all looking forward to celebrating the data around this as we prepare to send out school report cards on Friday week 2 next term.

Prep open Morning

Can I say a huge thank you to Mrs Karen Weekes our Early Years Coach for her planning and preparation for our annual Prep Open Morning. We had a large increase in families and hosted a relaxed, informative morning. It was great to meet new and existing families and show off what a great school Bowen State is becoming. The petting farm was a popular hit and welcoming Prep staff provided future preps their first experience with a big school classroom.

We had many community organisations to supported the morning and connection to what our community has to offer. Thank you to all the Bowen State staff that attended the morning to ensure a safe, and smooth experience for families and children. For more information about our Prep 2021 transition please contact the office.

School Opinion Survey

Early next term families and our year 5/6 students will have an opportunity to have a voice in the key work our school has engaged in this year. We will continue to communicate information around this process as information is released. We are looking forward to celebrating what we are doing well and feedback for areas to improve.

A safe holiday

I wish all our families a safe and enjoyable June July holiday break. Looking forward to sharing more great stories around the teaching and learning next term. Until then have a great holiday break.

Making a Difference with Attendance

Over the past 18 months our school has been working hard in the space of increasing student attendance. We have started a number of initiatives to support students attending school every day including; whole class rewards, improvements to whole school processes to absenteeism, and the development of an attendance task force to support students and our wider community. At Bowen State School, all staff and students take ownership of attendance ensuring a collective effort to make a notable difference.

Take a look below to see what difference we are making for the year to date for those students who are attending less than 85%. An outstanding effort by all!

Students are Well Behaved @ Bowen State School

Over the past year, our school has been working hard in the space of improving student behaviour. We have done this through strategically teaching and rewarding desired student behaviours, increasing the support and intervention for students, and increasing staff capabilities in behavioural management strategies.

Our hard work has been identified within the region and we have now become a Tier 2 school for Positive behaviour for learning (PBL). To put this into perspective, we have been working in the Tier 1 space for the past 6 years.

How do we know that we are improving?

Our data collection tool Oneschool, indicates that on average in 2020 we had around 4 recorded student behavioural incidents per day, compared to 2 per day in 2021.

We have also had a dramatic reduction in suspensions. In 2020 we had a total of 60 suspensions for the year, compared with only 9 for 2021 so far. At this point in time last year we had a total of 28 suspensions.

A huge congratulations to our students, staff and parents for doing their part in supporting appropriate student behaviours at Bowen State School. Our students are certainly well behaved. 

Jeremy Callaghan                                                                                                                           

Deputy Principal                                                                                                                   

Sports Update

We come to the end of sport at Bowen State School for Term 2 2021. It’s been another very busy term with trials, aths days, juggling and after school basketball all happening. We look forward to Term 3 where we will continue our sports trials with cricket and athletics to name two. After school basketball will continue and many other opportunities for students to work on their fitness and skills.

Athletics Days

Last week we had our junior and senior athletics days. Unfortunately our senior day was impacted by unseasonably wet weather and had to be called off before lunch. The students were fantastic on this day putting up with the weather and we still got the 800m, 200m heats and 100m completed.

Due to the inclement weather we made a few last minute changes to our Junior carnival day so that we could get the senior students to still compete in some events and have an eventual house champion for the day.

All students both junior and senior did an amazing job in all of their events. It was great to see the fantastic sportsmanship shown by everyone and everyone competed with a smile of their face. A big thank you must go to everyone who made the two days possible and showed incredible flexibility. Our student leaders were amazing during our junior carnival as they set up, ran activities and packed up at the end of the day.

Students who competed competitively had the opportunity to qualify for the Bowen Sub District Athletics trials. This team will be finalised in week 1 of Term 3. We will also be presenting medallions to our age champions at parade tomorrow.

Our winning houses for the day were:

Junior

1st Leichhardt 1,181

2nd Sinclair 1,121

3rd Denison 1,080

Senior

1st Leichhardt 809

2nd Sinclair 755

3rd Denison 751

Sports Trials

We have had many trials from different sporting events this term. Congratulations to everyone who has represented Bowen State School. We are incredibly proud of each and every one of you! The most recent achievements were Taijanah N and Emma S competing at the touch NQ trials. We also had Charlee S and Sonny P make it through to the national championships for cross country which is a brilliant achievement. We wish both these girls all the best as they work hard to prepare for this event. We will keep you updated on how they go early next term as they compete in Ipswich.

