Truthfulness, uprightness, and honesty are in this connection creative forces, while mendacity, deceitfulness, and dishonesty are destructive forces.
RUDOLF STEINER How to Know Higher Worlds
We must have experienced the divine within ourselves, before we can discover it in our environment. - Rudolf Steiner Dear School Community, I hope you enjoyed the long weekend and that you and your children are ready for the final few weeks of the term.
I would like to take the opportunity to thank Rachel Delany, Skye, Lou J and Vanya along with Nick and Amy J for their work in the swimming program this year. The students had a great time and learned valuable skills. This culminated in a fun swimming carnival which, due to storms, became an impromptu dance party led by DJ Geoff. We had several primary and secondary students continue their swimming adventures at the district, division and soon to be regional events. The staff have praised their effort, positive participation, spirit, and the care they have shown for their teammates.
The school has a huge number of camps and excursions that students are lucky enough to enjoy and be challenged by. Since our last messenger, Class 4 headed off on Farm Camp, Year 9’s have been to Buffalo, The Bluff, Mt Cobbler and spent 5 days hiking the Great Ocean walk near Apollo Bay. The Year 7 and 11’s camped at Stockyard Creek at Howqua Hills and the secondary students participated in the first Round Robin interschool sports day for the year.
Our music students across the school have been busy with their lessons, ensembles and orchestras and are gearing up for Strings on the Green, March 27th.
GRAPEVINE
P&F are preparing to fundraise by feeding us on the night with delicious baked ‘loaded’ potatoes. Make sure you block this out in your calendar and give the sports coaches plenty of time to replace them for the night if needed. Spuds are for sale from 5.30pm and music begins at 6.30pm. If you don’t yet have a steady instrument practice time in place for your children, it will help them (and our music staff) to get the most out of their efforts here at school.
The School Leadership Team is beginning to develop the schools’ policies around the myriad of issues concerning the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI). While there are some obvious issues such as plagiarism in written work and serious bullying with generative AI (deep fake) images, there are also many deeply concerning issues for individuals and society more generally regarding the future of work, transparency, accountability, intellectual property, relationships (with chat bots) etc. AI is already enmeshed with many aspects of our lives and the more educated we can become as a community, the more able we will be to make informed decisions that will help us guide our children. A simple google search will give you plenty of places to start (the first thing you will likely see is the AI Overview!).
Happy Searching!
Glenn Hood | PRINCIPAL
LITTLE ROBINS PLAYGROUP Laura Herridge
Beautiful Autumn has arrived, and Little Robins Playgroup has been a hive of activity. Our mornings begin with kneading and rolling sourdough buns, cutting fruit and preparing our table for a lovely morning tea together. Some families have started knitting some slippers for their little ones, which will be such a lovely ritual to add to our morning rhythm as the days get cooler. By Winter, we will have some soft woolly slippers to keep little feet warm & toasty. Our mornings together in playgroup are settled and delightful, what a blessing.
CLASS 1 Kristi Mulvihill
MORNING STAR Sandi Valerio Echidnas
Lady Autumn is here. We are singing songs of the changing season, bees, frogs, birds, ducks and fish are all part of our days. The gestures we use in our circle time translate to play both indoors and outdoors. Cubby’s are built, homes are made, tables are set for tea party’s and animals are cared for as the children make them safe in paddocks and shelters with soft cloths and blocks. Imaginations are being engaged and we are right where we should be as the season begins. Friday, Nature Day is evolving. We are venturing into the big school on walks, playing ‘Farmer in the Dell’, weeding our garden ready for Autumn plantings, caring for our worms, working on our compost, and most importantly exploring nature and all it has to offer. We will begin preparation for the upcoming Easter festival next week. We have baskets to make, nests to felt, cloths to dye and clay eggs to build. Busy hands for busy little children, a lovely time of the year to work together.
MORNING STAR Tash Kavanagh Honeybees
The Honeybee’s have settled in with all of our new friends. We have been making twisties together and working with our rhythm across the days and weeks. In our morning circle, we have been row, row, rowing our boats down the river, spotting our Australian animal friends along the way. After a very hot start to the term, the Honeybee’s are enjoying the cooler days, sister rain, and beginning to notice the first hints that Lady Autumn is beginning to visit. We have started our Autumn and Easter morning circle to welcome her into kindergarten and prepare for our Easter Festival at the end of term.
