From Olivia Week 8 Term 1

Posted on March 24, 2023 by Olivia

Spotlight on Carolina (Spanish Teacher)

Why did you become a teacher?
You might not know that I am an IT Engineer. I worked in the field for almost 20 years. I liked technology, the analytical thinking, the problem solving, but I wanted something else.
The desire to share knowledge was always latent inside me. But it became more relevant when my first daughter was born. So, when she was one year old, I started a Spanish Playgroup and that made me realise two things: my desire for her to learn her mother tongue, to connect to her roots and how much I enjoyed interacting with the children. In fact, many parents told me that they saw in me a gift for teaching kids and even suggested me to devote myself to it.
The idea grew inside me until I finally decided to immerse myself into teaching Spanish to children.

What is it about Currambena that you like so far?
I like the teachers, the community feeling, the relax atmosphere, seeing the kids coming to school so happy. It is at a beautiful environment!

What do you do in your spare time?
I enjoy spending time with my family doing activities together. I also love reading, gardening, and stand-up paddle boarding.

If you had a superpower, what would it be?
Super-Speed to be able to travel to Argentina and Poland more often to visit my relatives.

What do you want the Currambena Families to know?
That I am passionate about teaching and I put a lot of thought when planning my lessons so the children can learn and have fun. I truly feel that I am giving the kids a gift for life.

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The Hairy Toes: Term 1 Week 8

Posted on March 24, 2023 by katrinaa

Hello everyone,

After allowing everyone the opportunity to have a say in regards to choosing a name for preschool and then spending time voting on them, has led to the preschool class now being named “The Hairy Toes.” For those of you that might not know. The Hairy Toe is currently a favourite story of many of the children in preschool. It’s an American Folklore story and is a little scary though mostly silly and fun!

This week there’s been an interest in putting on performances. The children are enjoying using our pretend money to buy tickets and be the audience. The performers are very keen to choose their favourite songs, which is generally “Let it Go”, to perform.

Our changes to our afternoon preschool program are continuing to prove successful for everyone. The top playground is a definite highlight of most of the children’s day. We’ve been blown away by how many children are now about to singe the entire length of the monkey bars by themselves. It just goes to show that determination and perseverance are definite determining factors in success!

Our end of day meeting time has been a great way to teach everyone an attitude of gratitude. By helping children look at different situations from a positive point of view instead of a negative one we are focussing on healthy emotions. It’s almost impossible to feel sad when you have happy thoughts!

A huge thank you to Benji’s family for gifting a special story called “Jana’s Brightly Coloured Socks” to celebrate World Down Syndrome Day with preschool. It would be great if everyone that come next Tuesday could wear some brightly coloured socks so we could have a sock parade just like in the story as a way to celebrate how we are all different though also the same!

That’s it for this week.

Love

Michael, Lisa, Joanna and Katrina

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From Olivia Week 7 Term 1

Posted on March 17, 2023 by Olivia

Spotlight on Michael (Preschool Teacher)

Why did you become a teacher?

I wanted to give back to a place that was able to give me so much.

What is it about Currambena that you love?

Shared experience of learning through mutual respect and the idea that we are all on a level playing field.

What do you do in your spare time?

Spending time with my young family and friends. Bushwalking and playing the guitar.

If you had a superpower, what would it be?

Time travel, so I can travel back to the fun times of being a student here.

What do you want the Currambena Families to know?

With all the hard work and passion that Currambena brings, it is all worth it in the end.

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Preschool: Week 7 Term 1

Posted on March 17, 2023 by katrinaa

Hello everyone,

It was lovely to see so many preschool families at the Currambena social on Thursday night. The children always find these nights so special, a lovely way for them to be able to share the magic of Currambena with their families.

Great news! This week we have had a new preschool assistant join us. Her name is Joanna, she is diploma trained and she will be working in preschool each day from 11:30 to 2:30pm to cover Lisa, Michael and I while we have our breaks. We warmly welcome Joanna and look forward to getting to know her.

The children have decided to give the preschool class a name. They’ve come up with a huge list and now we are voting on them. This time next week our class will have a new name so stay tuned.

We’ve had some changes to our daily program which are proving very successful. The last part of our day now involves an end of day meeting where we are coming together as a group to reflect on what we are grateful for. We’re then looking at what areas of the preschool need to be packed away before we begin our pack away time. The children are no longer putting their names on jobs, rather being responsible for working together to get the preschool clean. This is proving to be so successful we now have time to head up to the top playground so children can practice their climbing and skills on the monkey bars, the flying fox and cross bars. A great incentive to clean the preschool, ready for the following day.

Thank you to everyone that has taken home some preschool washing this week and to Alegria and Luna for the GLAD cards, a perfect addition to our current work on gratitude.

Love

Katrina, Lisa and Michael

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Vinnie’s group Week 7 Term 1

Posted on March 17, 2023 by Vincent

Hi all,

We had a mixed week with the weather. The downpour on Tuesday and then another hot day on Thursday kept us away from the pool. The children still had fun playing in the rain on Tuesday and then with the sprinkler out the back of the room on Thursday.

