SZ Test Rebuild - Geelong Grammar School - Bostock House
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FROM THE HEAD OF BOSTOCK HOUSE
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Adventure Awaits #Expansion Parent Forum
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Diana Hammond – Prep Reflection
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Jane Marney - Year 1 and Year 2 Reflection
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Michael Stafford - Year 3 and Year 4 Reflection
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Alison Humphreys - Year 3 and Year 4 Library Reflection
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FRIENDS OF BOSTOCK
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BOSTOCK HOUSE NOTICES AND REMINDERS
FROM THE HEAD OF BOSTOCK HOUSE
Dear Bostock Families,
As I write this, I am aware it is the coldest day of the year, a chilly nine degrees. Despite this, our students were still playing down ball and chasey on Tuesday morning before school. Many smiles as well, which indicates to me that they are pleased to be back on campus after the long weekend.
IPSHA Conference
Last week, I attended the IPSHA (Independent Primary Schools Heads Association) Conference at Prince Alfred College in Adelaide. Of note was the Wells Oration speech by Jessica Stenson. Jessica is a long-distance runner who competes in distances from 5000 metres up to the marathon. She represented Australia in the 2012 London Olympics and 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics in the marathon. She spoke to us about her passion for long distance running and her journey which she likened to a hilly road, full of highs and lows, not a straight projectory of success after success. Jessica is still running at 34, has a young family and was inspiring in how real and down to earth she was on an ever-changing course to reach her full potential. Another stand out keynote speaker was Dr. Cam McDonald. An accredited practicing dietitian and exercise physiologist with a long-standing personal interest in understanding the latest research in genetics and environmental influences on health. Dr. Cam works closely with educators and childhood specialists in the application of personalisation through understanding the biology of individuals. His key message was, everyone is unique and has unique strengths. When these strengths are unlocked, and we understand the biology of individuals we can better cater to their needs within the classroom context.
Reconciliation Assembly
On Friday, we also hosted some of our Indigenous students from Corio to hear about their lives and backgrounds. The students also took part in our Reconciliation assembly and then visited the classrooms to speak with the students. Sandra Brogden and Ms. Cody also attended the assembly, and I did hear our principal was bought to ‘happy tears’ whilst the students sang the Indigenous version of ‘We are One’. Special thanks to Sharon Couch for organising the assembly, our Year 4 leaders and Norm and his family, who led the Smoking Ceremony and Welcome to Country.
Reconciliation Week 2022
Year 1 and 2 Learning Journey Assembly
Please note that Year 1 and 2 will lead the assembly on the 10 June at 9.00am. In this assembly parents will hear about learning that has taken place in the Year 1 and 2 Unit of Inquiry. The student are busy preparing for the assembly. As there are many community cases of COVID-19, we will not be able to invite parents back to the classroom to hear more about the learning. We will also offer you a cup of coffee, tea and a small treat and an opportunity to connect as a parent group.
Friends of Bostock Trivia Night
The FOB Trivia night is planned for Thursday 16 June. It would be great to see to see you all there if you are able to make it. Please refer to the invitation posted by our FOB further on in the newsletter.
Long Service Leave
Please note that Mrs. Breer will be taking long service leave in Semester 2. We wish Wendy all the best for her leave. I know she has some adventures planned and is looking forward to exploring warmer parts of Australia. We are in the process of finding a replacement for Wendy and will inform you of this, once the recruitment phase is completed. Have a wonderful time Wendy.
Kind regards everyone, have a wonderful weekend.
Rachael
Adventure Awaits #Expansion Parent Forum
Thank you to the families who joined the #Expansion Parent Forum last week. The feedback from the workshop leaders was extremely positive and comments were made around the level of engagement from the group. Please be reassured we will keep families well informed of the progress around buildings and developing ideas. Your views are highly regarded and welcomed.
The session focussed on the positive aspects of Bostock House, the challenges, what the group were looking forward to with the move and what concerns were held. Please see a summary below.
Things we love
- Nurturing safe environment
- Quality of education
- Small class sizes
Challenging about the campus
- Cosy feel of current space but not enough space to run freely
Looking forward to
- Facilities
- Purpose built
- Environment
- Adventure play
- Siblings on same campus
Concerns
- Behaviour on buses
- Navigating the buildings
- Quiet space/accessibility
- What is the community going to be like?
- Maintain sense of community
- Safety measures
Discussions held were also based on the following questions.
1. How can Geelong Grammar ensure that they are supporting the community to feel connected through the transition phase?
- Newsletter updates
- Keep consulting – workshops
- Guided site visits for parents
- Ensure parent reps can communicate to parent group. What’s App, meet ups
- Timeline updates – visual
- Involve current students in design input (give ownership/agency in the process). Build excitement for the possibilities
- Re-energise Project Play
- Honesty around development delays and numbers of students enrolled
- Familiar staff to be involved in transition for students and parents
2. What systems can be put into place to ensure that transport and commuting to the new Primary School are as seamless as possible?
