GRAPEVINE
to travel across the world, stay with another family and go to a school that is likely very different from what you are used to. They will be here for the next five weeks before it is our students’ turn to travel to France in August.
If you have not had a chance to view the school’s Strategic Plan 2024 – 2028 it is available in the publications section of our website. This will be a live document that requires regular review and I invite comments from our community.
The Annual General Meeting of the School Association will be held on May 16th at 7.00 pm and is the forum for electing new members of the Governance Committee (School Board). The CEO of Steiner Education Australia, Andrew Hill will use this opportunity to give a presentation to parents. If you have previously become a member of the School Association, you will remain one. If not, please contact the office, membership is available to all staff and parents and is highly encouraged. If you are interested or want to suggest someone, to take the extra step of becoming a member of the Governance Committee, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me, particularly if you or someone you know has business, accounting, legal,
or marketing skills to offer.
Finally, Class 3 to Year 10 students and staff have been cross-country running (the track on Monkey Gully Rd) together on Wednesday mornings this term. It’s not a race against others, but it is a chance for individuals to challenge themselves on how far they can go in 10 minutes before turning back toward school. The atmosphere has been supportive and many students are putting in a huge effort and taking the time to encourage others. Talk to your children about how they understand this activity, their relationship with physical effort, and their willingness to endure discomfort. None of us can discover what we are capable of without a significant measure of discomfort. Learning to cope with this discomfort in any sphere of endeavor requires practice.
Next week’s Autumn Festival is a great chance to celebrate harvest, make lanterns and enjoy music together around the bonfire. Please help to make this a reverent occasion by closely supervising your children on the lantern walk and ensuring they are focused and appropriately behaved during the singing at the bonfire.
Glenn Hood
MORNING STAR Sandi Valerio
As the weather cools the Morning Star children have been singing songs of chilly Autumn days, chasing leaves in the garden and watching the colours change in nature. We had our first outside fire on Nature day last week. The morning was chilly and we gathered around the fire sipping chai and sewing hats for our Autumn Festival in the weeks ahead. Thank you to the mums that helped stich our gnome hats in the cold morning by the fire. We ventured into the big school and visited Finella in the garden on nature day to dig some potatoes. There were all shapes and sizes as we carefully dug in the soil to find our potato treasure. We look forward to cooking them up next week and having a feast of roast potatoes.Over the next 2 weeks we will practice our circle songs with Prep and prepare our lanterns for the Autumn /Lantern festival.
ROSA MUNDI Jack Finegan
Rosa Mundi have been busy this term preparing for our upcoming Autumn festival. The Autumn leaves are falling and our yard is vibrant with extra sunlight. The morning circle and verses we sing represent this change and our meeting place and fire pit are taking shape. The coming weeks will see us finishing off our Lanterns and gnome hats for festival and begin creating some warmer clothes for the coming winter.
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower. - ALBERT
ALL SCHOOL EVENTS AND DATES: WWW. MANSFIELDSTEINER.VIC.EDU.AU/CALENDAR DEAR SCHOOL
CAMUS
COMMUNITY
CLASS 1 Liz
Morrell
Class 1 have been immersed in the world of Numeria where Percy Plus, Tamara Times, Moira Minus and Duke Divide take us on many counting and number process adventures. We have begun writing and illustrating our first reader and look forward to sharing the story of Little Bird who saved his brothers and sisters from Tom the cat. Singing for the autumn festival with Class Two and making autumn lanterns with our Class 5 buddies has been a highlight.
CLASS 2 Amy Burns
Class 2 students have proudly been adding new books to the bookshelf this week… books they have made themselves! After very careful drawing, painting, writing and weaving, their collections of Fables are now beautifully bound and being busily read at any chance they get. We are this week beginning a grand adventure as we follow the journey of the King of Ireland’s Son- ‘his hound at his heel, his hawk on his wrist, and a brave steed to carry him, whither he list’. We are busily getting ready for our Autumn Festival and Mother’s Day with special craft projects, as well as singing each day to practice for our big community bonfire and singing next week.
CLASS
3
Ariel Stava
Class 3 have had a great start to the term with Farm Camp to Merrigum. Beautiful weather made exploring Greenwoods Biodynamic Orchard, Petersons Biodynamic Dairy and Saywell’s Biodynamic mixed farm a delight. The children sampled apples in the massive old cool store and helped clear old pear wood from a field in preparation for a new barley crop. They had an exciting time fitting milking cups in the dairy, patting the day old calves and sampling fresh warm milk. At Saywell’s the children took a close look at a canoe scar tree and sampled berries from the native creeping saltbush. Across all three farms the children learnt of managing water, increasing biodiversity through biodynamic preparations and animal husbandry practices, that increase the health of the land reducing the need for chemical inputs to manage pests and illness. Returning to school the children presented their beautiful farm tool projects to their peers, Class 2 and at assembly. The vast variety of projects was very impressive with no two a like. Lots of up-cycling and recycling was evident along with explanations of working closely with family to help bring ideas into fruition. Thank you to our class community to helping make these two experiences a great success.
CLASS4 Lou Pullar
Class 4 have started part one of our new Mountain Country Main Lesson which focuses on mapping and our local area. We are off on camp this week to explore the western side of the district, heading up to the Strathbogies to walk in the tall timbers around Mt Wombat with local mapmaker, Simeon Ayres, before heading out to Wappan Station to stay with the Tehan’s in the shearers’ quarters. (Their four children went to the school and Sarah is a regular CRT with us). One of the oldest sheep stations in the district, Wappan has been a refuge for the local Taungurung people and we also look forward to catching up with Aunty Bernadette and Aunty Angela on Country. At school, we’ve made nearly 200 mudbricks for our building project and these fine Autumnal days have been excellent drying.