Sarah D covered for me on Monday as I was away. The children built lots of different creation from recycled boxes. She told me the children loved using these, thanks for bringing in all those boxes! We are always after more.

On Tuesday we looked at the story Going On A Bear Hunt  by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury. As a class we acted out each scene, then we coloured and ordered the story in our writing journals. The next day we looked at Is Your Grandmother a Goanna by Pamela Allen. Instead of colouring in, the children have started drawing scenes from the story, then colouring them, then pasting them into their writing journals and finally reading their story back to the class. Later in the week we had our craft sessions. This week we painted warm coloured paintings on Wednesday and cool coloured paintings on Thursday. Chris also finished firing our clay vessels and we are ready to eat out of them. We will aim to walk to Woolworths on Monday and cook our dish in the afternoon. I have emailed a link to sign up.

We did more cooking this week with Meg’s help. We made damper with optional raisins, the children enjoyed making and eating the damper rolls.

We have also continued with our protective behaviours unit of work. As a class we have now discussed and role played: emotions and feelings, personal space, and now safe and unsafe secrets. Next in our learning sequence will be safe adults and then private and public parts the week after next. If you have any questions or would like to know more, come talk to me before or after school.
I was sorry I couldn’t make it to the social on Thursday evening but I hope you had a great time.

I look foward to another great week at school.
All the best,
Vinnie

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From Jess Week 7 Term 1

Posted on March 17, 2023 by Newsletter Ed

Sunshine and rain this week! On Tuesday there was apprehension from some of the more sensitive children in the class regarding swimming and the weather. We discussed some of these feelings and then voted if we wanted to push forward with our regular swimming activity despite the risk of rain. The vote was that we would push ahead which was challenging for some children to accept. In the end, we were caught in the rain and whilst some children delighted in the joyful sensory experience, others were challenged by the need to be flexible and manage the unpredictability.

In other news, we’ve been having fun with maps this week, covering concepts in maths, geography and English. We read a fabulous book called “My Map Book” by Sara Fanelli, which was gifted to me by a friend, and we made maps of a range of things including our heart, our brain, our feelings and our relationships. A wonderful, very abstract way to begin thinking about maps. We then examined more traditional maps, focusing on their features and how to describe pathways and locate places. We’ve integrated this with journey stories like “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt” in English. The children then drew their own maps and marked out a journey, which we will develop into our own journey stories.

On Thursday, we explored symmetry in butterfly wings and had fun painting and folding to make the concept concrete. In “Travels Through Time” we talked about the concept of past, present and future, and we then analysed old photographs of shoes to draw conclusions about the past and how things have changed over time.

Wishing you a gorgeous, sunny weekend,

Jess

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Sarah’s Class week 7 Term 1

Posted on March 17, 2023 by sarahm

What a ride the weather has taken us on this week!

Our visit to Lane Cove Cove library on Monday saw it HOT and HUMID. Then on Tuesday morning the rain cleared – after a deluge – enough for us to walk up to the pool for swimming. Shortly after we arrived the sky opened again and we returned to school in the rain. There was much excitement and joy as we navigated puddles and water spray from passing cars. Then on Thursday and Friday we were back to 30 + degree days……. CRAZY!!

Things we achieved this week included some fabulous writing and drawing for a class book! This is something I get the children to do every year and over the years have some beautiful books with amazing pieces of writing and drawings. They started way, way back in 2015 and have grown from paperback to hardback. Themes have included: Heroes and Villians, Acrostic and Haiku Poetry, Places, Our School, graphic stories and the World’s Worst Children.

This year, our theme is ‘special places’. We started this process by reading a story, then the children created a picture of their special place. From there we wrote a few sentences. I supported them with spelling and editing and we are almost complete. A front and back cover will need to be designed and voted upon before we send it off to be printed. The books provide us with the opportunity to reflect and read. A lot of children come back to visit the classroom once they have moved on (to another class) and look back at the books. They also give those who are in the process of producing one, inspiration and a point of reference. We can see what we are working towards.

For Maths, we looked at column addition and partitioning numbers into their tens and ones and next week we will use this strategy to add 3- and 4-digit numbers. Again, our learning stations provide us with the opportunity to read quietly, look at spelling strategies, sounds, blends and ends and think about the weekend just passed to write a factual recount. For our unit on Time Travel we discussed things from our past and things in the present and future. We examined old black and white photos of shoes and shared our thoughts on who may have been in them. We will continue on this theme of looking back into the past and learn about historical figures. This will be followed up with an excursion to Sydney’s Wax Work museum in Darling Harbour on the 30th.

That’s us for the week folks!

