Goulburn North Public School Newsletter

Goulburn North Public School is so grateful for the amazing contribution that our Support Staff do at school. Last week, was SAS Recognition Week. We would like to thank the each and every member of the school team for their dedication and contribution to the school.

Wendy and Cathy are our amazing admin team. They keep the office run so well. They are the face of the school and often the first person you speak to on the telephone when you call. They are always support the teachers with orders, admin tasks and a whole host of jobs. A massive thank you to these brilliant ladies.

This year we have a large team of support staff in classrooms. We have Amanda, Fiona, Skye, Jayden, Beverly, Madison, Bronwyn, Georgia and Kyly. They are always supporting classroom teachers with students in pretty much any capacity. You will see these amazing people sitting beside students to provide work support, walking with student in the playground to assist with regulation, making teaching resources and pretty much anything that is required of them.

Finally our team of SAS is supported by a General Assistant. Allan is our General Assistant. He is maintaining our school grounds, supporting with building maintenance, and assisting the school in any odd job that needs completing. Allan is often the member of staff helping set up for Fireworks, opening up the school after hours and making sure all buildings are secured after hours. 

The SAS team are pretty much the glue that holds the school together. They are a wonderful group of people to work with and we say "Thank you for your amazing contributions to our great school".

Our new school break times have been implemented for a week and first week was very successful. We hope that will continue into week 2 of the trial.

All soccer areas have been established and are ready for use. A timetable will follow to help students access the right location for soccer games.

Our new whole school lunch eating area has resulted in a dramatic reduction in liter across the school. This will continue moving forward.

We are exploring further options for increased playground experiences that provide greater engagement for our students. These will be shared soon. 

The school has continued to keep a focus on 'Inappropriate Language' and we will continue to follow this focus throughout the school term. However, we have discovered a noticeable decrease in incidents being logged revolving around 'Inappropriate Language'. We are still on the journey, but we are beginning to see a noticeable improvement across the school. We would also like to thank our amazing North Community in this regard for your assisting and support with helping our school in this space.

We have started to notice that nuts and food containing nuts are beginning to creep into school again. We would like to ask our community to have nut free options for student lunches. We have a number of student at school that have nut allergies and nut intolerances. Whilst we maintain a strict 'no sharing of foods policy' to keep all students safe, some students can have a reaction from a few particles in the air or being in close proximity to students that have nuts. To assist us in keeping all of our community safe, we ask that lunches have nut free alternatives if at all possible.

We thank you in advance.  

R U OK? Day

R U OK? Day is a national day of action dedicated to reminding everyone that every day is the day to ask,  'are you OK?' and support those struggling with life's ups and downs.

On Thursday 14th September our Northern Stars dressed in yellow and donated to support the development of free resources and campaigns that build the confidence of students to look out for one another.

This information is taken from the ‘Digital Lives of Teens’ report compiled by the eSafety Commissioner (2020).

State of Play

• Teens spent an average of 14.4 hours a week online (boys 15 hours, girls 13.8 hours)
• Teens used an average of four different socia media services
• Top social media services were YouTube (72% of respondents), Instagram (57%) and Facebook (52%). The trend for these services has gone down since 2017. TikTok has had substantial growth in Australia (12% of respondents in 2017 compared to 38% in 2020).

Negative Experiences

• Just over four in 10 teens had at least one negative experience in the six months to September 2020.
• This increased to five in 10 for those aged 14 17
• These negative experiences included being contacted by a stranger (30%), receiving inappropriate content (20%), social exclusion (16%), receiving online abuse (15%) and having things said online to damage a student's reputation (15%)
• Almost one third (30%) said that their negative online experience related to bullying that occurred at school.

Digital lives of Aussie teens | eSafety Commissioner

Have an amazing birthday!!!

Friday 15 September @ 12.30pm

Our next whole school assembly for Term 3 will be held on Friday 15 September (Week 9) commencing at 12.30pm.

We will be holding our assembly underneath the junior COLA. Please feel free to come along and join us celebrating the successes of our students. 

Additional assemblies for Term 3 will be held on the following date:

• Friday 15 September @ 12.30pm under the Junior COLA.
  

2C have been taking part in the new school wide program “Grow Your Mind”. We have been learning about the importance of being kind and being a bucket filler. Students have listened to the story "Have You Filled a Bucket Today, by Carol McCloud" and discovered the many ways we can fill or empty someone’s bucket. We have also learned that by filling someone's bucket we also fill our own bucket and by being unkind and bucket dipping we also dip into our own bucket. We have also had a look at shark and dolphin thinking and learned that shark thoughts bite you, they are not helpful whereas dolphin thoughts are realistically optimistic thoughts that are helpful. We drew a picture of our sharks and gave them a silly name to take away their power.

2C would also like to say thank you to Miss Stapleton who we have had in our classroom for five weeks while she is studying to become a teacher. The students have loved getting to know you and have you to help support their learning. We wish you all the best with the rest of your learning journey and hope to see you again soon.

Term 3 has been super busy. Not only have 5/6F been busy taking part in Education Week, Book Week, GCOPS, High School Taster Days (to name a few) we have also been flat chat in the classroom as well. 

We have started the Grow Your Mind program, worked hard on our Literacy Contracts using google classroom and built a city using lots of mathematical concepts. To wrap the term up we are working on a novel study for 'Sadako and The Thousand Paper Cranes.' 

We come to the end of another busy term. NLG have been engaged in a variety of activities this term ranging from designing their own obstacle courses, sewing, cooking and building their own ships to looking at and using descriptive and prepositional language in writing and conversation using their creations and dress-ups as inspiration. In Maths we have been exploring whole numbers, strategies to add and subtract, patterns and positional language. We use play-based learning to explore these concepts, encouraging lots conversations with ‘what if’ questions and games to reinforce our learning.

Our Social Emotional Learning is coming along well, this term we implemented the Grow Your Mind program. We have been learning about the different parts of the brain and how they affect our behaviour. You may hear a lot about the different ways we can breathe to wake up our brain animals or how we can calm our Guard Dog. It has been wonderful to see the students work towards building their character strengths. NLG’s favourite character strengths so far have been perseverance and humour.

Our meetings have now changed to Weeks 4 and Week 8 each term. This will mean that our next meeting will be held on:

Monday 30 October in the Staff Room at 6pm.

We hope that you can come along and join in with the team.

The P&C would like to welcome our new canteen manager Sharon Warn. The canteen is now open on Wednesdays and Fridays. If you have a few hours to volunteer on a Friday to help out, even once a month, we would love your help! Please contact Sharon on 0428 259 791 if you are interested.

P&C meetings are now held 6.30pm Mondays in weeks 4 and 8 each term in the school staff room. Casual members always welcome!

• Updated Student Details
• Stage 3 Camp Forms and payments