Newsletter Term 2 Week 10 2021

"We acknowledge and respect the traditional custodians on whose land our school rests. Their footsteps and whispers blow in the wind, drift on the clouds, remain deep in the sandstone and float on the waterways of this place. Their memories and Dreaming stories will continue to connect us to the land and guide future generations of our school community. Country is alive if you take the time to look, listen and learn."

Principal's report

What a lovely afternoon I had down at Passmore reserve and Nolan reserve last Friday. I was impressed by the sportsmanship and teamwork displayed by our boys soccer teams and our rugby league teams. I look forward to the opportunity to watch our netball teams play next term!

This afternoon I will be visiting Forest High to view the projects that our students have been working on through the Year 5 Enrichment Afternoon Showcase. What a fantastic opportunity our students have had to connect with our local high school and high potential students from local schools. This opportunity will be available to another 5 students in Term 3.

Just a reminder please that Covid is still around. It is really important that both QR codes are used when you are signing students in and out of the office. Our BNPS QR code is linked to our attendance and this information goes into our internal school system. The services NSW code does not do this. Please also remember, that before entering your child's classroom that you have made an appointment and have signed in using both QR codes. No parents are allowed in classrooms unless by arrangement.

Our senior Dance Ensemble performed at Glen street theatre last week. We look forward to their performances early in Term 3. It has been lovely to see more opportunities for our students to be involved in performance opportunities this year.

Just a ‘save the date’. Education Week open day will be on Thursday 29th July. The performances will commence from 9.30am and run until recess. More information will be available early in Term 3.

Our chickens need some assistance in the holidays! Thank you to Kulkunna for providing help from Monday to Friday. We just need some cover for the weekends. Please click on the link if you think you can help out.

https://www.signupgenius.com/go/30E0A4DADA829ABF49-term2

I hope everyone takes time out in the holidays to connect with family and friends and find time to do what you enjoy. Our students and teachers have worked hard this term and we are all looking forward to recharging, resting and re energizing! Staff return to school on Monday the 12th of July for a day of professional learning. We look forward to our students returning on Tuesday the 13th of July.

Brooke Keevers

Principal

School news

NAIDOC Week – Heal Country

This year NAIDOC Week is held from Sunday 4 July to Sunday 11 July. NAIDOC Week is an opportunity for all Australians to come together to celebrate the rich history, diverse cultures and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the oldest continuing cultures on the planet. There are many opportunities across Sydney to participate in during the week and to support your local Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community. A couple of great family events include:

NAIDOC in the city – a celebration in Hyde Park with food, art, dance, song and stories.

https://whatson.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/events/naidoc-in-the-city

See of Hands at the Calyx in the Royal Botanic Gardens – a fully immersive audio-visual experience focusing on the theme of ‘Healing Country’.

https://whatson.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/events/naidoc-week-sea-of-hands-at-the-calyx

We will be celebrating NAIDOC week at Balgowlah North, during Week 1 of Term 3. Students will be involved in a range of activities to facilitate understanding and knowledge about the purpose of NAIDOC week, the importance and meaning of this year’s theme and understanding about country and language groups of our local area.

We are also looking forward to a presentation by Indigenous author and presenter Gregg Dreise in week 3.

Aboriginal Education Committee

Reports

This afternoon we will be sending home our Semester One school reports via email. As this is our first time trialling our email distribution of reports we ask for your patience and cooperation in resolving any technical issues we might encounter. If you have not received your child’s school report by 3pm on Thursday the 24th of June, please email the school office to notify us so we can reissue the report.

Gifted Writer’s Workshop

We are very proud to have had our Gifted Writer’s Workshop featured in an article on the Northern Beaches Advocate website. It is wonderful to see the fantastic teaching and learning at our school celebrated in the local community.

https://www.northernbeachesadvocate.com.au/2021/06/21/creative-classroom-collaboration/

School Holidays

Our students have had a busy term of rich and engaging learning experiences and should feel so proud of how hard they have worked and the progress they have made. I wish all of our Balgowlah North students and their families a safe, restful and happy school holiday break.

Rachel Ridley

R/Deputy Principal

Tech Hub

The Tech Hub has been busy the past few weeks! Kindergarten students have thoroughly enjoyed using these adorable Bluebots! Bluebots are a great introduction to robotics, as students learn coding through controlling the movement and direction of the robot through step-by-step instructions that are in order. Kindergarten programmed their robots to make shapes as well as make their way through mazes!

At the other end of the school, Stage 3 began their projects with LEGO EV3 Mindstorms. In this project, we focus on the development of 21^st Century Skills, which include Critical Thinking, Collaboration, Communication and Creativity. The task was for students to construct a basic driving base. From there, students adapted the design and create an algorithm using block coding. Watch the video with some of the creations along with some student reflections.   

