One of our 2 School Priorities in our Burnie Primary School Improvement Plan 2022 is Numeracy. The start to the collective work with Burnie High School and other ‘feeder schools’ now known as ‘Burnie Counts’ has a strong focus on the Number strand in the Maths curriculum. Unfortunately, this work has been delayed until now and officially started on the student free day on the first Monday back this term, where all teachers from the 5 schools got together to undertake Professional Learning. A critical component of this collective initiative is engaging parents and carers in developing an understanding of how they can build on this at home. As a start, we are keen to get some packs and games together that will support this learning at home and engage parents to be involved in their child’s development in number. Look out for some maths “games” that we are looking to purchase. We will package them up, barcode and have them in the library to be borrowed like we do with books. We also intend to run some parent workshops to explore further how you can see maths in our everyday world to build your child’s numeracy.

One other initiative for the ‘Burnie Counts’ collective has been the opportunity to get parents involved via Facebook. As a result, our Leadership Team here have decided that we now have a need to establish a Burnie Primary School Facebook page and we have started the application process with the Department of Education.  This is a big undertaking especially for administrators of the page, but we think that the benefits for our parent engagement strategy will be great. We have taken this on as part of our Community Connections work, and we are looking to get that up and running ASAP. Keep an eye out for our upcoming launch.

Our P&F continue to be great supporters of our Burnie Primary School community. As well as undertaking fundraisers, they intend to enhance our outdoor learning environment through painting interactive games for students to play in our playground. Students have been consulted and their suggestions taken on board. As a result, in the near future (weather depending), we will see some new and some renewed markings being painted to allow for the social interactions that students engage with when playing these playground games. This is just one of the initiatives that our P&F are engaged in to help bring our school community together and we certainly thank them for their ongoing support.

During week 5 (2 weeks away) we will be celebrating Book Week with the theme being ‘Dreaming with your eyes open’. Our Library monitors have organised a number of activities to be held during the week with the highlight being our Book Week Dress Up day on Thursday 25^th August! We will be inviting students to come dressed up as a character from a book. We will be having our Book Week Dress up Parade, commencing at 10:30, in the Gym. All parents and carers are invited to come in and join in the festivities.  

Being Safe is one of our school expectations. We have been concerned that during pickup times at the end of the school day, some parents are getting their children to jump in their cars whilst still on Van Diemens Crescent, or on the move in the school car park. We have a designated student pick up and drop off zone in our carpark to minimise risks during these times and we would appreciate your support in using this zone at the beginning and end of the school day. We appreciate there is congestion during this time and thank you for your patience, especially during pickup, but we believe it’s worth it! We have a Zebra crossing at the top end of our carpark that is to be used by parents and students to safely cross to the other side of our carpark. Please use this crossing rather than attempting to cross while cars are moving through the pick up area. Also, we have seen an increasing number of students being dropped off to school before 8:30 in the mornings. Supervision of students does not begin here at school until 8:30am. Students should be dropped off after 8:30am of a morning to ensure student safety.

Andrew Starick
Principal

Last term the Grade 3 students inquired about Australian Natural Landmarks.  We worked as ‘Researchers’ to locate information and to write an information report.  During literacy, students learnt how to identify keywords while reading to assist with writing the reports in their own words.  We were ‘Communicators’ as we presented our information in a PowerPoint to the class.

Here are some slides from our PowerPoints.

Slides By: Chloe, Jovi, Evelyn, Charlotte, Eden & William

Levies invoices for 2022 were issued in Term 1 and are due for payment.

Levies can be paid at Service Tas, via bPay, over the phone with card or in person with cash or EFTPOS.

Levies can also be paid via Centrepay.  Centrepay deducts your chosen amount from your Centrelink payment and pays it directly to the school until fully paid.  Centrepay forms are available from the office.