- Specific bus for Bostock, ELC to Year 6
- Student to have Bus Minder cards and parents the App
- Traffic flow and allowance for parking – separate entry and exit points for young students
- Three-minute walk not practical with school bag, sports bag, instrument etc
- Plan for weather
- ELC and P-Year 6 have different start/end times – would they need different bus?
3. Long day care is being considered as an additional facility. How might this look and feel to complement the new initiative of the new campus?
- Question- retention to Prep
- Curriculum that allows for consistent learning
- Content for ELC and long-day care children
- After school activities – tennis, soccer, swimming, coding, art club, ongoing projects, gardening
- Flexibility important
- Create a homely environment
- Opportunities for parent/parent and parent/staff interactions
- Drop off and pick up dynamics
4. When considering a kiosk/canteen at the new primary school how important is this aspect of the design? What factors need to be considered
- Kitchen garden
- Quality of food – ensure healthy
- Educate students on healthy food and sustainability – where food comes from, composting, growing food
- Allow students to be independent and make good choices
- Students being responsible for the kiosk area – e.g., cleaning and recycling
- Query – who will have the time? Might not see a lot of use
- Value the ability to touch base with teachers
- Payment options for students – not cash, not credit card, not school account. Student card that parents can add funds to
- Use a space for more informed parent events such as workshops
5. How can we capture what is special about Bostock House and ensure that is maintained at the new Corio Campus?
- Small class sizes
- Parent/teacher community and connection
- Community Functions
- Parent Inclusivity E.g., FOB
- Safe environment in all aspects
- Buddy system
- Seeing the journey of all students (parents and students have visibility)
- All students can play together, older student leadership in the playground
- Cosy, supportive of one another
- ELC and primary connection – ELC transition to Prep is seamless
- Campus name - Bostock
6. The current landscape design has a 3-minute walk from the car park to create an arrival experience – how important/practical is this aspect of the design.
- It can be done practically
- Good idea to support mindfulness, reflection and sharing
- Allows this not to be rushed. Adequate parking, wide walking path and shelter options.
- Consider the weather, provide umbrellas
- Consider pick up point for parents with time constraints. Shuttle bus/golf buggy for ELC
I am very keen to organise a parent tour of the site as well as reignite our Project Play. Our ELC students have already shared some playground design ideas with the architects and our primary students will re-engage with Project Play but extend it out to be called Project Adventure as we want the students to engage with the idea of learning through and within nature, not just at play.
Diana Hammond – Prep Reflection
As part of our PYP Unit of Inquiry, How we Express Ourselves, we have been exploring the concept of Ideas. We used the story, 'What can you do with an Idea' by Kobi Yamada to provoke the students thinking about what an idea is, why it is important and how it can be shared. Through our small and larger group discussions we found that even the smallest of ideas can grow and develop to create positive change in people and the world. We found that ideas evolve when shared. We found that ideas can be expressed in many and varied ways. We drew, made, wrote and spoke about our own ideas together.
Some of the students comments are below:
Joseph: An idea is something you think of in your head, something you want to do.
Arthur: It is in your brain, you think of it, it is something you like.
Raya: It's your imagination. Ideas are beautiful like rainbows.
Valerie: It's like those bubbles, thinking bubbles, thinking lots of interesting things.
Max: The wheel was a good idea, you can make lots of things with it.
Millie: I can draw my idea, I can use colours.
Charles: I have an idea when I make things, I can make it from my imagination.
Levi: Sometimes ideas can change, like the wheels on a bike or a car or a motorbike.
Henry: I have a lot of ideas, I have a brain and an imagination.
Carice: My idea is about kindness, kindness can change the world.
Ewan: I don't have an idea today. I like to listen to the other ideas. Then I can think of my own ideas too.
Prep Reflection
Nick Mawson – Drama PE Reflection
The Preps have been working hard and learning new skills and techniques in Drama. They have been engaged in a process drama based on the book Farmer Duck. It follows the story of a duck who is mistreated by the farmer for whom he works. However, the animals band together and get rid of the farmer. In exploring the students characterised different animals with their bodies and voices and the emotions they embody in the story. It has been fantastic to watch the varied interpretations the students have created. It has been great to share the new techniques of sculpting, tableaus and teacher-in-role with them. It has been a fun term and I am looking forward to the students’ progress as they undertake a readers theatre activity with the aim of performing this to an audience before the end of the term.
Jane Marney - Year 1 and Year 2 Reflection
This week we began our Maths investigation into Statistics and Data.
We played some games of chance where the odds were not always fair. Mr Micelli made the rules so that he and Ms Marney had a much better chance of winning. They smashed us and thought they were so clever. But…. then we told them that it was not a fair game, and we had a much less chance of getting our cards. We made Mr Micelli change the rules so that both teams had an even chance of drawing their card. This time it was such a close game and the students won by one point!
We found out that
- games are not really that much fun if everyone does not have an equal chance of winning and one team has different rules.
- games of chance have nothing to do with ability. They are just luck!