Love Sarah

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Week 7 Term 1 in Caetano’s Class

Posted on March 17, 2023 by caetanol

This week our little capybaras had so much fun in Science. We investigated the differences between solids, liquids and gases. We also discussed why and how materials can change and even went as far as looking into what happens to the atoms during this process. I was blown away by the enthusiasm the children had towards the two experiments. Our first experiment was looking into what would freeze faster between honey, milk, water, dishwashing detergent and tomato sauce. We wanted to investigate if liquids freeze at different speeds from one another.

Our second experiment was all about seeing how we can take a solid (an ice cube) and make it change into a liquid and see how quickly we can do so. The students had all sorts of methods and used their stopwatches to time them. This led to a rich conversation about why the results were different and how we could make the experiment more consistent if we were to do it again. As true scientists, the children came up with a range of ways we could get more consistent results.

Outside of Science, we unfortunately couldn’t make it to the swimming pool this week but on the flip side we did enjoy the social night on Thursday. We’re also preparing for our excursion on Monday to Gore Creek, run by the Field of Mars.

This week we also had an amazing virtual visitor in the way of Brooke from Kids Help Line. The one hour lesson was run by Kids Help Line and helped students understand how to stay safe online. It was very interactive and the students took away some amazing tips on how to stay safe while surfing the web.

Last but not least, the students really enjoyed their new Literacy Group rotations where two stations are on the laptops using the websites Room Recess and British Council for Kids to help them out. The next station is Dressing Up a Sentence where we are working on improving our sentences by adding adjectives and adverbs.

Thank you to all the help from parents as well. It is extremely helpful and everyone benefits.

Bring on Week 8!

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Wendy’s Group Week 7 Term 1

Posted on March 17, 2023 by wendyp

Hi everyone.

We had a fabulous camp last week at Castle Mountain on Webb’s Creek, part of the Hawkesbury River system. Steve and Lynda, who run Outdoor Adventure Camps, and our guide, Jason, looked after us really well. The food was great and plentiful and the activities were challenging and fun! We canoed on the river, swam, made towers of crates and climbed them, many of us did a 17 metre abseil, we went on a flying fox/zipline across the dam, walked to the castle at the top of the mountain, went on the mud mania course and played spotlight after a campfire where we toasted marshmallows.

It’s always a delight to see the children challenge themselves and attempt things they haven’t done before at a camp like this. Currambena children had never done that 17 metre abseil before and it was amazing to see how brave the children were, even to get harnessed up and close to the edge took courage! Camp is always an opportunity for new relationships, increased cooperation and understanding and there is such a positive flow-on effect for the group. Wonderful to see children cope with small doses of homesickness, eat huge breakfasts when they assert they never eat this meal, sleep because they’re tired out, try things they thought they wouldn’t enjoy or couldn’t do… so many opportunities to expand their sense of themselves and to develop resilience. I was really proud of them all. And very grateful to Meg for coming with us. She was a wonderful help.

Back in class this week we have written our thank you letters to everyone who helped us with transport or other aspects of camp (watch for snail mail!) and painted pictures inspired by Castle Mountain. We have also revised the formal algorithm for long multiplication, solved word problems using multiplication and division and practised times tables. We have learned spelling lists, worked on unit 5 in textbooks and almost finished the Australian history aspect of our current topic.

We have now finished reading “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” and we had a very successful focused meditation session concentrating on a candle flame for 90 seconds just as Henry did in the story.

It was lovely to see Maya on Tuesday for a visit day. She told us about Mosman High School where she is settling in very happily and enjoying being part of the new dance stream.

I was sorry I couldn’t stay for long on Thursday night but it looked as if the social was going to be a lovely evening. I hope everyone enjoyed themselves very much. Thanks so much to all the helpers.

Have a wonderful week.

Love,
Wendy

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Minutes of School Meeting 17th March, 2023

Posted on March 17, 2023 by wendyp

CHAIRED BY SKYE AND AMY

1. Sunglasses lens by Hunter
Hunter has lost one lens from her sunglasses and she asked anyone who finds it to return it to her.

2. Books by Ettie
Ettie asked everyone to take better care of books and not to leave them on the floor where they can be damaged.

3. Bike by Mabel.
Mabel told the meeting that her bike had been damaged when she brought it to school. She left it in the bike rack and when she went back to it a lunchtime it had been moved, was scratched, the chain was off and both tyres were flat. Several people spoke about how terrible this is and the school meeting was asked to let Mabel or a teacher know if they saw anything or know anything about this. Nobody spoke in the meeting so people are encouraged to speak to Mabel or a teacher later today.

4. Aikido game by Aidan.
Discussion about whether or not it is OK to bring the aikido fighting game to school. Some people felt it was ok since the figures are not all human and it’s very similar to bey blades. Others thought it was inappropriate since it’s about fighting. The vote was that this game is not allowed at school.

5. Ring by Rhea.
There is a ring on Wendy’s desk and if you have lost a ring, please go and see if it’s yours.

Meeting adjourned. Preschoolers first. Wendy’s group stay to tidy up.

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