Term 2 Week 9

From the Principal

Re: Nationally Consistent Collection of Data on School Students with Disability (NCCD)

Every year, all schools in Australia participate in the Nationally Consistent Collection of Data on School Students with Disability (NCCD). The NCCD process requires schools to identify information already available in the school about supports provided to students with disability. These relate to legislative requirements under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 and the Disability Standards for Education 2005, in line with the NCCD guidelines (2019).

Information provided about students to the Australian Government for the NCCD includes:

• year of schooling
• category of disability: physical, cognitive, sensory or social/emotional
• level of adjustment provided: support provided within quality differentiated teaching practice, supplementary, substantial or extensive.

This information assists schools to:

• formally recognise the supports and adjustments provided to students with disability in schools
• consider how they can strengthen the support of students with disability in schools
• develop shared practices so that they can review their learning programs in order to improve educational outcomes for students with disability.

The NCCD provides state and federal governments with the information they need to plan more broadly for the support of students with disability.

The NCCD will have no direct impact on your child and your child will not be involved in any testing process. The school will provide data to the Australian Government in such a way that no individual student will be able to be identified – the privacy and confidentiality of all students is ensured. All information is protected by privacy laws that regulate the collection, storage and disclosure of personal information. To find out more about these matters, please refer to the Australian Government’s Privacy Policy (https://www.dese.gov.au/about-us/resources/department-education-skills-and-employment-complete-privacy-policy-0).

Further information about the NCCD can be found on the NCCD Portal (https://www.nccd.edu.au).

If you have any questions about the NCCD, please contact the school.

Staffing update

Mapleton State School principal, Julianne Emmert will remain on leave for the start of next term. At this stage, it is expected that she will be on leave until at least the end of Week 5, Term 3. Our regional staff continue to liaise with Julianne as she determines the best course of action to support her recovery. I ask that we respect that Julianne is on leave, and that she not be contacted for any work/school related matters. I will continue as acting Principal at Mapleton during this time.

Schoolzine

We have signed up to use Schoolzine as our digital platform for communication with our Mapleton school community. Our future newsletters, parent/teacher interviews will be managed through Schoolzine. We will also be able to send ‘push notification’ to our parents through the SZapp, which will be a more effective that the current system of emails. It will take a little time to get everyone using Schoolzine. When staff are signed up to the app, you will get to see the same communication that goes out to parents. Instructions for installing the SZapp can be found here

The Mapleton Way

Our Mapleton staff have been reviewing the Mapleton Way and how this can be linked to explicit behaviour expectations across the school. Our aim for the start of Term 3, is to have a simple, consistent set of behaviour expectations that will be used in all classrooms and school settings. Through the development of our Mapleton Way Matrix, we will be able to better guide students to follow our school’s behaviour expectations and to use the matrix as a teaching tool to support students to reflect and reset their behaviour.

Another tool we are have been talking with our students about The Zones of Regulation- a framework to foster self-regulation and emotional control.

The Zones of Regulation framework is used to:

Attendance

Our Mapleton school attendance data is 89.9% for the year. This is below the regional and state goals. We know there can be several factors that can add to this. This year we have had to work around covid and severe weather events. The other area that is coming up in our school data, is the number of students who are late each day.

It is important that children arrive at school on time every day for a number of reasons:

• It is the legal responsibility of parent/carers to ensure that children attend school on time each day.
• If a child is late they miss valuable information about the day’s activities.
• A child that is late will miss school work.
• Children that arrive before the bell, can talk to their friends before school and settle into the school day with them.
• A child who is arriving late to school may feel sad, embarrassed or unsettled. 
• A child that is late disrupts staff and other children.

The table below shows how lateness can add up over the school year:

Lateness + lost learning! Top Tips for being on Time

• establish good bedtime routines so your child has enough sleep, and doesn't struggle to get out of bed in the morning
• invest in a good alarm clock - and engage your child with setting it each evening!
• establish good morning routines
• make sure they have breakfast (or come to our breakfast club at school)
• prepare lunches and snacks the night before
• put out uniform the night before
• pack school bags the night before - you don't want to be searching for musical instruments, books/book bags or PE kit in the morning!
• leave bag and shoes near the front door
• get into the habit of completing home learning in the evening instead of trying to complete at the breakfast table
• keep keys in the same place so they are easy to find
• build in a 'time cushion', leaving home in plenty of time in case of delays in the journey.

If you have any particular challenges or difficulties in arriving on time for school, please talk to your child's class teacher or contact the Office.

Community Garden

I have had many conversations with staff, students and community regarding the school’s community garden. There is tremendous support to get the gardens back in shape for Spring. To do this, there will be some work taking place in the garden area over the coming holidays, to help start the process of rejuvenating this space.

Slow down in a school traffic zone

We have been informed that Queensland Police will be running a road safety campaign in the months ahead. Part of this program, will see a more active police presence in local school zones. School zone times have been standardised in Queensland to help motorists remember when to slow down.

The standard operating times for most school zones* in Queensland are 7–9am and 2–4pm.

