Welcome everyone for the last newsletter of Term 3. Thank you all for your continued support this Term. Whilst we have not had the Lockdown restrictions for Covid-19 we still have had some restrictions in place that have made our normal day to day operations slightly more challenging. We are busily planning for Term 4 and each of you will receive a Term overview for your child’s sector of the school for Term 4. We will still need to be Covid-19 compliant with our activities next term but feel confident we can still conduct our Year 12 Graduation and our Year 6 Graduation as planned.

Year 12 Graduation

Our Year 12’s will have a Formal Dinner Graduation Night on Wednesday 18^th November at Gunabul Homestead. We have three Year 12 Students graduating this year and we want to make their Graduations memorable and enjoyable. On Friday 20^th November, we will hold a short Graduation Ceremony followed by a Morning Tea here at the school to farewell these students.

Student Code of Conduct

We will shortly begin work on our new Student Code of Conduct. The Student Code of Conduct replaces the:

• Responsible Behaviour Plan for Students
• Statement of Expectations
• Code of School Behaviour

The Student Code of Conduct clearly sets out expectations about staff responsibilities to support students to understand and meet discipline expectations of the school, and guidance on the application, where required, of disciplinary consequences. This document will be available on each school's website early next year and provided to newly enrolled students and their parents. Until a school finalises their Student Code of Conduct, the existing Responsible Behaviour Plan for Students continues to apply

Queensland state schools have the full 2020 school year to develop and consult with their community on the new Student Code of Conduct. We will be asking for families to provide feedback to us during the consultation period which we aim to commence early next term. If you are interested in supporting us to work on this, please contact me on slest7@eq.edu.au to indicate your interest.

New Playground

Our new Playground contract has been awarded and materials and equipment will shortly be ordered. We hope the majority of this work will be completed over the Summer Holidays ready for the start of 2021. It is very exciting to be revamping our playground and adding some great new equipment.

Secondary Uniforms for 2021

Our P&C has ordered the new 2021 Senior School uniforms for our Junior Secondary and Senior Secondary students. We will hopefully have them ready to purchase early next year.

New Student Free Days at the End of Term 4

In recognition of the extraordinary efforts of school-based staff during the COVID-19 health pandemic, the 2020 school year will end early. The last two days of the school year, Thursday 10 and Friday 11 December 2020, will be designated student free days. Schools will be closed on these days.

Spring Holidays

I wish all of our students and families a refreshing and safe Spring Holiday. Monday 5^th October is a public holiday and we look forward to welcoming everyone back to school on Tuesday 6^th October for an 8.30am start.  Best wishes!

Sarah 

Hi everyone,

It has been a very busy term 3 and your children have been able to access some wonderful learning opportunities including mathematics and science applied practically through gardening and observing creatures such as meal worms.  We have also had students proudly presenting their mathematics and writing work to us in the office and it has been a privilege to be able to give out special stickers and awards for excellent effort and application in these areas.

Term 4 Parent Calendars

Your child will bring home a Term 4 Parent Calendar today.  As we all know, Term 4 is an extremely busy time for students and their families with lots of school, sporting and family social commitments. The calendar is designed for each sector in the school: Early Years, Primary Years, Junior Secondary and Senior Secondary Sectors.  Everything that has been pre-planned is included in the calendar, however there may be some additional things that are individual to your child’s particular class that you can add to the calendar if needed.  The calendar also outlines the Positive Behaviour for Learning (PBL) rule of the week.

HOLT BOLT

As part of our Positive Behaviour for Learning (PBL) program our students are given Ardy tickets for following our school rules:

Every Monday on parade, each Ardy ticket that is earnt goes into large plastic containers.  Once the containers are full, the HOLT BOLT will come to Gympie Special School.  The students watched a video on parade this week that showed what the HOLT BOLT is and there was a considerable amount of excitement generated. You can watch some of the videos here by clicking on this link: https://theholtbolt.com/videos/. 

In hindsight, we perhaps should have used some larger containers…the students have already filled half of the first container in one week! 

There is also a half-way prize. Once the first container is full, all of the students will receive an additional ten minutes of playtime.

Have a safe and relaxed spring holiday.  We are really looking forward to seeing all of the students back at school on Tuesday the 6^th of October.

Kind regards,

Rachael

AHOY THERE ME HEARTIES!

Today’s Talk Like a Pirate Day has definitely been quite the hit with staff and students dressing up, treasure hunting, telling (corny) pirate jokes and investigating Pirate culture and attire. Aarrgh! Keep ya’ eyes open for these photo treasures on Facebook and in the local Gympie Today Newspaper.

