23rd July 2019

DANDENONG NORTH

PRIMARY SCHOOL NEWSLETTER

Calendar of Event

School Website: www.dandenongnorthps.vic.edu.au

JULY 2019

25th - Grade 1 Students

excursion to Healesville

AUGUST 2019

7th - Grade 3 Students

Excursion to Melbourne

Museum

12th –16th Grade 6 CAMP

20th - Book Parade

26th - Grade 2 Students

Excursion to Science-

works

School Pledge

I will do all that I can to make sure that Dandenong North Primary School remains a great school.

I will try my hardest to fol-low the 4Cs to keep our school a safe and happy place.

I promise to treat others as I would like to be treated.

News From the North

Camp Amazon Success

New Play Area

Amazon is a large multina-tional technology company that specialises in ecom-merce, artificial intelli-gence and cloud computing and is one of the big 4 tech companies (including Ap-ple, Facebook and Google). In the last week of Term 2 we had seven students that successfully got accepted into the Camp Amazon Science, Technology, En-gineering and Manufacturing program. This is a wonderful achievement as only 100 students were accepted across Victoria and New South Wales! They had to answer 3 questions in their application - 1. What is your passion? 2. What does your dream job of the future look like? 3. Who is someone you admire or look up to in the field of STEM, and why? Congratulations to Lazar, Suha, Lamar (6L), Thomas (6HK), Devasena, Laraib, Siyana (6A) and Aishani (4P) for their thoughtful responses to the application and representation of our school during the camp. Over the next 2 years, once during each school holidays, they will spend a day at Amazon’s Dandenong fulfilment centre working hands on with S.T.E.M. resources and technology. During the past Term 2 holidays, students worked with Lego Robotics, putting together and programming a robot to follow a path and knock over cups! Another congratulations to these 7 stu-dents and we hope to hear more news and updates from their Amazon Camp experiences. By: Mr Peter Cheng (ICT specialist teacher)

After the removal of the old Prep building, we are now left with an empty space that is going to be utilised for student play. There is going to be a cricket net for the children to have the opportunity to develop their batting and bowling skills. Also included will be a tower with a basketball and netball ring so children can practise their basketball and netball goal shooting.

We can’t wait to see this new area developed for our students and look forward to increased play space for our children..

Page 2 News From the North

Lyndale Secondary - Locked Box Challenge On Friday the 28th of June, Lamar and Lazar headed over to Lyndale Second-ary College to compete in the Lock-box Challenge. As its name suggests, there is a locked box with 6 locks on it, and each lock has a different 3 digit code. There were 6 schools competing however 1 school didn’t turn up. They were Dandenong North, Dandenong, Silverton, Lyndale Greens, Rosewood Downs and Wooranna Park primary schools. Each student pair had a helpful Year 11 tutor who could assist them through-out the 6 perplexing challenges. The tasks were based on the field of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineer-ing and Mathematics). The contestants had only 1 hour to complete their puz-zling challenges. The first task excited Lamar and Lazar as it was a mind-boggling puzzle-type game which required creative thinking. The second en-gaging challenge required estimation and problem-solving, it was about working out how many plastic counters were in a container, using an ice-cream tub, beakers and electric scales, without counting them. The third and fourth complicated tasks were about complex science, figuring out the acidity of certain liq-uids and trying to work out the parents of 3 babies using their (fake) blood. The fifth and sixth tasks were technology and they used a tool on the computer to find out the age of certain objects. The sixth and final task was again about problem-solving and they had to order some events from first to last. Rushing over to the box taking a last glance at the other teams they quickly and carefully applied the codes to the six locks. With two seconds on the clock, Lazar strug-gled to remove the final lock and with a lit-tle assistance they pulled it off, flinging open the box, and claiming victory for Dan-denong North, who have won this challenge for the last three years in a row. The prize for the ecstatic winners were two program-mable “Edison” robots and a plaque which will be hung up at the school. It was an eventful and amazing day. By: Lazar (School Captain - 6L)

With a continued pattern of increasing student enrolments, we are keen to ensure that all our current fami-lies have students enrolled for 2020 in order to assist with planning and to keep all class sizes as small as possible.

We continue to aim to keep our Prep classes to below twenty in order to give children the best possible start to their education. Therefore it is highly important for us to have an idea as to how many students may be enrolling at our school for next year.

If you know of a neighbour or a relative who has a child that turns five before the 30th April 2020, please ask them to come to the office for an enrolment form.

Parents are asked to bring a Birth certificate or Visa for proof of age and an Immunisation History State-ment from Medicare in order to enroll their child at our school.

Early enrolment also ensures children are included in our Prep Transition Program which begins in Term Four.

We look forward to meeting all of our new families enrolling at DNPS and making them a part of our community.

2020 Prep Enrolments

Page 3 News From the North

Special Awards

Prep H - Joshitha 1G - Raun 2S - Saanvitha Mr Mackay - Hamidah (5L)

Prep K - Raghavi 1H - Mahdi 2B - Arnav ICT - Penny (3W)

Prep N - Wajiha 1L - Abdullah 3W - Gurlin PE - Raghav (3P)

Prep O - Zeynep 2M - Chason 3L - Ekaksh PE - Somaiah (2AM)

Prep M - Theruni 2C - Shafa 3B - Yuhan PE - Aziz (1L)

1O - Athia 2AM - Sosan 3LF - Enayat

1F - Ridhi 2N - Deanna 3P - Aleej

It’s Not Okay To Be Away-Term Two Absence Data

At the first assembly for the term, Mr Lodge spoke about the ab-sence rates for students in Term Two. There were 47 school days last term. Throughout Term Two, the weather tends to turn cold and wet and children become more susceptible to the common cold and other viruses which cause them to take time off school.

