Terara Times

It's official: Terara won the Small Schools Swimming Carnival! Congratulations to all students that entered in events, and congratulations to our age champions Molly, Finn and Viktor.

To qualify for District, students needed to come within the overall top two places in their events. Our District Carnival will be held on Thursday the 27th of February, and all students who qualified have already been given notes. I will be attending the carnival as team manager for the small schools, and I've heard rumours that a certain retiring principal might be volunteering on the day as well.

We currently hold all three Small Schools sporting trophies here at Terara, and I look forward to our students working hard to ensure those trophies stay where they belong!

The independent review into the non-educational use of mobile digital devices in NSW schools is complete and NSW has taken action to address its recommendations. A new Student Use of Digital Devices and Online Services policy is now available. It covers student use of smartphones, smart watches, tablets, laptops and any other device that allows connectivity to the internet and applications. It applies to both school owned and personal (BYO) devices. The policy builds upon the important work in schools, teaching young people to use digital technology in safe, responsible and respectful ways, as we prepare students for life beyond the classroom.

Each school has been asked to develop a procedure for how they are going to implement this policy. As our school is very advanced in its use of technology in the classroom, this policy and procedure changes very little of our classroom practice as our technology is always for educational purposes.

The main points to consider are:

• Mobile phones are not to be at school, and all communication between parents and students during school time will go through our front office as per usual.
• If a student does need a mobile phone for before/after school safety reasons, it must be handed into the front office upon arrival at school. It will be locked away securely for the day, and the student can retrieve the device at the end of the day.
• Parents, teachers and students need to take an active role in discussing online safety so that our children can be safe, responsible and respectful when using devices and the internet at school and home.

This procedure will be discussed at our upcoming P&C meeting. You are able to download the procedure below. If you have any questions or feedback, please email the school.

Tuesday, 31st March is School Photo day. Photo order envelopes will be sent home today with students.

There are 2 ways that you can purchase school photographs.

1 – CASH

Using the traditional envelop. Each student fills in their own envelope and hands it back to the school along with cash payment. Please ensure correct money AS NO CHANGE CAN BE GIVEN.

2 – ONLINE PAYMENTS

Using the schools ONLINE CODE that is 318517. NO envelope is required to be returned to school. The order is collected online.

 

Family photos are available and should be ordered using the family photo envelope available from the front office.

In our K/1 and 1/2 class we are learning about the life cycle of chickens. We are very lucky because Mrs Wilson and my mum brought in egg incubators. Egg incubators keep chicken eggs warm and cosy so they can hatch into chicks. I am very excited to watch the chicks hatch. It takes 21 days for the chicks to hatch, so we should meet the chicks in Week 6. I’ll be back then to show you pictures of our new friends. - Abby

Last week in our art lesson we made self portraits. A self portrait is a drawing of your own face. We used pencils to outline our faces and then oil pastels to colour inside it. I liked using the oil pastels because they colour in more space than pencils. I like art lessons and can’t wait to do more.

Congratulations to the winners of last week's Froggy draw - Levi and Hunter!

The focus for this week is 'be safe'.

The annual P&C Welcome BBQ will be held at 6:00pm - 8:00pm on Friday the 21st of February. Bring along a share plate of salad or dessert, your own cutlery, plates, cups, drinks, nibbles, chair/picnic rug and spend some quality time with the Terara family at this incredible event.

Please RSVP by Wednesday via the eforms on our Skoolbag app or by handing back the paper form.

This year we are continuing our partnership with Jervis Bay School Of Music to provide music lessons for interested students within class time. This year we have Alfi returning to teach guitar and Megan teaching piano, singing, saxophone and flute. Check out their website or contact our office to enquire.

*The lessons do come at a cost to participating families.

At Terara, we use our Skoolbag app to simply and efficiently communicate with our school community. We use Skoolbag to:

• send out notifications to your smart phones informing you about whether excursions will be postponed
• to keep you up to date with events
• send newsletters

You can also use Skoolbag to send in absent notes if your child is away.

Please make sure you download Skoolbag and subscribe to the classes that your children are in so you don't miss out on what is happening at TPS!