Due to regional circumstances, some councils have been granted slightly different operating times that apply to all school zones* in their council area. 

School Watch

 We love our school and want to come back after the holidays knowing that our school is safe and ready for learning.

During this period empty schools provide an opportunity for criminal activity, becoming targets for unlawful entry, arson, stealing, graffiti and property damage – all of which become a cost to the community.

NEWS ITEMS

Curriculum Corner                                                                                    Tia Page- HoD-C

 There are some wonderful things happening in classrooms around our school. Take a look…

Design Technology in Year 3 & 4. A huge shout out to Ms. Nielson and Mrs. P for organising the fabulous ‘Repurpose it!’ day. It was wonderful to see the kids so engaged with the Design Technology curriculum and ‘caring for our environment’ by repurposing items they no longer needed. We loved the creations they made!

It was also great to see the number of parents and even grandparents involved. Thank you to all of the parents/ carers that came to help. We really appreciate your support.

Yr. 5/6 Camp at Currimundi

A huge thank you to all of the teachers that went on camp recently and to especially to Mr. Price for organising the activities. The kids were so well-behaved and enjoyed every minute.

Science in Yr. 1 & 2 

All the hard work Ms. Hancock and Ms. Bentley put into teaching the kids about properties of materials has paid off. The children made some fabulous boats that floated (mostly) and even carried two marbles! The students seemed to thoroughly enjoy this task. Well done to everyone.

Effort in Yr. 2

Also a big shout out to the Year 2 students and Mrs. Shillig for their efforts. There have been some wonderful improvements for these students this year, which is to be celebrated. Each time I go into this classroom I find students working diligently and there is a lovely calm feeling of people working together on a goal. What a wonderful vibe!

Our Preps are writing!

Mrs. Lynch came to visit me last week and excitedly told me that the Preps have begun writing. Congratulations to our Prep teachers for all of your hard work. What a wonderful thing it is to help a little person learn to write. Also, congratulations to our Prep students…We can’t wait to see what you do next!

Code-Mapping

Seeing the students practice Code-Mapping is making my heart sing! Our teachers are doing a fantastic job of working together to improve literacy skills across our school. These teachers are doing wonderful things for our children by giving them the skills to improve their spelling, like orthographically mapping sounds to letters. Great job!

Decodable Readers 

We are purchasing more decodable readers for our Prep- Year 2 students. These readers are designed to help our students practise essential reading skills. The books are created to ensure all the words included are decodable. This means that students can decode each sound within the word and then blend the sounds together to read the word. The decodable books are also designed to match the alphabetic code the student is working on at that time. For example, if a child is learning the long /ee/ sound, they can practise reading books with words that contain the long /ee/ sound, like bee or tree.

Prep News

 In Prep this term, we have been learning about materials in Science. The children completed a recycled materials project at home for Show and Tell. We had the most amazing creations brought in. They enjoyed our waterproof investigation in class, where we tested which common materials were waterproof or not. This was in preparation for creating our wind ornaments using a variety of different materials. The children have created some beautiful wind ornaments for assessment. Come and see them hanging near the Prep playground. We hope they will survive the wind over the last few days!

The children have enjoyed working together in our puppet theatre this term. They have eagerly shared the fairy tale stories we have learnt in English. They have even made their own puppets as well. The Preppies have developed very good retell skills, and have had fun using interesting “character voices” to support their story-telling too!

Chappy Chat

Emotional self-regulation is a skill that we all need to navigate successfully through life.  As with most skills everyone has different amounts of natural ability in this area.   Also, the more we learn about and practice this skill the better we become at it.  At school we have begun to introduce the Zones of Regulation program which is a framework to teach children self-regulation.  The Zones of Regulation categorises states of alertness and emotions into four coloured Zones.  There is no bad Zone. Children are taught it is O.K. to experience any of these emotions, but it is not alright to stay in the Red, Yellow or Blue Zone for too long or engage in negative (unexpected) behaviours that are sometimes associated with these Zones. The primary aim for the child is to use their “tools” or strategies to remain in or close to the Green Zone. You may like to ask your child to share with you what they have learned so far about the Zones of Regulation.

To help your child better engage with the subject of self-regulation you might like to discuss with them the healthy things you do to help when you are feeling frustrated, worried, sad or overwhelmed. An example of this is saying something like “I had a really hard day at work today and I’m feeling really frustrated, so I am going to go for a walk to feel better”.     If you discuss the tools you use to self-regulate with your children, they may be more likely to discuss their feelings with you. Children often learn best by seeing the example set by the people around them and copying that.

More information about The Zones of Regulation (by Leah M. Kuypers) may be found on the internet.

From Your Chappy,

Chappy Vicki

Email : velan1@eq.edu.au

Mapleton State School Sports Day 2022

The results from the day were:

 OVERALL HOUSE CHAMPIONS: 1^st : Sharks 2^nd: Eagles 3^rd: Kangaroos

Age champions

Book Club

Thank you to all the Parents for purchasing books from Book Club. Because of your wonderful support, Sheila has been able order some wonderful books to the value of $300 for our library.