- there are many ways we can talk about the chance of something happening. Here are some we brainstormed as a group:-
Fair, even, equal and 50-50 all mean that things have exactly the same chance of occurring.
Least likely, less likely, likely, more likely, most likely are words we can use to rank the chances of things occurring
Certain and impossible are at the two ends of the scale. Certain means that something will definitely happen. Impossible means there is no chance of something happening.
We then had to make a Snakes and Ladders game that gave players a greater chance of going up a ladder, down a snake or an equal chance of both happening. We had a great time playing against each other. The games where there were a lot of snakes took a LONG time to finish because we kept sliding back down.
Year 1 and Year 2 Reflection
Xing Liu - Year 1 and Year 2 Chinese Reflection
The Year 1 students applied the knowledge of numbers to learn the Chinese rhyme ‘Five Little Squirrels’. They made the mountain and stick puppet to role-play the rhyme in class. After that, they learnt to name the days of the week in Chinese. Students enjoyed making the days of the week chart and could fluently name the days of week in Chinese. A Chinese song, Days of the Week, was taught in class to consolidate students’ learned vocabulary.
The Year 2 students learned some marine animals in Chinese. They were able to use the learned sentence structures to have a simple dialogue with their peers about what marine animals they could see in the aquarium. At the end, they conducted a survey to find out their friends’ favourite marine animals and recorded in the form.
Year 1 and Year 2 Chinese Reflection
Michael Stafford - Year 3 and Year 4 Reflection
Taking Action Within the Bostock Community
For our previous unit of inquiry, through a focus on sustainable practices, Year 3 & 4 students explored how we could make changes to our immediate environment at Bostock House. After speaking with experts, exploring different forms of media and conducting surveys, the students became informed about different forms of action that can be taken to nurture and enhance our environment.
With waste management being an important part of caring for the planet, students were alarmed to reflect on the way that we discard of our waste at school. Our biggest problem being that our classroom waste was all landing in the same bin and not being separated for recycling.
Students called on some community experts for assistance. They drafted and delivered emails to Mr. Limb and Mr. Martin who are involved with sustainability across the four campuses and asked for their help. Within the week we had both experts meeting with students to show the current data around sustainable practices at school.
With further explanation and negotiation around the problems faced at Bostock House, it was agreed that we needed some bins sent over immediately. We now have some special bins landing in different areas of the school and have more on the way.
In order to educate the rest of our community on how to use our new bins, the Year 3 & 4 students have been creating posters to sit alongside these bins explaining what type of waste goes into each.
It will be exciting to see how sustainable practices grow throughout the year now that the students are armed with their new enviro-mindset.
Alison Humphreys - Year 3 and Year 4 Library Reflection
The Year 3 and 4 cohort have been exploring the map of Australia through the eyes of Mr Chicken, a figure created by author/illustrator Leigh Hobbs. Throughout his journey around Australia, we visit all the oddly named places (such as Woop Woop and Woolloomooloo) as well as places that hold significance to all of us (Uluru, Great Barrier Reef). It is a fun and ridiculous trip around Australia and the children enjoyed trying to find these places on the map, using Google maps. They realised how vast a continent Australia is and learnt about the states, the territories, capital cities, oddly named places (and some reasons as to why they are called that) and the amazing number of big things around the country (Big Prawn, Big Pineapple, Giant Koala etc.). A great way to explore the geography of Australia!
Alison Humphreys (Teacher Librarian)
Wendy Breer –PE Reflection
House Soccer Tournament
The focus in Physical Education this term is 'Invasion Games'. Students are learning and have the opportunity to practise the skills and strategies associated with various sports that lie within this group. To enhance and deepen the learning opportunities students are also experiencing different invasion games during After School Sport. So far this term Football Academy has been running a soccer clinic for the Year 3 and 4 classes out on Kow Flat at the Corio Campus. Students have been practising the various skills associated with soccer, as well as the strategies of 'invading', running into space away from defenders to create scoring opportunities. The final session was the House Soccer Tournament. Captains were chosen for each of the Houses, with the selection based on effort in the weeks preceding. Captains were: - Ayana (Morres); Duncan (School); Nick (Volum) and Campbell (Austin). A very exciting and closely contested competition ensued with bonus points awarded for exceptional team work. The winning House was Austin with Volum and School drawing for second place.
House Soccer Tournament
FRIENDS OF BOSTOCK
Hello Bostock Community,
Hopefully everyone had a relaxing and recharging exeat weekend; and was able to rest and reconnect with friends and family.
A reminder about the annual Trivia Night. The Trivia Night is open to all friends and family of Bostock House, so please book a table or individual ticket; looking forward to seeing many of you there. If there is anyone who may have an item they would wish to kindly donate to the auction on the night, please contact Julia or Ky with the details.
If you require any additional information on anything FOB related, please feel free to contact us anytime juliabc1986@gmail.com or kyran@podactive.com.
Wishing everyone a joyful and exciting week ahead.
Kind Regards
Julia and Ky
FOB Presidents