The library is beginning to look a little different with the addition of new wall shelving for our books. Our new readers and big books are in the process of being covered and used in classrooms (photos below). Next term we will be holding our very first Scholastic Book Fair from 19^th to the 23^rd of October. Our theme will be ‘Curious Creatures, Wild Minds’, which fits in nicely with our animal themed English, Mathematics and Science. Some great activities are organised including a dress up day, best dressed door/room prizes, the library will be transformed so that staff and students can come and purchase books, the more we sell, the more our library will earn rewards for our school library. Start thinking about your animal themed costumes now!

Lastly, have a wonderful Spring break, enjoy the warmer weather and time together.

Shellie

It is the end of Term 3 and the students have been working well on their various tasks. Early years, primary and junior secondary classes have been exploring what it would be like to grow up in Uluru and Kakadu. The students have completed great comparison charts and been learning about how these special places can be looked after. The senior secondary students are continuing to investigate the liveability of places, including environmental considerations. They have been learning how to draw a field sketch to collect primary data and what conventions are necessary for mapping.  I hope that everyone has a safe and happy holiday.  Miss A

Our Musical characters Unit has come to an end. Many students have become very confident with using music symbols to write and perform their music. Students have enjoyed playing percussion instruments, especially the Djembe drums. It is great that they will have the opportunity to continue playing the drums next term in some of the sessions with Chappy Naomi.

Next term we will be studying Dance. The theme will be animals. In the first couple of weeks in the new term, we will be revisiting skills and knowledge that the students have gained from their Dance Unit last year. It will be exciting to see them build on their previous skills and knowledge to create and perform their animal themed dances.

 The senior students working in different groups to compose and perform their music.

 Junior secondary students learning about rhythm by reading rhythm flashcards on the whiteboard to play along with.

Early Years students playing percussion instruments and marching to the song ‘The Ants go Marching’.

Hope everyone has a happy and restful holiday after all the hard work our students have done this term.

Chris, (The Arts teacher)

Spring is upon us and so are the September school holidays! We have been very busy learners this term. We have enjoyed many of our Books of the Week, recently reading Hairy Maclary Scattercat, Bertie and the Bear and The Little Red Hen. The predictable nature of the texts allows us to look at the characters and their emotions, to sequence events and the order of characters in the story. Some of us sequence according to the beginning, middle and end of the text and say which characters or events we liked best. In maths we continue to study number and 2D shapes and 3D objects, sorting real objects and pictures with the help of ALS boards. We identify the features of the shapes or objects; whether the edges are straight or curved and how many edges, corners and sides each shape or object has. In science, we are very excited to report that our mealworms are finally starting to change into pupa! We look at our worms at least once per day to examine any changes, to count how many worms and pupa we have and to clean their containers and feed them. We have also looked at the life cycle of the butterfly through sequencing The Very Hungry Caterpillar and studied Bush Foods, particularly Witchetty Grubs! As you can see we have been very active and we are learning to be careful and respect our small creatures.

We hope you all have a well earnt rest!

Yours in learning

Jan, Libby, Chrissie, Bree, Miss A, Chris and Andrew.

Wow, how time has flown. The end of term 3 already. As the term draws to a close, we have reflected on our learning. We have explored and analysed our book of the week to make comments on who our favourite characters are, where the story is set and made connections between the text and our own personal experiences. We are (in my humble opinion) communication superstars. We have been working hard to communicate with a range of ways including PODD, Pro LO, ALS boards, switches and our voices. We even have our very own Facebook celebrity amongst us. We were happy to see some our wonderful work has been published on GSS Facebook page.

In maths, we have been comparing 2D and 3D shapes, looking for 3D shapes in our community and using ALS to help us describe. Miss Claire the school’s speech therapist came in and joined in one of our “Guess what shape” game using our ALS boards, PODD and Pro LO to describe and guess. Finally, in science we have been taking good care of our meal worms each week. We are happy to announce that just yesterday one of our mealworms has begun its transformation into a black beetle. Hopefully when we return from the holidays we can observe the transformation process under our newly acquired electronic microscope. How exciting.

We wish everyone a safe, relaxing and fun holiday. See you all next term.

Term 3, Week 10! How did that happen so fast? Our literacy unit has revealed the personalities of our learners. As we analyse the characters in text using ALS boards, I have noticed we have a number of learners with great senses of humour. Not only have they demonstrated their knowledge, they are able to communicate opinions. The ‘Pig the Pug,’ series appears to be a favoured set of books by most students in our class.

Throughout the day I am blown away by the students demonstrating their shape knowledge by showing me 2D shapes both inside and outside of the classroom. Every time we leave the classroom, students are independently locating 2D shapes. In addition, I am very proud to say that some staff have commented on our JS1 learners increasing their number confidence this year.