Miss Wakelin and Ms Stock

Technology with Miss Wakelin

The past three Wednesdays, 6/5S has been designing a robot called an EV3 Lego Mindstorm. It has been a creative and fun experience for everyone. We have learnt the basics to building our vehicle to coding fun movements. Our favourite part of this experience was the coding of the EV3 Mindstorm because we could do all sorts of things like a spin, move in all directions and even show emotion. Here is a short clip of some coding that we did with our craft.

Katie H and Lucy O

6/5S were fortunate enough to build and code the Lego Mindstorms. We had so much fun coding Mindstorms to do the weirdest things like making it bark like a dog, making it spin around so much that if it were a human it would get a migraine and making it be able to sense colours. We got off to a rough start as our Mindstorm fell apart, but we ended up finishing with loads of time left. We ended up coding our Mindstorm to go forward for five seconds, make it spin around ten times, move back for five seconds and spin around ten times again (poor Mindstorm) and then make it say game over. But these are just some of the things that you can do with the Mindstorms.

Max T and Lachie S

Leadership Camp

The 2021 student leadership team of Annie B, Caleb M, Lucy R, Max W, Amali E, Harry S, Indie O and me, Max T had an absolute blast at the Leadership camp on Tuesday and Wednesday last week. I’m here to give you a short review about it. There were lots of student leaders from schools across the Northern Beaches and we were all separated into five different groups of about 22. We did so many cool individual and team building activities including archery, orienteering and the escape room. The main activity for us as a school leadership group was to develop to an Action Plan about something that we thought would benefit BNPS. This took quite a bit of thought and work and the team decided that we needed to upgrade our lost property system. Long story short it will definitely be one of the highlights of the year.

Max T

Dance ensemble

On Thursday 17th June the Balgowlah North Dance Ensemble went to Glen Street Theatre to have their ‘Century Switch’ dance professionally filmed. The group performed on stage as a part of the Sydney North Dance Festival and did an amazing job. The filmed performances were then presented to audiences over the weekend. Well done to the 20 talented dancers on their outstanding effort in making their ideas come to life in a wonderful performance. The students will also be performing at our 3-6 assembly in Term 3, Week 2 and our K-2 assembly in Term 3, Week 3 where parents are welcome to attend.

Come and visit the Green Grove

If you’re alone at lunch time and you have nothing to do I advise you to come and help me and the caretaker of the Green Grove, Sadie Melov. The Green Grove was built in 2017 and is a popular lunch place for students to visit.

The Grove has had up to four chickens named Hen Solo, Nuggets, Midnight and Curry. Many volunteers look after the chickens: feeding them, taking their eggs for sale and allowing them free range. The Grove also has many plants and herbs as it is a very successful garden. 

The best thing about being a volunteer at the Green Grove is that there are so many amazing things to do there. You can pick honeysuckles and play with the chickens all you like but the best thing that happens when you work hard is that you get refreshing food or drinks. It depends on what is in season. Once I went and passion fruit and limes were in season so we had passion fruit and lemonade which is lemonade just with limes.

So don’t miss out, let's get digging!

Alex D 5M

Theme Park Homework Activity

Stage 3’s homework for the last three weeks of term 2 was to design and make a Theme Park. The student’s solution for their parks were to fill them with amazing rides, fun attractions and delicious food ideas. Here are some different, definitely cool, creative examples from across all stage 3 classes.

PBL

Be Respectful

Weekly focus:  Keep toilets clean and report any problems immediately

What it looks like:

• Dispose of paper towel/toilet paper properly. That means not wetting paper towel or throwing it around the bathroom and over nearby fences. 
• Keep the toilets nice by not peeling off stickers, scratching or writing on the walls/doors. 
• Report any problems to a teacher immediately 
• Broken toilets/taps
• Graffiti/vandalism/damage

Dates for your diary

25 June

• Last day of Term 2 

12 July

• School Development Day

4-11 July

• NAIDOC week

13 July 

• All students return for the start of Term 3
  

25 July

• P&C working bee Years 2&3

Community news

Northern Beaches Council has developed a schools road safety and active travel project to identify issues and concerns around schools and to encourage more active and safe journeys to schools. 

Balgowlah North Public School has been selected as one of the schools we are reviewing this year.

As well as our review we are providing a self-reporting method for the school community to give us feedback using an interactive map. 

We invite Balgowlah North Public school parents, students and the wider school community to participate in the self-reporting method using Social Pinpoint.  This is an opportunity to tell us exactly where concerns and issues are for parking, speeding, walking, bike/skate/scooting, pedestrian safety and general issues, related to your school. 

How you can help

• Please share the link in your school newsletter and any school managed social media pages that parents access
• The map allows people to indicate issues in specific places, and to categorise them with an image – the more comments for Balgowlah North Public School the better!

The link is https://northernbeaches.mysocialpinpoint.com/northern-beaches-safe-schools#/

Note that some people may have already posted comments last year. These comments are still captured and will be included in our review.

We would appreciate feedback by Monday 5 July 2021.

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