After School Basketball

After School Basketball has started in recent weeks and is proving to be highly successful. We currently have 6 teams from Grade 5 and 6 with over 40 students being involved in the competition. We are hoping to get the Grade 3 and 4 students involved in the program in the not too distant future. A massive thank you to all the teachers who are giving up their time to ensure that the competition is successful. It’s also been great to see families come and support the teams. We strongly encourage this to happen. We’ll be back in full swing the first Wednesday of next term.

Juggling

This term has been a big one for our juggling team as they have continued working hard to develop their skills. They had their first performance and will have their first performance at school tomorrow at Parade. Congratulations to all of the team, I couldn’t be more proud of all of them on how far they have come in such a short time.

Basketball School Holiday Camp in Mackay

On Monday and Tuesday of week 1 of the school holidays there is a basketball camp in Mackay. This is not a school event but with the growing interest in basketball at the school we are putting this out to everyone for those who are keen. I will be there for both days and it would be great to see some students from Bowen State School there. Please note students do not have to attend both days and it is $50 per day.

Go update - PCYC Re Engagement Program (PREP)

Bowen State School in collaboration with PCYC Bowen have written a program to support students to development leadership skills in alternative learning environments to foster and increase in engagement and successful outcomes at school.  PREP is about connecting with the community, being pushed out of your comfort zone to develop lifelong skills such as:

• Self control
• Positive self talk
• Taking orders from a range of adults
• Empathy
• Resilience
• Courage

Whilst the program uses fun physical activities they are also confronting and put the team under pressure to practice displaying skills they are focusing on.  The group of boys finished the program off strong and all displayed the skills above.  Our Bowen State School and PCYC team are extremely proud of all of them pictured below with Community Development Officer Ms Rachel Miller and Sargent Danielle Needen Acting PCYC Branch Manager.

What a fantastic day for our NAIDOC celebrations! We also had a small ceremony for the start of our new Yarning Circle. A big thank you to our organisers and special guests.

Turning of the Soil - Our New Yarning Circle 

Juggling Performance 

What a fantastic performance from our talented juggling group this morning on parade!  Thank-you performancers, Mr Dunn and Mrs Conway - it was awesome!

Bowen State School would like to say a huge thankyou to Bunnings Cannonvale for their kind donations of herb seedlings, vegetable seedlings, passionfruit seedlings, hand spades, mesh and a wheelbarrow. Your generosity is greatly appreciated. During Term 3, Rachel Rice, from Bunnings will be coming to our school to set up a worm farm with our Environmental Club students. Our gardens are looking fantastic and students are working very hard to maintain them.

Mr Jason Osman, our Instrumental Teacher, is leaving Bowen State School and moving back to Brisbane in July.

On behalf of the Bowen State School community, particularly the students in the instrumental program, we say thank you, Mr Osman, for all your efforts as you took on over fifty students and managed to timetable them all into one school day a week. Yes, it was difficult, as many forgot their instruments or their books or their lesson schedule- but you did not give up. As the instrumental teacher you inspired the students to play; you continually reminded them that practice is required and you created opportunities for them to perform so that the Bowen Community could come together, listen to and appreciate the talents of our young musicians. We appreciate all your efforts over the past two and a half years. It has not been an easy time as Covid certainly created some challenges, but you worked with the students to overcome the obstacles and managed to maintain a strong instrumental program that has been an integral part of the Bowen State School for over 40 years.

We wish you well in your future endeavours.

2021 School opinion survey for Parents and Caregivers

The School Opinion Survey gives parents, students and staff the chance to give their opinions about our school. It is important information that we use to inform our priorities each year. This year all surveys will be emailed to parents. Here is some information about the survey:

• Families with one or more enrolled children at our school will receive one invitation to complete the survey via email. No logins or passwords are needed; you can simply click on the link and complete the survey.
• The parent/caregiver to receive the invitation is selected based on information and email address in OneSchool.
• Parent survey invitations will be sent over a number of days in the week beginning 5 July. The survey will close on 30 July. 
• The survey invitation email uses the subject line: School Opinion Survey of parents, 2021; check junk email folders if it can’t be found.