22 June 2017

Newsletter Articles

Principal’s Comments

Tips for Learning – Balance

It is important to have balance during the school day. Students will spend a great deal of time using digital technology. This means a great deal of screen time combined with considerable time spent sitting. As much as possible, students should aim for a range of activities in their day. This will help to develop a broad set of skills. Consider the following ideas:

• During break times students can try some physical movement. For example, go for a short walk.
• Where possible, take notes by hand and do regular activities (not send-in activities) in a hardcopy notebook.
• Take analogue (non-digital) breaks such as reading a hard-copy book, playing a board game, exercise, playing an instrument.

Results of the Inter-house Athletics Carnival will be in the next issue of the DIRT (School newsletter).

Enjoy the break

John Clark
Principal

Inter-house Athletics Carnival

Deputy Principal’s Comments

Feedback

The art to providing effective feedback lies in the idea that to be purposeful, the feedback should be clear, purposeful, meaningful and compatible with students’ prior knowledge, and to provide logical connections.

Praise, admonishment, extrinsic / tangible rewards (e.g. stickers) and other similar activities have little impact on student performance from a feedback perspective and may be better characterised as behavioural reinforcement.

Effective feedback makes student learning visible. It provides students and teachers with information that examines what students know, what they understand, where they make errors and when they have misconceptions.

Effective feedback may be characterised by three fundamental questions;

• Where am I going? (learning intentions / goals / success criteria)
• How am I going? (self-assessment and self-evaluation)
• Where to next? (progression / new goals)

Thus, when meaningful feedback that builds on prior learning to examine these questions occurs, it can assist students to comprehend, engage, or develop effective strategies to process the information that is intended to be learnt.

Hattie, J 2009 “Visible Learning” Routledge, London.

Cameron Burke
Deputy Principal

A Note From Your Parent Liaison Officer

The Venue: Townsville Sport & Recreation Precinct

The Challenge Games is a two day event of sporting activities, athletics, fun and games for school children who have a disability- regardless of their type of disability - hearing or visually impaired, intellectually impaired, physically impaired (cerebral palsy, spinal injury, amputee, wheelchair dependent, short stature), autism, attention deficit, learning difficulty – or any other school child – from prep grade, through primary and on to final year of secondary education; whether attending a mainstream school, special education facility, distance education service, private school.

The main focus of the Challenge Games and very importantly is fun and participation for all children. There is no other sporting event in Australia that covers all disabilities at the one time and it is held annually in Townsville North Queensland. It is an event where children with a disability can play games, have fun and compete with other children of their own ability level – without the feeling of being conspicuous or “different”. They can meet and make new friends and let their hair down. There is also a night time disco.

Students can be registered on line as individuals to attend for $10:

Are you aware of the educational allowances available?

Both state and federal governments provide allowances to assist with the cost of educating children in regional, rural and remote Queensland.

Lesley Griffin
Parent Liaison Officer

Education Support Program

Recently five teachers from the Junior Secondary team travelled to Townsville to meet the students that reside in this area. Some students travelled from as far as Bowen for the one day Outreach. The students and teachers met at the Townsville TAFE and spent the day working on a variety of tasks both indoors and outdoors. Some of the activities included Science experiments, English and Maths assignments as well as some play and puzzle time. The day was both productive and enjoyable with both teachers and students reporting they had a great time. There will be another Townsville Outreach held in August.

Deb Oss
Education Support Teacher

Prep Maths Fun!

What budding mathematicians our Preps are!

This term, Preps have had lots of fun, using their fine motor cutting and pasting skills while doing Maths activities.

They created their own robot with their cut-out paper shapes of triangles, circles, squares, rectangles and diamonds. They also did a fantastic job of matching all their cut-out numerals from 1 to 10, to pictures showing the same amount of things in a collection.

In their last unit for this term, Preps used their reading, measuring, cooking and sharing skills, when following a recipe to make a damper. YUM!

Leean Shephard
Prep Teacher

Luke - Damper - measuring

Years 10-12 Update

One of the most unique aspects of an education at CSTDE is the diversity of perspectives and life experiences our students offer to their classes. In the days of chalk and slates, teachers would deliver their subjects as if they were a series of endless lectures. Fortunately, today’s students are active participants in their own learning. When students participate, express their views and justify their claims they are not only developing their critical reasoning skills, they are enhancing the learning experience for everyone in the classroom. From the outback and beyond, the insights students gain about the complexities of the world are vast. In SOSE the Year 10s looked at political systems through the ages. Be it legal corruption on the ancient Nile, or gruesome revolutions in France, students delivered political arguments that also help to build their confidence in everyday life.

