We acknowledge the traditional Aboriginal custodians of the lands, waterways and skies of the Bunurong Peoples of the Kulin Nation where we gather, learn and grow at Aspendale Primary School.

We pay our respects to past and present Traditional Custodians and Elders of all nations,  and their ongoing cultural, spiritual and educational practices.  

We extend this respect to all Torres Strait Islanders and any First Nations peoples who learn or visit these grounds. We thank you for sharing and caring for the land we are learning on. 

New version of the Acknowedgement of Country
Above is an updated Acknowledgment of Country that has been written in consultation with staff,  students and members of our community. We are awaiting feedback from our friends at the Bunurong Land Council.

If you wish to share more feedback, please scan the QR Code below which will take you to a Google Form. 


~ Thanks Cait Fletcher & the Global Awareness Team 

Hello everyone and welcome back to Term Four!

I hope you were able to spend some time over the September holidays with the people who bring you joy. Congratulations and commiserations to those who had sporting teams win and lose over the break. We did have some staff members with very big smiles on the first day back of school!

Teaching and Learning

It’s been terrific to see our students settle back into their learning routines over the first week of the term. This is a testament to the work our staff and students have done over the first three terms. Units of inquiry have either continued from last term or commenced this term.

Here is a snapshot of the central ideas across the school:

Foundation The waste we produce and what we do with it impacts the environment

Year One Stories can be conveyed through different media

Year Two People create organisations with the purpose to support communities

Year Three People use creativity to solve problems and express ideas

Year Four Thinking beyond ourselves empowers us to act as agents of change

Year Five Scientific knowledge is continually developing

Year Six Individuals or groups inspire actions or change to solve problems

Our Year Six unit of inquiry is their PYP Exhibition unit. They will each lead their own inquiry and we look forward to them sharing their learning journey with us later in the term.

Facilities

It’s been lovely to return from holidays to find our new front door installed and the internal carpeting completed. Thanks to Amelia Mastorakos and Amber Demmler for managing the logistics of the improvement of our facilities.

Division Athletics

Tomorrow we have 30 senior students representing our school at the Division Athletics. We are looking forward to them seeking their personal best and put into practice the training they have done with Ms Scott and Mrs Hale over the last two terms. Great work everyone!

Student Movement

We are turning our minds towards 2024, in terms of workforce planning and school structure. If you know that your family is moving next year, or your child is moving schools, could you please let the office know as soon as possible via the school email address: aspendale.ps@education.vic.gov.au This will help us to make informed decisions when planning for 2024.

World Teacher’s Day

World Teacher’s Day is celebrated internationally today. This date normally occurs in the September school holidays. As a result, Australia celebrates later in October. This year we will highlight the wonderful work our teaching staff do on the 27th of October. It is timely though to thank all of our staff for their ongoing support of our students every day.

I’m looking forward to continue to work together this term,

Tom

While Exhibition is over, many of our students have taken the time to reflect on their PYPX Learning Journey. This is a very important part of the process because many students originally thought that PYPX was really about the Exhibition night. We have worked hard for students to understand that it is more about the process of creating their own inquiry, unpacking questions, researching, creating something, presenting and then reflecting!
Below are a sample of their reflections. Canva is very popular in Year 6 at the moment, so you will see many of our reflections have been created there.












Term 4 Week 7
And that's a wrap!

And just like that, PYPX is over. The Year 6s put on such an incredible event on Tuesday evening, showcasing their awesome work that they had been completeling over the past two months. There work was viewed by many the Year 6 parents and carers along with other members of the Aspendale community . We are very grateful for all of the support the Year 6s received from their Aspendale PS mentors, families at home and experts members of the greater community.










Student Reflection: Jett & Liv

This week was exhibition week, which means Year 6’s eight weeks of PYPX have almost come to an end. It has been a great journey and also a hard one, at times! 

On Tuesday night we had our final exhibition to the parents, carers, family and friends of our community. It has been a great 8 weeks of working hard to reach our final goal of spreading awareness of our or trying to solve our issues. Our research has been full of interesting facts, like how the FIFA Women’s World Cup prize money is 4 times less than the Men’s. We also all took an action which could be writing an email, raising money for charities related to our issues. I emailed 5 A-league clubs (Melbourne City, Melbourne Victory, Sydney FC, Perth Glory and Brisbane Roar) as well as the Matildas but unfortunately no one responded. Some of us also created interactive games for the students seeing our projects. I made a mini penalty shootout game against Matildas goalkeeper Mackenzie Arnold. On behalf of Year 6 I would like to thank all the teachers around the school for helping us and being our mentors, the school community for supporting us and most of all the Year 6 teachers who were with us every step of the way. This was an awesome experience and we are all very proud of ourselves.

