Term 2 Staffing – Principal 

I have been fortunate enough to work here at Calliope State School, as your Principal, for a year now. Your substantive principal, Moira MacKenzie, has extended her leave and my contract has been extended. I will remain here for Term 2.  

Cross Country

It was fantastic to see so many students participating in Cross Country on Monday. A huge thank you goes to Mrs Betts for all of the time that she has put into planning and preparing for the day. I also need to extend a thank you to the staff and students that supported her in ensuring that the event ran so successfully.

COVID

The school community, and especially the staff, need to be commended for supporting one another as our school faces increasing cases of COVID.  Thank you to all parents and carers for your support during these complex times and for your open and timely communication with the school. Please be aware that COVID may have caused some disruption to students accessing the teaching and learning throughout the term, which in turn will affect assessment and reporting as we progress through semester 1. The teachers are working hard to support students to catch up with missed content when they return from periods of leave related to COVID.

Regional Office Staff

We are currently experiencing some staff shortages due to staff being unwell. As a result of the large numbers of staff on leave, we had to call on Department of Education, Regional Office staff to support us towards the end of last week. We had the Regional Director and members of the regional Teaching and Learning Team in classes teaching, as well as our own Leadership Team out in classes too. This ensured that we had supervision for all students in classrooms and we could provide staff with their non-contact time for planning and preparation. We are eternally grateful for the support that was offered to us during this time.

Unwell children

Essential to the success of these measures is that if your child is unwell or displaying any COVID-19 symptoms, they must not attend school. I cannot emphasise this message strongly enough – it is critical to keeping our school community safe. Your child, if they have COVID-19 symptoms, can visit your local Queensland health testing clinic and will be given priority access to a free RAT.

Parent Volunteer Mandatory Training

All volunteers at Calliope State School are required to attend a mandatory training workshop before they are able to assist in our classrooms, tuckshop or for school events.

A session will be held on Monday morning, March 28 from 9 – 10am.

Please register your attendance by emailing admin@calliopess.eq.edu.au or calling our school office on 49758333.

Please also note that all volunteers need to be vaccinated and will check-in through the school office.

Social Media and the School Community

https://behaviour.education.qld.gov.au/resources-publications/Documents/social-media-and-community-online.pdf

This guide offers some information to parents and caregivers about how to use social media in relation to comments or posts about their school community.

The internet, mobile phones and social media provide wonderful opportunities for you to network and socialise online. While these technologies provide positive platforms for sharing ideas, they also have the potential to cause pain and suffering to individuals, groups or even whole communities.

Just as you would discourage your child from behaving inappropriately online, it’s important to remember that sometimes negative comments that parents and caregivers post about their school community have a greater impact than expected.

This guide offers some information to parents and caregivers about how to use social media in relation to comments or posts about their school community. Reputations of teachers, schools, principals and even parents can be permanently damaged — and in some cases, serious instances of inappropriate online behaviour are dealt with by police and the court system.

Crazy Hair Day

This Friday, 25 March, RotaKids are holding a Crazy hair Day. This is to support two of our student leaders who are cutting their long locks for ‘Hair with Heart’. Students are asked to bring a gold coin donation on Friday to support this worthy cause and our two brave students.

Staff of the Week Leadership Award – Monique Cheesman  

For demonstrating inspiring leadership in her position as cohort leader. Monique supports her team with effective scaffolding to support all students to access the curriculum. 

Staff Member of the Week Peer Award – Lee Maycock  

You are a ball of energy who puts your all into everything you do around the school.  Everyone knows that they will get a friendly greeting as they cross paths with you during the day, and you brighten our days with your can-do attitude and sense of humour.  Thank you for all that you do to improve staff and student wellbeing, including your involvement with the social club and the running of the “Jag the Joker” competition, which brings a sense of fun, excitement and friendly competition to the work week.  You are a star.

FINAL THOUGHT

Regards,

Coralie Ditchmen

Acting Principal

Student Learning and Wellbeing

This Weeks PBL Lesson – Respectful Language

This week, students will be revising over the school expectation of respectful language in the classroom, playground and tuckshop. Students will be given scenarios where they have to identify who and how people are being respectful or disrespectful. They will also correct the disrespectful behaviour and identify what respectful language looks like, sounds like and feels like in these areas.

Working at Success Program - WASP

At Calliope State School, we have a Working at Success Program (WASP) to help assist students to be successful with their behaviour at school. This is where students have up to three goals that they strive to achieve. These are agreed upon by teacher, parent and Student Learning and Wellbeing Teacher/Case Manager. There may be other support people that also have input eg. Principal, Deputy Principal, HOSES or inclusion teachers. The student is involved in the process and there is an agreed upon reward for the student if they reach their target. The WASPs are sent home daily to parent/s. This supports with open communication with teacher and parent. The data is also collated by the teacher and Student Learning and Wellbeing Teacher to see if or where changes need to be made to support the individual student.