CLASS 5 Clare Bennetts
Class 5 have been learning about the decimal system and base units of 10. We have measured our heights and estimated volumes of vessels. We are now working on putting data into tables and graphs and what the units after the decimal points in measurement stand for. The mushrooms grew over the holidays with moisture, darkness and warmth. Students painted some algae last week and will now move onto more complex plants. Botany will continue to tick along with Sam on Fridays as we move onto Australian History in week 4 with Clare.
CLAS 6 Jacinta Walker
Class 6 are looking forward to our horse riding camp next week. We have been practising the poem Man from Snowy River and will no doubt get a chance to run through it as we roam the high country on our horses – or around the campfire in the evening perhaps! We have started planting out our garden beds after carefully preparing them – digging out the old worn out soil and replacing with good compost and topsoil as well as mulching with straw to keep in the moisture. Flowers as well as vegetables have been planted and it will be interesting to see how they fare over the coming months. Our new Main Lesson is about Alexander the Great, where we are learning about how he conquered such a huge swathe of land as well as hearing many anecdotes about his life – making him a much more real character.
YEAR 7 Dion Hall
In our Chemistry Of Combustion Main Lesson, students will start at the beginning by getting busy with their hands trying to start their own fire using friction, persistence and maybe a bit of crafty thought. With our heads we will unpack a timeline of the history of fire, looking at how long (and how we know) humans have been playing with fire. Finally, we will gather together and warm our hands and hearts together by our own fire to imagine and reflect on the bonding that fire has generated in groups of people for time immemorable.
YEAR 8 Dion Hall
Year 8’s in Platonic Solids: Sacred Geometry have been exploring the geometry, beauty, history and mathematics of the five platonic solids. Busy hands have been drawing the nets for these objects with compasses and rulers or manipulating the shapes out of clay with precision and concentration. Meanwhile busy minds have been solving unknown angles and learning the mathematical language for reasoning and how we can say we know something is true.
YEAR 9 Seamus Kavanagh
The Year 9s have slowly entered the period of the Industrial Revolution. With a heavy focus on inventions and the people who made them, students have experienced the transition from agrarian to industrialised society. A big part of this social change is also an awakening to the political, economic and philosophical thinking from this time. We have explored the beginnings of Capitalism with Adam Smith and will be exploring the beginnings of Communism with Karl Marx. Using this knowledge we then look at how technology can aid us, and ask what we do with our time now that technology can do this faster and better than us.
YEAR 10 Nick Koschitzke
Year 10, alongside their French counterparts, have dived into the world of stop-motion animation, devising a story based on the theme ‘an exchange’. They have been tasked with creating a story, designing sets, props, and characters, and then shooting and editing their film in the painstaking frame-by-frame process. The process is well underway and we look forward to sharing them with you.
MUSIC Celeste Cleason
It has been lovely to return to school and get back into music making. Class orchestras are busily rehearsing, individual students are beginning to select solo concert pieces for Term 3 and extracurricular ensembles are building and developing their repertoire. During classroom music time, students have been singing the autumn festival songs in preparation for the festival in Week 4. We are looking forward to all singing together with our school community and holding the spirit of autumn around our bonfire.
PARENTS & FRIENDS Amber Wright
On behalf of the Parents and Friends Committee, I would like to thank our wonderful school community for the support of our most recent fund-raiser at the Strings on the Green event. Baked potatoes were a huge hit, selling approximately 180, and raising, after expenses, $1200. The craft stall had some beautiful products as always and did a fabulous job raising an additional $700 for the P&F Committee - thank you to the Craft Group! It was a wonderful evening, especially the opportunity for so many classes to get together and hear the orchestras perform! Thank you so much to our many parent and friend volunteers as well as staff who supported the event and helped with clean up! We look forward to hosting baked potatoes again next year!
REMINDER: At lunchtime Thursday and Friday the craft room is open, if students have project ideas from home this is a great time and space for them to work on these projects.
Autumn Festival
Early Childhood
THURSDAY 9 MAY 5.30-7.15pm in the preschool Morning Star & Rosa Mundi families
Class 1 to Year 12
FRIDAY 10 MAY 6 – 8.30pm at the school. Thanks to Year 9 for setting up and preparing soup and bread.
IB - HERE’S THE REACTION Mackenzie Henderson & Willow Matthews
STEINER PARENT BUSINESS
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A unique aspect of the IB’ Diploma’s chemistry course is the freedom to explore the discipline and its applications in everyday life. As an interactive way of assessing students’ capabilities, for the internal assessment (IA), students are provided the opportunity to explore any topic of their choosing and see how it plays out on a molecular scale. This year’s cohort has tapped into their naturally inquisitive minds and Steiner-inspired creativity to explore local phenomena on a molecular level. Take our local kombucha salesman: building on a year eight project, he’s now testing how enzymes can speed up fermentation, aiming to generate a quicker brew for what would have been a quicker buck. Then there’s our native angler, who chemically analysed the oxygen levels in Mansfield’s rivers, pinpointing the best fishing spots – farewell carp, you will not be missed! It does not stop there. Another student turned the spotlight on spinach, using chemistry to justify their disdain for the leafy green through investigation of its toxin levels. Meanwhile, another practical chemist questioned the real need for cleaning gutters by studying how plant debris affects water quality in their tank, discovering a microscopic world of activity in the muck. However, like all good things in the IB, a 4000-word write-up must follow... speaking of... hope you enjoyed... got some work to do...
Artwork: Grace Cleeland - Year 10