We all started with an idea and hope that we could change a problem in that category. Most of us tried to raise awareness of our problem and did a great job. We all got people that were interested in our problems coming up to our stands looking at our information and learning new things. Some people had more than others but we all still raised awareness. I know I had heaps of fun preparing and setting up for my exhibition and I hope everyone else did as well. For my action Hugo and I asked a few Year three girls if they would like to play a game  of basketball in the hall. Surprisingly lots of them were interested and they had fun playing a game of basketball. The next week we asked if they would like to play a game of footy- this time, there was only three who were interested in playing. Advice, I would give to Year 5s? Make some of your presentation interactive to attract people. And to also make the words you use as simple as possible.

 
Term 4 Week 6
The countdown is well and truely on! We have 2 more days to set up our displays before it all begins.

"Creative chaos" is the best way to describe the Year 6 spaces at the moment...

We are in build/ develop/ cut/ print and put together mode. The teachers favourite questions are 'Excuse me...can you just print this for me?' 'Is their a spare table I could use?' 'What do you think about this?'

On Monday and Tuesday next week, we are looking forward to showing our school community - and other schools all the learning that we have been doing for the past 8 weeks. 

On Tuesday night from 5.30 -7.30 families will be invited in for the official, PYPX Exhibition night. 

The Year 6 teachers are very impressed by the students marathon commitment to their displays. It is really challenging to stay on task for so long and now that the end is in sight - we are all a mix of excitement and nerves! Thank you for all those who have supported us so far. We only have 5 more days!!!!





Term 4 Week 5 student blog

Term 4 Week 5 student blog - By Ivy & Jack

Hi, we are Jack and Ivy and the issues we are looking at are Fast Fashion and ADHD awareness. 

This week we are getting ready for the PYPX exhibition. It has been a bit chaotic in the classroom with everyone making their posters, graphs, diagrams and their projects. I have been emailing some NGO (Non-governmental organisations) that are facing a problem or an issue about fast fashion. I have also emailed Reliable Uniforms about what they’re doing to make their clothes sustainable and to help the environment.


 

This week we had 4 guest speakers!!! We started with Amanda Dudley who came in and taught us about psychology and the different types of health (mental, physical ect) and talked about the 6 pillars of wellbeing that includes things like exercise, relationships, body needs/ biological etc. 

We also had a visit from our old Assistant Principal Mrs Regester who now works at the Resilience Project. She came in with her colleague Elias and they spoke to us about G.E.M.EL (Gratitude, Empathy, Mindfulness and Emotional Literacy).
  

Emma Bowd came in to tell us about her journey to becoming an Author. She began by writing books for adults and it wasn’t until she visited her children’s classroom as a helper that she decided she loved working with children and writing stories for children. She now writes a lot of children's books and some chapter books as well. We have a couple of her stories in our school library as well! ‘Wonderful Shoes’ and ‘The day you were born’.  

We also have our last guest speaker coming in tomorrow, such a busy time in Year 6! A massive shout out to our special guest speakers for taking time out of their busy lives to come and chat with us, we truly appreciate it.  

Term 4 Week 4 student blog

Term 4 Week 4 student blog - By Jett & Hugo

Hi, we are Jett and Hugo. We are both researching similar issues for our PYPX project, ‘inequality and pay rate differences compared between male and females in sports both basketball and AFL.’ As part of our action we decided to run some lunchtime clubs for the Year 3 girls to raise awareness for women's sports and its population. We started on Tuesday this week and played basketball, we ran some warm ups and finished with a basketball game. Next week we will run a footy skills session and play a footy game. The following week the year 3’s will vote if they want to play another footy game or another basketball game. 

This week we had a guest speaker come in, his name was Paul Zappa he spoke to us about Respectful Relationships. We learnt a lot from him, he told us about his journey and experiences he has worked through with experiencing depression and anxiety. He taught us about how to identify if someone has something going on in their life and if they might need some help a really simple thing you can do is ask ‘Are you ok?’ He also taught us how to have some good habits to calm down and other strategies we can use. 

We are also now half way through our research and at the thinking stage before our big exhibition. We have almost finished researching, so now we’re up to thinking about what we’re going to show at our exhibition and how we are going to share our learning journey with the community.

We have had meetings with different teachers outside of our year level. They are called our mentors so if you see a big scary year six in your classroom, don't be worried we are probably just having a meeting with your teacher. 

We have all chosen a change maker we would like to research about. The change maker I chose most people do not know but he is important to my sister. His name is Geoff Lachlan, he started the first Edi Asp Under 8s Footy team, and convinced some other clubs to get under 8 teams as well. 

Thank you for reading our PYPX Blog and we hope you enjoyed hearing what we have done this week to improve our projects. Bye!!

Written by Jett and Hugo.