ROSA MUNDI Jack Finegan Nature days on Fridays have been well received after finishing up with the swimming program, the children have built cubbies with sticks, created dams and lakes in the sandpit with friends and enjoyed sunny days with outside picnics for Lunch. We enjoyed pancakes on Shrove Tuesday and have heard the story of The Rooster and the Sultan which is always a class favourite. We are all getting ready to enter our last few weeks and celebrate the coming of Autumn, we have been busy in the garden turning over the soil and planting our winter vegetables. And of course we cant forget about the quickly approaching Easter Festival.
Class one has developed a lovely routine of class skipping paired with fun verses at the very start of the day. The class is making the most of the mild mornings and doing the most of the Morning Circle with big body movements, rhythms and gestures and then a small obstacle course in the beautiful playground.
CLASS 2 Samantha Charlotte Number Patterns
Class Two have methodically worked through the various number patterns created by the times tables. They have been walking, singing, drawing, writing and weaving each of the patterns, marvelling at the beauty created by each. We are now moving together into the world of animal fables, where we will be pondering the morals explored in each, and developing literacy skills along the way.
CLASS 3 Liz Morrell Mathmatics
This week in Class 3 Mathematics, we explored measurement in real-life contexts, learning about metric units for length, weight, and capacity, and practising how to both measure and estimate accurately. Earlier we measured how big Noah’s Ark may have been using cubits! We also continued building number fluency by working on our times tables, focusing on finding multiples of 2, 5, and 10. In PE, we enjoyed our first athletics afternoon with Liam, where we were introduced to the skills of high jump and long jump. It was a hot afternoon, but everyone finished feeling accomplished and satisfied with their efforts. The class look forward to welcoming parents into the room on Thursday 19th March at 2.45 for a sharing of a Spanish play and class work from the term.
CLASS 4 Clare Bennetts Fractions
EARLY CHILDHOOD
Class 4 have been working hard on their mathematical skills, learning about factors, prime numbers and multiples, to build up to a Fractions Main Lesson later in the year. They have also been introduced to long multiplication looking at examples such as, “How many chicks will hatch if 23 hens are sitting on 12 eggs each?” They are on camp this week which will consolidate some of their Farming Main Lesson skills covered last year and introduce them to navigation and mapping for our Local Area/Mapping Main Lesson that will see us to the end of the term.
CLASS 5 MICHEAL BRITTON Australian History
Class 5 have continued to hear stories of the early Australian settlers arriving in what was then known as New Holland. The students focused on the remarkable life of William Buckley, a convict who escaped from Sullivan Bay (modern-day Sorrento). After surviving alone for some time, Buckley encountered the Wathaurong people, who took him in, believing he was the spirit of a recently deceased community member, as he had unknowingly taken a spear from his burial mound. Buckley went on to
live with the Wathaurong people for 32 years, with no contact with Europeans. Throughout this learning, the students have been practising their literacy skills by summarising longer stories, sequencing key events, and identifying the most important information. Working in small groups, they each wrote about a different stage of Buckley’s life, created an illustration to accompany their writing, and presented their work to the class. Our exploration of Australian and Victorian history will continue in the coming weeks as we prepare for our camp to Sovereign Hill. We have begun our Decimal Main Lesson, building on the students’ work with fractions. They are learning to convert fractions into decimals and vice versa, while also exploring historical number systems and the value of a base-10 system. The class will be applying this learning through both Australian History contexts and Athletics-based problem-solving activities to bring some real life examples.
CLASS 6 Lou Pullar Australian Explorers
We are extending our Australian Explorer Main Lesson at present, with a focus on mathmatical and logistical considerations of the expeditions. Students are investigating fractions, decimals and percentages of supplies and representing the information in various graphical ways. Carol has introduced Geology on Thursdays and is currently focusing on Tectonic Plates, rocks and minerals.
YEAR 7 Dion Hall Combustion
The Year 7 chemistry lesson on combustion encouraged students to take a scientific approach to exploring the fascinating nature of fire and its impact on the world. Through experiments, they investigated how factors such as fuel thickness, oxygen supply, and different ignition sources influence fire behaviour. Students then applied this knowledge to real-world contexts, using Victorian bushfires as a case study to better understand the complexities and challenges of managing fire in our region—home to the most fire-prone state on the most fire-prone continent.