In Science, we have organized living and non-living things and have continued to investigate lifecycles of Australian animals. We have found that baby platypus, koalas and kangaroos are very, very small when they are born. We are also using technologies to locate and label Australian animals.

Our playtime has become fast and furious as we play badminton, handball and volleyball daily (weather permitting). The participating students from JS1 and JS2 successfully rotate to position of King and have developed the skills taking turns, getting out and following rules. One of my favourite times of the day, even though I don’t seem to hold the position of King for very long.

Have a wonderful break and we will see you back in term 4.

Keep staying safe,

Karen, Bree, Debbie, Dana and Deb. 

As we wish everyone a safe break, we are also happy to say that JS2 are finishing strong in the last week of term by putting the final touches on our learning tasks and thinking of ways to keep busy until we meet again. We have been learning about the different ways people celebrate special occasions like Father’s Day and Birthdays and we have discovered that we are all different in what we choose to do. We worked on our independent writing skills to make cards and party hats too!

In Health, we are concentrating on washing our hands after play time and before we eat. We are learning that we have to rub the soap all over our hands and between our fingers before the water will change colour as the dirt and germs disappear down the sink. One of our team collects the dirty dishes to wash them, while another wipes down the table after food breaks. We are all responsible for putting our own rubbish in the bin and tidying up after ourselves and have our water bottles nearby so that we remember to stay hydrated as the weather begins to warm up.

Our classroom is starting to come together since we started fresh in week 3 with the addition of the new junior secondary class. Miss Emma has been very busy sewing and cutting at home and is starting to put some of her art on our windows. We can’t wait to see the finished decorations for our new reading room, which has a haunted house theme!!

Next term will be packed with learning activities and we can’t wait to get started!

Have a lovely break,

Miss Jodie, Miss Jordan and Miss Emma

Our books of the week have been a great stimuli for learning about story writing.  One activity we do using our new laptops is to download a template and answer questions about each book. The books have also been a springboard for science and math lessons.  We have been researching life cycles of different birds, insects, mammals, and reptiles.  We brainstormed all the birds we could think of and came up with over 30!  Oscar chose the flamingo, Seth picked a tucan, Elijah a rooster, Grace the macaw and Jas the yellow finch.  Their work is proudly displayed in our room.  It was also fun exploring different shapes of homes animals make.  We thought that the hexagon shape bees use to make their hive is very clever.

We’ve been enjoying experimenting with different types of movement in HPE.  We especially like skipping and juggling.  Not too easy, but lots of laughs trying.

Finally, welcome Elijah and Jas who have settled in well to JS3 this term becoming valued hard working members of our class. 

It’s certainly been a busy 3^rd term, time for a holiday to recharge our batteries!  See you all happy and healthy in term 4.

Ms Grace, Ms Sue, Mr Darren.

Our science this semester is looking into life cycles of plants and animals. JS4 are currently nurturing zebra silkworms which we have raised since they hatched out of their tiny little eggs in week 6. There are 60 silkworms in our care and we are feeding 30 of them the leaves from a black mulberry tree and the other 30 leaves from a white mulberry tree. So far, those fed the white mulberry leaves are growing at a much faster rate. We can not wait to see if the silk they weave into cocoons is different and finally if the moths that hatch are any different. After moulting several times, we have discovered one of our silkworms is albino. We named it Kouki, which means Little Snow in Japanese.

The silkworms are finally large enough for us to handle with our hands. They do feel a little creepy as they grip onto our skin. So far not all of us have been brave enough to let the silkworms crawl on our hands. Maybe we will all gain the confidence soon.

A big thank you to Miss Anne-Maree for providing our mulberry leaves and for looking after the silkworms each weekend and over the September holidays.

Miss Cann and  Miss Anne-Maree

Senior students had a fantastic time at Road Craft last Friday.  The students had a classroom lesson followed by a practical skills lesson.  It was great to see all the skills that we have been learning on our Friday lessons at school being put into practical situations.  Our focus has been on pedestrian safety and everyone showed what great pedestrians they can be by stopping and waiting at a pedestrian crossing.  Peter from Road Craft took the time to ensure that students understood why they should stand back from the road, and students were able to play out various scenarios in a safe environment.  To coincide with being a safe pedestrian we also need to understand road signs and signals. The students were able to drive some small cars which travel at a walking pace and with instructions were able follow some of the road signs and also traffic lights. The students showed great engagement in this activity and we look forward to being able to expand their road and community safety skills.

 Trista, Thelma, Debbie and Judith