There is no doubt Year 6 students have been hard at it this week. There were a few lightbulb moments and Ms Fletcher, Mr Powell and I really enjoyed witnessing our students taking advantage of all the opportunities they have been given and embracing this journey. One of my favourite moments was reflecting on how far we have come. 

Questions included:

• What is the hardest part? 
• What is the coolest thing you have learnt this week? 
• What is the best part? 
• What is advice I would give to someone who was yet to begin?

Students were keen to share their highlights, and cool facts with the group. Many students, able to explain lots of challenges but also amazing experiences. Next week we look forward to planning out ideas for exhibition and more guest speakers. Huge thanks to Paul Zappa who gave up his time to come and talk with our Year 6 students.

Term 4 Week 3 student blog

Hi we are Milly, Milla, Rose & Ky, 4 students from 6P. We hope you enjoy reading about what we have done so far this week!

This week was an exciting week for PYPX! We started off with two full blocks of PYPX on Monday, then one full block on Tuesday, and a full block on Wednesday! On Monday we chose our Learner Profile Attributes (LPA’s) and then designed a card saying what the LPA was and a picture that represents the LPA. For our task before that we did an activity where we were given a job and we had to choose which 3 LPA’s would be the best. On Monday we also filled in a cheat sheet that we can use to help guide us when we meet with our mentors. 

This week most of the Year Sixes have met or are meeting with their mentors. Our mentors help to guide us through our PYPX journey so that we can be the most successful possible.

On Thursday our expert speaker, Miss Fletcher, will be talking to us about history.

We hope that you enjoyed reading our update about PYPX and look forward to reading next week's update.

Written and designed by Milly O’Donnell, Milla Youngs, Rose Stokes, and Ky Perkin!

Special thanks to Miss Fletcher for presenting to us to help with our PYPX!

We have had two guest speakers this week to show us what they are passionate about and what they do to help give us ideas on what we might want to focus on for our inquiry projects. 

On Tuesday we had our first guest speaker, Samantha Vella, an Artist and Teacher. She showed us her art work and told us her journey through becoming an artist. Since then she has had an exhibition and sells her work online. Our second guest visited us on Wednesday and her name is Emily Bourke. She is a teacher at APS who has a therapy dog named Dave that she brings to school. She explained to us how she got Dave and how having a therapy dog reduces stress and boosts joy. Did you know that when you see a dog it can lower the stress hormone cortisol and increase serotonin levels! This happens even when you see a picture of a dog. 

  

This week for our task we have been looking at the Key Concepts. With this task we had to look through each lens of the key concepts eg form, function, connection and many more. Everyone focused on their personal issue and looked at it from a different lens, asking questions around their issue so that later on in our PYPX we have more questions to answer and research to unpack!

For our PYPX we have been given a checklist to guide us each week and this week on our checklist we have: 

• Check in with your coach, (discuss what you have done or what you want to get done this week)
• Respond to the weekly prompt also known as your blog. 
• Email your mentor to book a time to meet (your mentor is a teacher in the school who helps with research and someone who is an expert on a particular topic. 
• Create a bibliography to show where all of our research came from. 
• Write an email to our mentor to schedule and organize times to meet and check in. 
• Post on our Google site and Padlet to keep that updated with our blog for each week and the Key Concepts. 

This week all of the year 6’s started to research for their PYPX. We are all researching a variety of issues for lots of different topics including Ocean pollution, Fast fashion, Animal testing and Mental health. Most of our research has been based around our Sentence of intent which is a sentence that represents your goals and what direction you intend for your PYPX to go in.

Written by Jasmine Reid, Holly Savic, Keita Rogers and Amelia Young. Thanks for reading and also a big thank you to Emily Bourke and Samantha Vella for coming in to share their stories with us! 

What about how will and has artificial intelligence changed our lives? (Kai)  Why do humans blink? (Georgia) Can you predict the next 50 to 100 years? (Woody) Do you know why our bodies adapt or how do our brains receive signals from our body?(Matilda)

The Year 6 students had the chance to ask Dr Karl Kruszelnicki all these questions on Wednesday. Our students were impressed by Dr Karl’s knowledge about so many different topics. It was a great way to see someone so passionate about learning!  

Some of the other questions were: 

How have humans evolved? (Charlotte R) Why do some animals lay eggs? (Harvey) What was the first creature created and how? (Jett) If our earth and oceans and lands are always moving and changing and how countries were all split apart. Can this happen again in our future?(Ella R) How does Hawking Radiation escape a black hole? (Jayden M) What happens to water when the tide is high and low? (Milla) What made you want to be a scientist? (Lucas) How can most bugs climb up walls or vertical surfaces? (Tilly) What is the first country to be discovered and where was it? (Finnegan.)  

Week 1  has really  been about organising; our sites, our padlets, our ideas and our checklists! 

