Tag: News

In the last two weeks we have certainly been able to celebrate the learning that occurs at Newman College each day. The primary campuses have been busy exploring their world during the STEM festival which launched Science Week. We then came together as a whole primary school at the Lavalla Campus to celebrate the Assumption of Mother Mary into heaven with our Buddy Day connecting our students. This led us beautifully into the celebration of Book Week and the student parades.

All these learning opportunities occurred outside of the “normal” classroom setup and were wonderful ways to challenge our students. Flexible learning spaces allow our students to create and collaborate and the launch of the IDEAS Lab at Marian is a prime example of this. The multi-purpose space at Lavalla also accommodates a range of learning styles and needs and can be arranged to suit a multitude of learning outcomes.

Gratitude Project

This term the College has taken on a Gratitude Project as part of the path toward building resilience to support wellbeing in our community. On the primary campuses, staff have focused their projects around ‘daily hits’ of practising gratitude with the students. Throughout the project, activities and reflections are shared through Seesaw as well as prominently in many classrooms and we encourage you to engage in conversation with your children around practising gratitude at home. There are many simple ways that you can support this practise with your children in the family setting, such as:

• Modelling gratitude – stating aloud the things that you are grateful for, and thanking each other openly
• Quick gratitude chats – in the car, on a walk, around the dinner table or at bedtime, go around and each mention something you are grateful for that day
• Gratitude journalling – support your children in keeping a notebook where they can write down what they are grateful for each day
• Find opportunities for your children to identify those less fortunate than themselves and express their gratitude – in your local community, watching the news, reading the newspaper

Author, Alan Cohen, wrote: “Gratitude, like faith, is a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it grows, and the more power you have to use it on your behalf. If you do not practice gratefulness, its benefaction will go unnoticed, and your capacity to draw on its gifts will be diminished. To be grateful is to find blessings in everything, This is the most powerful attitude to adopt, for there are blessings in everything.”

Click here for further information, videos and examples for practising gratitude in the home.

Coffee Van Fathers Day

To thank the dads of Newman College, the Primary Social Committee (PSC) would like to offer all dads and father figures a free coffee. The PSC has organised a coffee van to be at each of the campuses to say thank you for all that you do.

STEM Festival

To celebrate Science Week, the Primary Campuses took part in a STEM festival on Monday 13 August. STEM is the combination of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics to engage students, and encourage them to problem solve and collaborate. All students took part in a wide range of activities from building bridges to creating flying machines. There was a range of guest speakers and the Secondary School teachers even set off rockets at the Marian Campus. Thank you to Mrs Zelich and Ms Anderson for making it all happen.

Click here for a full list of activities from the day and more photos.

Book Week

This week we celebrated Book Week with the theme of “Find Your Treasure”. Our students dressed as characters from their favourite books bringing them to life. Reading is such an important part of our students’ learning and we are fortunate to have such wonderful libraries at each campus. Mrs Le Dan also organised a wide range of activities for the students such as author visits and even a trip to the Cambridge Library. Thank you Mrs Le Dan, Mrs Burchfield and Mrs Karagiannis for generating a love of literature. Please click here for more information and photographs from Book Week.

 

Artist in Residence

Our Year 2 students were lucky enough to attend a workshop with the College’s 2018 Artist in Residence Mr Andy Quilty this week. All Year 2 students came together in the Marian Hall to experience Andy’s approach and drawing techniques that serve to inspire freedom within art making. The wonderful designs will continue on this process during their art classes for the next few weeks. Thank you Mrs Spencer and Mrs Farrell. Click here for information about out 2018 Artist in Residence program.

 

Speak Up Finals

The following students participated in the Speak Up Finals last week: Harry Klein, Joshua Do and Aadil Thekkayil. Congratulations to all three students who were successful in moving through to the next round. There were topics that were funny and some deeply moving. Their talents are quite remarkable.

 

Feast of the Assumption of Mary

To celebrate the Assumption of Mother Mary into heaven, our Primary community came together at the Lavalla Campus last Friday. The students were excited to see their buddies again and work with them on activities about Mary and of course take part in the legendary Lapathon.

Thank you to Ms Warchomij, Mrs Rich and Mr Lynch for making this such a great day filled with fun and new friendships.

Click here to read more and to see more photos from the day.

 

Leadership Camp

Our Year 6 Student Counsellors had the wonderful opportunity to work with student leaders from years 7, 8 and 9 as part of the leadership camp last week. The students camped under the stars and cooked their own meals as well as took part in a wide range of leadership and team building activities to develop their skills and make new friends across the College. Thank you to Mr Van der Heever for making this possible and we look forward to this event growing in the future.

 

Visual Art Support

We would like to invite you to be part of our exciting and innovative PK-6 Arts program at Newman College. Please kindly consider supporting our exceptional Visual Art program by joining us on roster in Visual Art classes for students in Kindergarten through to Year 6. Your assistance with preparing and organising arts resources, and supporting arts learning by working alongside students, will help us to enrich and strengthen our Arts teaching and learning program. Please contact our specialist Art teachers, Ms Sarah Spencer at Marian Campus and Ms Amy Farrell at Lavalla campus for more information and to register you support. sarah.spencer@newman.wa.edu.au (PK-2) amy.farrell@newman.wa.edu.au (3-6).

 

Code of Conduct

It is critical that parents always work to provide a positive environment here at Newman College when communicating with one another, either in person, online or over the telephone. Conversations must be dignified and respectful. Parent social events for our families must only be used for positive connection. Anything outside of this is a breach of the code of conduct and will be managed by the College. Please click here to see a copy of the College Code of Conduct and refer to statements 4, 5 and 6.

