Newman Newbies: From the Head of Primary
It is a joy to be constantly immersed in the learning journey of our Primary aged students. Term 3 is a time of activity for our PK-Y6 children. The calendar is full of activities and events that challenge their creativity and promote collaboration.
Ideas Lab
The Ideas Lab at Newman College is the latest edition to our teaching and learning landscape. The Lab was opened in Term 3. Designed to inspire our early learning students from Pre-Kindergarten to Year 2, the Ideas Lab comes from the concept of a ‘Makerspace’. This is a place for children to explore, create and work collaboratively together. It is a community centre with tools that combine equipment, community and education to enable students to design, prototype and create. At Newman College we aspire to grow creative lifelong thinkers. It is not about the teachers having the right methodology to generate an answer, it is about setting up task where there can be multiple pathways to a finishing point. The Ideas Lab is a tangible resource for students to explore these paths for themselves
The Ideas Lab supports the College’s Vision for Learning, addressing it’s four pillars:
- Challenge – offer further enhancements in our curriculum programming with open ended, inquiry-based questions/projects that challenge all students.
- Collaborate – work with partners, teams and across classes
- Create – promote creative thinkers
- Celebrate – reward in the discovery of new ways of solving problems together
The Ideas Lab will help reinforce learning in the classroom by bringing to life the creative side of the curriculum. Students from Pre-Kindergarten to Year 2 will have the opportunity to work in the Ideas Lab on an inquiry project that connects to a Literature book. The Ideas Lab is further supported by the Ideas Trolley, that allows for continuation of the activities in classroom as and where required.
Book Week
In Term 3 we celebrated Book Week with the theme of “Finding Your Treasure”. Our students dressed as characters from their favourite books, bringing them to life. Reading is such an important part of our students learning and we are so lucky to have such wonderful libraries at each campus. A wide range of activities were also organized for students to participate in, such as author visits and even a trip to the Cambridge Library. Book Week bring such joy and excitement to our College community. It is so powerful to see the impact that creative fiction can have on the lives of our children. Click here to see more photos from the day.
Gratitude Project
This term, the College has taken on a Gratitude Project as part of the path toward building resilience to support Wellbeing in our community. On the Primary campuses, staff have focused their projects around ‘daily hits’ of practising gratitude with the students. Throughout the project, activities and reflections are shared through Seesaw as well as prominently in many classrooms and we encourage you to engage in conversation with your children around practising gratitude at home. There are many simple ways that you can support this practise with your children in the family setting, such as:
- Modelling gratitude – stating aloud things that you are grateful for, and thanking each other openly
- Quick gratitude chats – in the car, on a walk, around the dinner table or at bedtime, go around and each mention something you’re grateful for that day
- Gratitude journaling – support your children in keeping a notebook where they can write down what they are grateful for each day
- Find opportunities for your children to identify those less fortunate than themselves and express their gratitude – watching the news, reading the paper, in your local community
Author, Alan Cohen, wrote: “Gratitude, like faith, is a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it grows, and the more power you have to use it on your behalf. If you do not practice gratefulness, its benefaction will go unnoticed, and your capacity to draw on its gifts will be diminished. To be grateful is to find blessings in everything; this is the most powerful attitude to adopt, for there are blessings in everything.”