Students have been unpacking our loosely held ideas and talking/ clarifying our inquiries. We have found out who our coaches are (Year 6 teachers). Unpacked the  transdisciplinary themes and decided which one matches up with our ideas. The next steps include writing a sentence of intent which means that our students are clarifying their ideas, if you ask a Year 6 Student next week ‘what is your PYPX project?’ they will be able to give you a one sentence answer .

Hello! We are Olivia and Emily, two Year Six students and we are here to tell you about our week so far. As you may know we have started our PYPX journey to Exhibition in 8 weeks. 

On Monday we planned and asked questions about PYPX and we discovered that we have a coach and mentor. Our coach is a Year 6 teacher and our mentor is any teacher around the school. We were so excited that Ms Fletcher had to put the timer on - lucky we didn't stay in. We also got to put in our preference for coaches and we found this out on Tuesday.

On Tuesday, we looked at the transdisciplinary themes we have learned throughout Primary School. Each inquiry we do has a transdisciplinary theme and so we get to choose our own for our PYPX. I (Emily)chose to do an inquiry within the Sharing the Planet and I (Liv), have chosen to do a Where we are in place and time inquiry.  After a long anticipated day we finally discovered our Coaches and everyone was excited. 

On Wednesday, we met with Dr Karl on video call. Some lucky Year 6 students got to ask Dr Karl questions like:Why do we have to blink? And How do we get allergies? These were amazing questions and Dr Karl answered them magnificently. We also did our want to know and what I know and what I need to know.  

On Thursday we checked some things off of our checklist which include: Create a padlet for our PYPX journey and post on our google sites. On Friday, we will write our sentence of intent- which will be a sentence that explains to anyone who asks, What our inquiry is about. It is also a sentence  for our perspective Mentors to read to decide which students they would like to mentor. 

We hope you enjoyed reading this, And hope you are looking forward to next week’s update! 

Written by and designed by Oliva McAuliffe and Emily Northey

Special thanks to Dr Karl for letting us interview him.

Year 6 students have been asked all year to hold their ideas for PYPX lightly. Holding our ideas lightly has allowed us to hear different ideas, reflect on the news and be open minded to different perspectives, as the year has progressed.

This week, we have formalised the start of our PYPX learning journey. Today, our provocations are related to unpacking key concepts, exploring issues within topics and brainstorming our ‘ideas’ less lightly. By the end of our first week back, our Year 6 students will have chosen their issues and we will be locking in their teacher mentors. 

Over the next 8 weeks, our Year 6 students will be embarking on a PYPX learning journey. It is a time that culminates in  our Year 6 PYP Exhibition. It is a time where our Year 6 students independently tackle an inquiry into an issue and/or solve a problem that exists today, they apply all the knowledge from their PYP experience- whether it be seven years from when they began in Foundation or more recently, when they arrived at APS. It is a celebration of the amazing skills and passion they show about an issue.

We hope to update this blog twic a week, with a teacher entry and student feedback. Watch this space! 

This year our students have been eagerly collecting tokens and redeeming them for a large variety of activities as part of our PBL program. We have had students using them to wear free dress, have some extra recess time, popcorn parties at lunchtime and sit in the teachers chair for the day to name just a few.

 

Noah (Yr 1) – Teacher for the day                     

 

Lakaia and Pia (Yr 2) – Teachers for the day   

Having a tangible reinforcement to accompany teacher praise has been invaluable in assisting to reinforce the behaviours we expect students to display at our school. Along the way however we have broken or misplaced some of our tokens. If any families are able to collect their plastic (not cardboard) bread tags over the next couple of months we would love them to come to school to be recycled for use as part of our token system. Tags can be sent to Mrs Peterson or via classroom teachers to forward on.

Multiplication Toss is a game that is suitable for students from Year 2-6.

It is a great game to investigate arrays, commutative property and when students are ready, partitioning. 

All that is needed is grid paper, a spinner or 10 sided dice (these can be found online) and two different colours.

Please check out the video on how to play and label the arrays.

This game helps to develop multiplicative thinking.

https://vimeo.com/400490263

https://balakr7.sa.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Muliplication-Toss.pdf 

Last month, Edie, Adele, Maddy, and Anna competed in a Girl Maths Minds Competition at Mentone Girls Grammar. It was the first time Aspendale Primary had been invited to compete in this competition. The day was lots of fun. We were asked to participate in a range of math activities and games. As a team we all worked really well together, but unfortunately, we didn’t place in the top 3.

We still worked our hardest and it was all worth it, we learnt a lot and the day helped us to improve our math and leadership skills. It was great to be able to compete against different schools and learn some new things along the way. We worked as a team by communicating and sharing our ideas in order to come up with solutions for the games and activities.

Overall, the event was super helpful in supporting us to develop our maths and teamwork skills. It was a great experience, and we are all so happy and proud to be given a part in it.

• Edie 5M and Maddie 5B