 

Family Night at Scitech – Friday 31 August

Only a week to go until the exciting family event of which tickets are selling fast. Please click here for more information.

 

 

Angelico Art Exhibition

The following students have had their art work displayed at the CEWA Angelico Art Exhibition for 2018. The students have displayed outstanding commitment to their craft and we are blessed that they are able to share their talents. Thank you to Mrs Amy Farrell for your instruction and support.

Charlotte Laurent, Year 6
Ella Hills, Year 4
Ella Scott, Year 5
Zoe Ehlers, Year 3
Savannah Doyle, Year 6
Harper Gamble, Year 6

Word Mania

Congratulations to the students in Years 4 and 5 who have achieved the top rankings on the Leaderboard for Round Two of Word Mania.
Year 4 – 11th in Australia
Year 5 – 49th in Australia

 

Past Events

The children at Newman College are continuously engaging in motivating learning experiences that support embedding and enhancing their education. Some highlights from the past two weeks are:

• Angelico Art Exhibition
• Speak Up Finals
• STEM Festival
• Book Week
• LAPs incursion – today we had the privilege of Lenny Hughes from Little Athletics Australia teaching our students some skills to help them with their athletics in preparation for the upcoming carnival on September 7

As part of Science Week 2018 (Week 5), students in Kindy – Year 6 were involved in a STEM Festival. The day was implemented to reinforce the important key learning area of Science.

The STEM activities were designed to complement the National Curriculum in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths by demonstrating the link between what’s taught in the classroom and the wider world.

Students were given the opportunity to put their creative thinking into action, learn how to collaborate effectively, challenge their designs and celebrate successes and failures. All of the notions mentioned shed light on our schools Vision for Learning, Shine through Discovery.

There were a variety of activities that the children completed over the day, with each being located in different classrooms across both Campuses. The children rotated every 40 minutes and were instructed by different classroom teachers whom organised a STEM based activity.

Throughout the day, there were a number of guest speakers from our wider communities whom presented on an aspect of STEM to the students and how it relates to their industry today. A special thank you to Mr Tony Stahl (Rocktape), Mr Mick Button (Rusty surfboards), Ms Tori Dewa (Qantas) and our Secondary School Science teachers Mr Shuckstes and Mr Spriggins.

KINDY – The Kindy students worked in the new Ideas Lab with some lovely Year 10 students. The children had a STEM challenge to build a chair using recycled materials that would hold a bear. They used a wide range of skills and had lots of fun.They all worked collaboratively to design and create some very comfy chairs for some lucky bears.

YEAR 1 – Year 1 had the challenge of designing and making a chair out of newspaper and alfoil to hold a small toy.

YEAR 2 – What a wonderful day the STEM Festival was for everyone in Year 2! The day was full of excitement, challenge and LOTS of thinking to complete the different tasks in each classroom! Some of the tasks were building a house of cards, a house of sticks that couldn’t blow over, building a tower of buttons, a bubble blowing device, and a paper cup challenge with no hands. It was impressive to see our student engineers collaborate, modify designs, problem solve, and persist until challenges grew to successes! The most explosive part of the day happened just before lunch when our super scientists Mr Shuckstes and Mr Spriggins conducted some sensational experiments with rockets, dry ice and different kinds of liquids. It was great fun watching the rockets take-off but….who knows where they landed! At the end they exploded some plastic bottles with dry ice and hot water. We didn’t know when it would explode, but when it did…wow! We all jumped nearly as high as the rockets! Such an amazing day where full of great learning for all!

YEAR 3 – We had a Ready, Aim, Fire!! Challenge – To build a catapult and then catapult an object into a stationary cup.

YEAR 4 – The Year 4 classes had a fun and challenging day making bridges out of spaghetti.

Year 5  – The Year 5 unit completed three engaging and fun STEM activities. In 5 Blue the students had to construct a mini trampoline to bounce a ping pong ball on. The group that could bounce the ping pong ball the highest were the winners. In 5 Green students had to construct a spinning top. The group that made their top spin the longest were the winners. In 5 Red students had to construct a geodesic dome which had to stand unsupported. The strongest dome was the winner. All year levels completed the activities well with some great adaptations of materials. There were lots of original designs and ideas.

Renae Zelich and Katya Anderson, Teacher Leaders

Student Reflection

Our first challenge was to create a marble run using pipes, tape, paper and cups. We had limited resources so we had to get creative. We started rolling paper up to make more pipes and used cups to catch the marble and transfer it to another pipe.

Our next challenge was to create parachutes out of a plastic bags, string and paper clips. There were some silly designs (some people just threw a piece of plastic in the air) but most of them were pretty good. After recess, we gathered for the paper plane challenge! We made models and raced them to see which one would go the furthest. There was one design, created by Pippa Simpson which won the competition.

After suffering many paper cuts, we all moved to the Marist Auditorium to listen to our guest speaker Tori, who spoke about how a plane flies, her position at Qantas and her previous position in the navy helping to fix helicopters.

After lunch, we had to make a trampoline that could bounce a ping pong ball the highest. We used balloons, cups, pop sticks, elastic bands, pegs and plates. While I slaved away trying to create something that would work (it failed miserably), the others in my group created a much better trampoline that bounced the ping pong ball pretty high.

The festival ended with two guest speakers. Cooper Button’s dad was first up and talked about the making of surfboards and how they float on water. Then it was Jack Stahl’s dad who talked about rock tape, the science behind it and how it stretches and lifts the skin from the muscle to help reduce bruising.

The day was very interactive and engaging allowing us to collaborate, investigate and have fun.

Charlotte Evans, Year 6 Student