It has been a very busy start to the term and we have still six weeks to go before the end of the year. Preparations are going ahead for next year with our two Pupil Free days and weekly activities by staff to prepare our School Improvement Plan.

Our staffing plans have been set in place and in 2022 we will have a Foundation to Year 2 class, a Year 3 to Year 6 class (Maths and English will be taught separately to Year 3-4 and to Year 5-6 student groups) and a Year 7 to Year 12 class. Around this structure of our main classes the following staffing decisions can be reported back to the community:

• Penny McCulloch will still be teaching our Foundation to Year 2 class, and also taking on the teaching responsibility in the Learning Area of the Arts across all our classes.
• Sharon Bates will teach mainly Year 7-11 across English, HASS and Home Ec, but will also teach Year 5-6 English and Year 5-6 HASS.
• We are advertising currently for a Maths / Science / PE teacher. This position will involve the teaching of Maths and Science across Years 7-11, Maths to the Year 5-6 students and PE across all three classes.
• We have appointed Victoria Barratt to our Year 3 – 6 Primary Teacher position. She comes with a very good background in primary teaching. She will teach English, Maths and HASS to our Year 3 – 4s and have other teaching responsibilities to our Year 3 – 6 students.
• Amanda Hilder will continue in her role in Special Ed and we are also advertising for a Special Ed teacher, teaching three days a week.

As further decisions are made in this area they will be reported to the community.

Walking Trail

I am pleased to announce that we have applied for a Council grant of $5000 for the development of the walking trail which runs adjacent to the school. This will be a project where we collaborate with students, staff, parents and our wider community, with the aim of reinvigorating the trail and opening the area up to bike riding as a recreation activity for our students. We plan to complete the following:

• Irrigation of plants on the walking trail.
• Redevelopment of the jumps area by the gym.
• Planting of indigenous plants along the trail.
• Topping up the trail with gravel.
• Designing new signposts detailing plants on the trail.

Expertise from Quorn where there is a similar development in the form of their nature trail will be tapped into and we will be working closely with the Flinders Ranges Council on this development.

Bikes Palya

The school is in the process of getting a week long bikes education program called Bikes Palya to Hawker Area School in Term Two next year. This is a program which focuses on healthy lifestyles and has been facilitated by non-profit Bicycle South Australia (Bike SA) since 2013.

The program is an active diversion and engagement course that promotes riding and fixing bikes as an important vehicle for developing healthy and empowering behaviours in our youth. By using creative and engaging hands-on activities and projects, the program aims to engage students about life and education in general.

This will be a five day program with activities for all year levels on each day. The session will focus on bike riding skills, road safety and general bike maintenance skills. Our students will learn throughs hands-on sessions how bikes work. At the end of the course, the students will have have the chance to successfully gain the skills to assemble their own bike. More on this program will be reported to the community in term one next year.

School Improvement

Over this term our staff will be working on the development of our School Improvement Plan for 2022 – 2024. This process will involve extensively looking over our student learning data, learning program while also utilising the improvement tools currently available by the department to help generate our new learning plan. In line with this we are also having two Pupil Free days this term:

• November 1st – Australian Curriculum day.
• November 22nd – Whole School Planning day for 2022.

These days will help to greatly assist us in our preparations for 2022 and beyond.

Cybersafety

The school is currently using the resources from the Australian Government Website ‘eSafetyCommissioner’ which can be found here - 

CYBERSAFETY - e-Safety  

The site contains a lot of well constructed lesson resources for all year levels, including Junior Primary and Early Years classes. It also contains links for a variety of groups including Kids and Parents, as well as young people that can all be accessed by going to the home page link above.

One of the activities for Students in Foundation to Year 2 involved viewing an episode of Play School called ‘Kiya’s excellent eBirthday’. Part of the ABCs evidence for presenting the program was that 81% of parents with pre-schoolers stated that their children use the internet, it is important to build understandings of online safety right from the start when this statistic is considered.

SRC

The SRC at the end of last term purchased the following:

• A mobile basketball backboard.
• Two mobile netball poles.

In doing this our students recognised the needs of our Junior Primary students to have basketball and netball facilities that engage students in younger age brackets in particular. Our basketball backboard has been adjusted to a height suitable for Junior Primary students in the Under 10 bracket, as has one of our netball poles, the other being set up to allow the big kids to shoot as well! Recently in Junior Primary HPE the students got the chance to give the backboard a test shoot!

End of Term

Don’t forget our Presentation Night will be on Tuesday December 7^th and our Final Day of school will be Thursday December 9^th.

As usual if anyone has any questions I can be contacted through the front office on 86484003 or through my email at daren.oneill253@schools.sa.edu.au

Mr Daren O'Neill

Principal 

Welcome to term 4

In the junior primary class this term, we are welcoming the kids from Kindergarten to a transition period into our classroom before they join us next year as our new foundation students.

Working with the Hospital auxiliary group, the students have been busy upgrading the gardens at the Hawker Hospital. The students buddied up with members of the auxiliary group and  prepared the holes dug, then planted a variety of native plants, finishing with some mulching.

For English this term, we continue with the Read, Write Inc. handwriting, grammar and word knowledge. The year 1 and 2 students are revisiting procedure writing, followed by narrative and poetry. They also will be reviewing various forms of text in comprehension. Foundation students will be exploring rhyming through writing and simple animal facts.

In Maths, we are revising the topics we have done throughout the year, emphasising number knowledge and facts.

The topic for Science this term is chemistry and we will be exploring materials and their uses, the different states of materials and mixing materials to become a new material like play dough.