Of course, while navigating everyday life may be difficult at times, our Year 11 Maths students have been equipped with navigation skills to become future globetrotters. While they may not get the opportunity to travel through time, they’ll be quick to orientate themselves as they leap between latitudes and time zones. Back on our soil, however, Modern History students have now completed their inquiry into Australia’s changing foreign policy, whilst our Geographers have evaluated solutions on how to maintain our waterways.

With Semester One completed, our senior students have been working hard to achieve their personalised education goals. Home Tutors and students should be in touch with their teachers to ensure that they are on track to meet the requirements of their chosen pathway. This time of the year is always a very busy period, so the Senior Secondary team would like to wish everyone a relaxing and safe Winter holiday.

Sarah Jenkins
Head of Department - Senior School

Year 10 Art is Popping!

Term 2 has introduced 2 new concepts – Miss Mroz and Pop Art. Not sure which the students are recovering the most from! Our artistic explorers have traversed the Pop Art world and have been exposed to one of the most enduring and often used art concepts. The Pop Art movement emerged in the mid 1950’s in Britain, but really exploded in America a few years later. Almost everyone has been exposed to some sort of Pop Art, even if you were unaware. Pop Art uses aspects of mass culture, such as advertising, comics and even everyday items.

Not only have our students been analysing and applying various art techniques, they have also been using the Pop Art theme and incorporating the aspects into their own creative works. It is always a pleasure and sometimes a surprise to see the reveals of their final resolved work. Here are some student’s work displaying their research and experimentation with this exciting art form.

Art is, and always will be, an enduring cultural aspect of our civilization. It is not necessary to be an artist or fine connoisseur of art. I am often asked why, and if, art is important in today’s day and age. Absolutely. Unequivocally. Art is a universal language, regardless of your race, religion, culture, social, educational or economic standing. Many artworks allow the viewer to meld the mind, body and spirit as well as allow the artist to self-express their thoughts and feelings. Artworks allow the creator and viewer to apply and develop higher order thinking skills (such as analysing, evaluating, synthesising and justifying) which are critical in today’s society.

Yours in creativity,

Miss Mroz
Year 10 Art Teacher

Year 5

Year 5 Students Get Creative

For the last few weeks, the Year 5 students have been learning how to create a short stop-motion animated movie using Microsoft PowerPoint – think along the lines of the ‘Shaun the Sheep’ and ‘Wallace and Gromit’ movies. In their movie, students had to tell a story involving two characters that face an ethical dilemma. Would their character make the right decision?

Part of the criteria students had to address was to include movement or action scenes. They also had to include sounds, captions and speech/thought bubbles, then turn their PowerPoint into a movie file that included transitions. Using their photography skills, students took hundreds of photos and created some wonderfully entertaining movies. Here are some of their amazing stories:

Brigalow Sports

Last Friday we went to Brigalow Sports at Nebo to represent our school CTSDE. Other schools that participated were: Coppabella, Valkyrie, Nebo, Clark Creek and CSDE. It was only my sister Kendall, Henry, Rachel and me from CTSDE. We had a fun day. We were buggered by the end of it though. I came 3rd in the 100m, 3rd in high jump, 4th in the 200m and 2nd in ball games. My favourite event for the day was high jump. Some of the events I hadn’t even trained for; however, all the other schools had been training.

- Tanasee Year 5

Tanasee proudly displays her ribbons

Bush Poems

Year 2 – Colours of our world!

Year 2 explored colours found in our world - at home and in our environments.

Year 2 in the classroom

We learnt about the Primary Colours and were able to explore each colour in detail.

Yellow…

Red…

Red Rock lady beetles!

And Blue…

We also mixed colours creating the colours of the rainbow. Our Science experiment drained colours to create a pastel rainbow on the absorbent rainbow plate.

Colour draining Science experiment.

Our rainbow spinners spun around in our classroom looking exceptional.

The fabulous Man from Snowy Mountain clown performance was a treat that gave up lots of laughs. We sang to and from the World Theatre enjoying our bus rides as well.

We read and discussed the aboriginal dreamtime story – The Rainbow Serpent and then made some creative serpents in rainbow colours of our own.

Creative rainbow serpent!

What an amazing time we had together!!!!!

Huge smiles,

Ms Simatis
Year 2 Teacher

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