Throughout the term, 22% of children attended school everyday of the term. Mr Lodge commented that this was one of the small-est amounts of children we have had that came to school every-day. He is hoping that this percentage will be back up in the thir-ties this term as it is very important that children attended each day when it was possible.

Prep grades have their own special award for 100% attendance. The Prep grade with the best 100% attendance was shared be-tween Prep H and Prep M. Prep H achieved the best overall at-tendance winning the mascot called Ben.

For Years 1 to 6 the grade with the most students who attended 100% of the time in Term Two was 3W with 57% . This is a fab-ulous result!

71% of children achieved a good attendance record for the term (less than five days absent for the term). 6D had the best good attendance for the term, with 100% of students missing less than 5 days of school in Term Two. This is the first time a class has achieved all children missing less than five days each in a term - Congratulations 6D!

The overall best good attendance was won by the Year 5 students with an attendance record of 80%.

Congratulations to all students who achieved 100% attendance for Term Two - you will soon be receiving your certificates and wristbands from Mr. Lodge.

Emma, Fatima & Ryder proudly rep-resenting Prep H proudly holding Ben for the best prep attendance.

Page 4

Everyday Hero

2019 Parent Opinion Survey

Aminah H (5F) has become a member of the ‘CANCER COUNCIL VIC-TORIA’ and is raising awareness for this good cause. She decided to be-come a member after speaking with her parents and wanting to help raise funds to find a cure for this terrible disease. To raise funds, Aminah has decided to cut the length of her hair by 20 centimetres.

At Monday’s Assembly, Aminah presented a fabulous speech on the types of cancer and shared Lucy’s story, a girl that has fierce determination to beat this dreaded disease. She encouraged all children to help others and make a difference.

We are proud of Aminah for raising this awareness and we commit to sup-porting her in this good cause by encouraging donations to the Cancer Council.

If you would like to support this worthy cause follow Aminah’s link pro-vided below.

https://shave.everydayhero.com/au/chop-the-locks-with-aminah

We are planning for Aminah to have her hair cut here at school on Friday 30th August, in our school hall at 10.45 am. Any parents who have chosen to donate to this worthy cause are welcome to attend this assem-bly in the school hall.

WE WANT OUR PARENTS TO TELL US WHAT THEY THINK!

Our school is conducting a survey to find out what parents think of our school. The Parent Opinion Survey is an annual survey offered by the Department of Education and Training that is conducted amongst a sample of randomly selected parents. It is designed to assist schools in gaining an understanding of par-ents’ perceptions of school climate, student behaviour and student engagement. Our school will use the survey results to help inform and direct future school planning and improvement strategies. Approximately 30 per cent of parents will be invited to participate in this year’s survey. All responses to the survey are anonymous. This year the Parent Opinion Survey will be conducted from Monday 22rd July

to Sunday 11th August.

The survey will be conducted online, only takes 10-15 minutes to complete, and can be accessed at any convenient time within the fieldwork period on desktop computers, laptops, tablets or smartphones. The online survey will be available in a range of languages other than English. These include: Arabic, Viet-namese, Mandarin, Chin (hakha), Hindi, Japanese, Somali, Turkish, Punjabi and Greek. The survey results will be reported back to the school at the end of September

Page 5

The Ridiculous Rhyme Show

Footsteps For the tenth year in succession, The Footsteps Move-ment Program has come to Dandenong North at the start of this term. These movement classes are held on a Thursday and provide students with a fantastic cardio workout.

Mr Malone organises this program for all students from Prep to Year 6 and everyone gets the opportunity to expe-rience what the program has to offer.

The enthusiastic instructors take the children through some high impact movements that teach them to listen and follow instructions quickly developing their coordi-nation skills.

The children love attending these lessons and try their hardest to follow along - no matter how tricky!

This type of cardio workout develops student fitness levels and increases their ability to sustain high im-pact exercise.

From the excited chatter from the students, it will again prove to be a successful program in 2019 and one that is looked forward to by the children.

As always, we thank the ladies from Footsteps and Mr Malone for providing our students with this quality program.

On Friday 28th of June, two performers from the Rhyme Rocket Show from the United Kingdom, came to our school to entertain and teach us about rhyming words. Teachers and students were pleased to watch this show on the last day of Term 2. It was a fun session planned for us. Every student was interested by their amazing performance. Year 5 & 6 students had the opportunity to be involved in a TV workshop in the hall with Henry and Dickie from the Ridiculous Rhyme show. Henry explained to us the roles of people who work backstage on a TV show. He showed us where the huge cameras belonged on the set, how they used the microphones and how they used the lights. While Henry was teaching us, Dickie was planning a role play with 3 other students. The TV workshop role play was a twist on the original story of Rapunzel. We had a great time at the Ridiculous Rhyme Show and especially during the session on how to make a tv show. By: Suha (6L)