In Geography, the students are studying the Flinders Ranges, looking at maps and learning about the significance of the country. We will be making a 3D topography map to help visualise how the Flinders Ranges sits amongst the landscape.

In foresight of the end of year assembly, we are compiling a short performance in Drama/Dance.

The class is enjoying some time gardening in our garden plot, planting and caring for our plants. We are also starting a succulent garden near the classroom.

Badminton was enjoyed by all in week 3.

English

Term 4 sees students using the skills that they have developed on some creative tasks. There will be a short play performance at the end of the term and students are preparing for that in English. We have also been studying a novel, “The Gizmo”, by Australian author Paul Jennings. That involvers taking turns reading aloud, discussing extracts and writing responses to questions or creating pictures based on the book. Our use of “Pobble” continues and we are also using “sizzling starter” sentences to practise writing engaging paragraphs for stories.

Maths

Our Maths “rotations” in class, the groups in which they undertake set tasks, were changed slightly for Term 4 to enable them to concentrate on their learning material more intensively. Fractions, decimals and calculating change with money transactions featured prominently so far.

Science

We will complete our work about our physical world this term. After that, the class will find out about some famous scientists and some important inventions.

HASS

Having explored a variety of other societies and places in Geography last term, we will look at Civics and Citizenship in this term.

Health/PE

Our sports in Term 4 will venture from cricket to badminton to soccer. At the same time, Health will examine aspects of keeping safe on social media.

Welcome to term four! We’ve had a busy couple of weeks and are already starting to focus on what we want to achieve by the end of term.

English 6-10

Continuing on from digital literacy in term 3, the students are now undertaking the production of their own short film, which we hope to present to the community at the end of year concert. We are also focusing of inferencing, which is the hardest part of reading comprehension to grasp, and students are all working hard to deepen their understanding. Later in the term we will complete a unit on fairy tales, and look at the origins of them, and some alternative fairy tales also.

English 12

SACE is officially finished for year 12 for 2021. Work has all been completed and submitted to the SACE board for moderation, and is of a very high standard. This time is now being used to finish off other SACE subjects and finalising other assessment tasks.

HASS 6-10

The focus for this term is geography. We are looking at Biomes of the world and food security. Students have enjoyed learning about the different farming practices in Australia, and debating whether all crops grown here should be from an environmental perspective. We are just beginning to look into food security both in Australia and around the world both now and in the future.

HPE 6-10

The students looked forward to participating in badminton workshops last week and all learnt new fitness and skills. So far this term we have learned an ancient Viking game called Kubb, which requires both skill and strategy. With badminton finished we will be moving on to tennis for PE. For the health component of HPE we are focusing on cultural diversity, this includes recognising our identity and what shapes it, practicing empathy and looking at different prejudices and privileges we may or may not have.

Home Economics

After our hectic three terms of cooking we have switched to textiles this term. At the moment the students are working on designing an applique which will be sewn onto a calico shopping bag. The class has measured, drawn and cut out their own pattern for this project, next step will be designing their applique and hand stitching that on before sewing their bags together.

HPE F-2

The foundation to year 2 class this term are focusing on identity. We are looking at what makes us who we are, what our strengths are, and how we’ve been learning new things every day. For PE we have been utilising our new basketball ring which can be adjusted to small people height. The kids have enjoyed learning how to dribble, then walk while dribbling, and then having some practice shots.

Mrs Sharon Bates

Year 6-12 Teacher / HPE Coordinator

This term in Maths our students in Year 6 – 10 will be involved in a diverse program aimed at evaluating student progress and developing skill levels in specific Mathematical topics. This will start with a topic on Units of Measurement where students will be planning a Sports Day, complete with a variety of events. They will need to calculate the area for each event, which will require some research into the rules for each event, along the terminology associated that comes from Units of Measurement itself, including centimetres, centimetres², kilometres³ including units of length, area and volume. Concepts of Geometry will also be investigated with students identifying and applying knowledge such as Parallel Lines, Relationships between angles and the calculation of the area, surface area and volume of different shapes.

Students will build their theoretical knowledge and practice their fluency using exercises and tutorials in the ‘Smartlab’ program. The program is designed to allow teachers to differentiate on student learning, with the software designed to respond to students needs evident in their responses to Mathematical challenges. This program will happen once or twice a week. The whole class at the beginning of term completed a ‘Learning Assessment Framework’ which tested on ‘Multiple Thinking Strategies’. The majority of our students were classed within one zone, with a few students exceeding this. The follow up to this test will be lessons delivered to each Zone Group, building their strategical and analytical thinking.

Scientific thinking in formulating a scientific question to solve, identifying and formulating key words or vocabulary from the topic. Then from here students will complete background research to build their understanding of the topic and help them to construct a hypothesis, which is formed to prove or disprove the question. From here students will test the hypothesis through an experiment of their creation, to find out if their procedure for the testing experiment works. This can be a circular process for if the procedure doesn’t work (ie the hypothesis doesn’t get tested effectively), we go back to the test! If the procedure works, then the students will analyse the data present, draw conclusions and decide whether the result aligns with the hypothesis.

For the rest of the term, our students will be studying Aboriginal approaches to Astronomy. They will learn about the ways in which Aboriginal people used their knowledge of Astronomy in their everyday lifestyle. This will includes concepts such as understanding of seasons, foods in seasons and the weather and it’s prediction.

Mrs Lidia Szelzak

Mathematics Science & Language Teacher

NOVEMBER 22