School Newsletter 1018, 25 July 2018 Friday 27 July – Faction cross country carnival (details in Sport News below) Wednesday 8 August – Assembly Thursday 9 August – Interschool cross country (Yrs 3-6, by invitation) Monday 20 August – Friday 24 August – Book Week Speak with Confidence Awards Congratulations to Jaegger and Maddy for representing Kensington PS at the Speak with Confidence awards. Thanks to the parents and Ms Millar and Mr Griffith for preparing the children for these awards. Jaegger spoke on body image and was then invited, along with a student from Manning PS, Meleina, to be interviewed for 720 ABC radio on this topic. Please check out the radio recording on the web address in the newsletter: http://www.abc.net.au/radio/perth/programs/focus/body-image/9935304 See below for more details in a report by Mr Griffiths. Awards We wish to recognise and congratulate Ava L in Year 6 for being highly commended in the Shaun Tan Award for Young Artists for her artwork entitled “Neil.” You can see all the winning and highly commended works on the link below. https://www.subiaco.wa.gov.au/getdoc/f8642112-13cc-412b-8d1f-f81c0ab9151f/2018- exhibition We also congratulate Matthew A in Year 6 for winning the Upper Primary category of the South Perth Young Writers Award with his work entitled “The Souls”. A copy has been placed in the library. Philosophy Day in Action Six students from Room 10 and S2 represented Kensington Primary School in a ‘Philosophy Day in Action’ session held at Hale School on Monday 9th July. The session was part of The Federation of Australasian Philosophy in Schools Associations (FAPSA) biannual conference. Practitioner Expert Peter Worley CEO & Co-founder The Philosophy Foundation (UK) ran a ‘community of inquiry’ session with students from Kensington, Hale School and Geographe Primary School demonstrating best practice. The topic for discussion: Is it possible to think of nothing? A huge congratulations to the students who gave up a day of their holidays to participate in the session. Our students were absolutely brilliant and we need to be extremely proud of each and every one of them. They spoke beyond their years and with clarity during the session. Feedback from Peter was very positive and other presenters and delegates praised Kensington students (we start teaching Philosophy in Year 4 and other students who participated in the same session have been exposed to philosophy since Pre-primary/Year 1!). It is no easy task having a philosophical discussion with people with whom you are not familiar, let alone having an audience full of teachers and philosophers. Thank you to Mrs Filmer for leading the team and organising our involvement. Reflections from the day: “I thought the philosophy lesson was great but confusing. It really got my brain working” “It was amazing, I really enjoyed it but it became confusing at times because of how many different opinions there were” “The philosophy place was a great experience to learn and share ideas like is it possible to think of nothing?” NAIDOC Week celebrations On Friday Miss May and Mrs Jetta, along with their team of colleagues, organised a full day of events to celebrate NAIDOC week at the school. NAIDOC (National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee) Week was actually celebrated during the first week of the school holidays so we delayed our celebrations until our return to school. Hopefully some of you might have been involved in the state events during the actual week. Our students participated in activities such as art and craft, games and sport and also learnt about the aboriginal flag, art and stories. We thank our special guests and volunteers for their work with our students: Noongar Sports, Urban Indigenous and Clontarf College. We also thank Miss May, Miss Lisa and Mrs Jetta, along with their team, for their efforts in developing such a great schedule of activities. Assessment and Reporting Policy The School Board recently reviewed the school’s new assessment and reporting policy. This can be found on the school’s website in the policy section of the Information page or by clicking here. Attendance As a strategy to meet our attendance targets, each term we will be rewarding students who have achieved at least 90% attendance with 10 minutes of extra play time. We will be working with families who are unable to meet this target to support them and, at least, to find out why their children were unable to meet this target. So, we encourage all families to aim to meet this minimum and to ensure when children are absent that the school is informed of the reason for the absence (this is a legal requirement) via the SmartLink app, email, note, in person or via the telephone. As was mentioned in a previous newsletter, the Telethon Institute has proved empirically that every day of school missed equates to a drop in standardised test scores such as NAPLAN. In other words, every day of school is important and contributes to student progress and achievement. For your information, a half day absence is where a child cannot complete at least 2 hours of instruction time (break time isn’t counted). A half day is approximately 2.5 hours of instruction time so if your child is more than 30 minutes late in the morning, for example, then it will be recorded as a half day absence, not late. If you are going on a holiday in school time, please let your child’s teacher AND the office know. Only the principal can authorise vacation leave. Nationally Consistent Collection of Data for School Students with Disability The Commonwealth Government wants to plan better for the needs of students with disability which include medical, social and emotional and physical conditions and/or leaning difficulties across Australia. To do this the government needs to collect information about the number of children who have a disability, what programs are currently being provided for them and what this will mean for resourcing in the future. The first step for Kensington PS will be to collect information about the number of students in the our school with learning needs and the programs and resources we use to support them. This information is confidential and no-child’s name will be provided to the Commonwealth. We think that it’s important for everyone to contribute to this project so it helps the government and the Department of Education to better provide for all students in Western Australia. We will include information about your child, or children, in the project. If you do not want us to include information about your child, please let Miss Lisa in the office know by 1 August 2018. Please be assured we will continue to support your child in our programs, even if we don’t use their information in the project. If you would like to learn more about the Nationally Consistent Collection of Data for School Students with Disability, please click here. Bronwyn Jones PRINCIPAL Foyer Display We celebrated NAIDOC day on Friday 20 July and the students created the stunning artwork as shown below. Patience Patience means waiting. Patience is being calm and tolerant when difficult things happen. It means having self-control because you can’t control the way someone else is acting or when things don’t go as you’d like. Congratulations to the following award winners from today’s assembly. Faction Cross Country The faction cross country carnival is on Friday July 27. Notes will be coming home next week for parent permission for students to run along the footpath from the kiss and wave gate to the oval gate as part of the cross country course. Runners from Year 3 to 6 will be selected from the carnival to represent the school in the interschool carnival in Week 4. The program will be:- 9.15am – 11.00am 1. Year 6 girls 2. Year 6 boys 3. Year 5 girls 4. Year 5 boys 5. Year 4 girls 6. Year 4 boys 7. Year 3 girls 8. Year 3 boys 11.30am – 1.00pm 9. Year 2 girls 10. Year 2 boys 11. Year 1 girls 12. Year 1 boys 13. Pre-primary girls 14. Pre-primary boys 2.35pm Presentation assembly in the undercover area (whole school) Runners from Years 3 – 6 will be selected from the faction carnival to represent Kensington in the Interschool Cross Country on August 9 at Harold Rossiter Park. Running Club Runners are welcome to join us on Tuesday and Friday mornings from 8.00am – 8.30am on the oval. Running is fun and gives your brain a great boost to start the day. Bollywood Thanks to Bollywood Dance Studio for leading us in a fun Bollywood session for fitness on Tuesday morning. Please click here for information on their upcoming Open Day and free trial classes and click here for the 2018 class timetable. Speak with Confidence Awards On 25 June, the City of South Perth held the annual Speak with Confidence Awards, which showcases the best young public speakers across all the schools within South Perth. This year, Maddy (S4) and Jaegger (S3) made it through the tough audition rounds and were chosen to represent KPS. Both girls did a fantastic job of presenting their speeches with charisma and confidence and should be proud of their achievements. Well done, Maddy and Jaegger! Mr Griffiths Kindness Project Sometimes our earth gives us small signs of kindness exactly when we need it. This is the idea behind the “Kindness Project”. Megan Murphy, the instigator of the kindness rocks, came back from a trip to India with the understanding that small acts of kindness could have a big impact on someone’s day.