YEAR 8 Charlotte Dayman perspective drawing
This main lesson, students in year 8 have been learning the rules of one- and two-point perspective drawing, creating drawings using vanishing points and horizon lines. Students have used their understanding of the value scale to shade their drawings. Highlights of this main lesson have been creating tonal rendered cityscapes and dream bedroom designs.
YEAR 9 Bella Moore/Dennis Bainger
Walking The Bluff, watching the sun rise was an enlightening experience for our Year 9 students. For three days and two nights we explored this iconic range, so close, but seemingly far from home. This week we are off to `Mt Buffalo, with a few last minute changes due to weather conditions.
Year 10 Venessa Hewson The Birth of Literature
Year 10 undertook a rich exploration of The Odyssey using the Community of Inquiry methodology. As a class, we studied five chapters in depth, with students collaboratively generating and democratically selecting the philosophical questions that guided our discussions. These inquiries centred on concepts such as justice and revenge, heroism and choice, loneliness and survival, with the intention of moving toward deeper shared understanding. Throughout the block, students mapped Odysseus’ journey using symbolic representations and examined the complexities of his character, particularly the contradictions embedded in his role as a hero. We then brought a contemporary lens into the classroom by comparing The Odyssey with Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, considering how the perspectives of minor or overlooked characters reshape the narrative. We analysed the archetypal Hero’s Journey and asked: What makes someone heroic? The Main Lesson culminated in a creative writing task in which students wrote from the perspective of a minor character from The Odyssey, allowing them to apply their understanding of voice, bias, and alternative viewpoints.
IB DIPLOMA YEAR 11&12 Phoebe Brown + Leith Pierce
The Year 11s and Year 7s recently went on a shared camp to Stockyard Creek. This was the Year 11s’ first opportunity to lead activities and provide peer support as part of their Creativity, Activity and Service Program. This is now a yearly event for the two year groups to remain connected, a follow-on from the Primary buddy groups. The Year 11s organised games with the class and also went on a hike where they learned about the history of Sheepyard Flat and the old mill that sits near the trail. Pictured is one of the team games we shared.The whole Diploma group are now in the beginning phases of writing their monologues for performance at the beginning of Term 2. These are in response to Drago Jančar’s short story collection, The Prophecy and Other Stories. This exploration has been supported by studies of Post-Communist Balkan nations through Kristen Ghodsee’s Lost in Transition during anthropology classes.
MUSIC Celeste Cleason
Class 3 students are settling into the weekly rhythm of instrumental lessons and daily home practice. They have had great fun exploring all the wonderful sounds their new instruments can make, (including the scratchy ones!) and have joined together in their first class orchestra sessions. We are looking forward to the Strings on the Green music event on Friday 27th March. P&F will be serving food on the evening from 5.30, and orchestras will begin performing from 6:30pm. Loaded potatoes ($8) and flavoured mineral water ($2) will be be available to purchase. Card payment preferred. Please BYO plate and cutlery.
SECONDARY ART Charlotte Dayman
The Year 7’s have been busy designing, screen printing and embroidering medieval banners to be displayed during their King Arthur play at the end of the term. Students have been inspired by heraldic animals and medieval motifs to create their designs and have brought them to life by making stencils for screen printing and learning chain stitching to embroider details.
SPANISH NEWS Vanya Foers
In Spanish news, learning is in full tango with Preps beginning to master greetings and feelings and happily singing some new songs to match their early days with new vocabulary. Class 1, 2 and 4 have been looking at sharks (los tiburones) and all things of the sea (el mar). Class 3 are preparing an Eric Carle story ‘Brown Bear’ to perform for their parents and friends next week. Classes 5 and 6 have been working hard on their listening and speaking skills.
Strings on The Green
The Camps, Sports and Excursions Fund (CSEF) is provided by the Victorian Government to assist eligible families to cover the costs of school trips, camps and sporting activities. If you currently hold a valid Healthcare, Pensioner or Concession card, you may qualify for the annual payment.
Please contact the admin office with your card details at admin@mrssk.vic.edu.au