Week 8 Behaviour Data

Positive Behaviour for Learning- Behaviour Action Summary (Term 1 2022 to date) 

Positive Behaviour for Learning- Behaviour Action Summary (Term 4 2021 to the same week) 

This term we have had many of our Calliope students achieve success in their chosen sports and make the Port Curtis team. Port Curtis is a representative team where the best of the best are chosen to represent our district at the Capricornia trials.

Our Port Curtis representatives are:

Sienna- Basketball

Georgia- Netball

Trace- Squash

Kobi, Mason, Carter, Parks and Sophie- Rugby League

Congratulations !

Cross Country Results

Yesterday we had our annual Cross Country. Well done to all the students who participated! Thank you for all the wonderful support from Calliope SS staff and our wonderful Helping Hands staff.

Big congratulations to Flinders house, who won again this year!  

Cross Country Age Champions

12 year old boys- Kobi

12 year old girls- Gian (new record holder)

11 year old boys- Mason

11 year old girls- Sienna (new record holder)

10 year old boys- Sam

10 year old girls- Nevaeh

9 year old boys- Braxton

9 year old girls- Lara 

Congratulations to Prep B who had an amazing attendance rate for Week 8. Their attendance rate was 96.36% for the Week!

Also, congratulations to the 3 classes which were at or above our school attendance target of 94% for Week 8.

Remember, every day you are away is a learning day lost.

2022 is nearly a quarter done…how did that happen!

We have an amazing team to continue the year with, some you may already know some you may not. Either way please don’t hesitate to stop us and say hi and introduce yourself. We are your voice within the school, and we would love to meet you.

President: Tenielle Wode, previous President and busy Mum of four children.

Vice President: Kate Whitehead, previous Executive and also a busy Mum of three children.

Treasurer/Book Keeper: Bec Harlow, working from way out west at Morven, previous Treasurer, Mum of one and owns a post office.

Treasurer on the ground: Geoff Kerr, busy Dad of two children and new to the team! And a Dad, how exciting!

Secretary: Cass Perkins, also new to the team and a busy Mum of two and long-time Calliope local.

I don’t know about you, but I see a pattern here, our whole executive team are busy people, P&C doesn’t need to take a lot of time, your contribution can be one event, one meeting, one hour of volunteering, we just want you onboard!

Cookie Dough

Wow! A whopping 471 tubs of cookie dough were sold for a profit of $1884. Great work everyone! All cookie dough needs to be collected Thursday 31 March from 2:00pm in the Multipurpose Hall. All cookie dough needs to be collected on delivery day as we DO NOT have the means to keep the dough refrigerated as needed.

Tuckshop News

Tuckshop operates at both first and second breaks from Tuesday to Friday. Ordering is only through the QKR! App.

Ice-creams: all student that order ice-cream/ice blocks will be required to take their bag up to the tuckshop to receive their ice-cream/ice blocks. These are not placed in bags as frozen food and hot food are not friends. Think Olaf and warm hugs!

Illness: We know that there are a lot of children going home at the moment when unwell. Please if you have Tuckshop ordered and you need to pick your child up, let the Admin ladies know, if your child’s order is ready, we could get it taken to office for you to take home, alternatively if its not prepared we can hold order your for another day. Unfortunately orders that are left at end of the day cannot be replaced on future days.

WE NEED HELP IN OUR TUCKSHOP! Can you spare a day or even a morning/afternoon? Contact Lisa at our tuckshop from Tuesday – Friday or via email at pandc@calliopess.eq.edu.au

Helpers needed Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday; any time you can contribute would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Uniform Shop

Our uniforms can also be purchased through QKR! If you have any questions or queries, please email uniformshop.calliopess@gmail.com

Contact Details

We would appreciate it if you could use these avenues to contact us with queries, feedback, or complaints. Please also remember that our team are volunteers, doing what we do because we love our school and wish to support our kids through their education. We do have other jobs, responsibilities, and commitments but we always try to respond to your concerns, questions, tuckshop, or uniform orders as quick as possible Email: pandc@calliopess.eq.edu.au for general enquiries uniformshop.calliopess@gmail.com for Uniform Shop enquiries.

Phone: Tenielle Wode 0406218312 (President)

We hope you all have a great week, stay safe, stay healthy and if you need assistance please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Your P&C Team,

Tenielle, Kate, Bec, Geoff & Cass

NAPLAN is a national literacy and numeracy assessment that students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 sit in May each year. It is the only national assessment all Australian students do. NAPLAN is just one aspect of a school’s assessment and reporting process. It doesn’t replace ongoing assessments made by teachers about student performance, but it can provide teachers with additional information about students’ progress.

Calliope State School will again be providing NAPLAN Online for students in Years 3 and 5 from Tuesday May 10 to Monday May 16. Further information has been sent home with all students in Years 3 and 5 this week.

For more information about NAPLAN:

• contact your child’s school
• contact your local test administration authority at nap.edu.au/TAA
• visit nap.edu.au To learn how ACARA handles personal information for NAPLAN, visit nap.edu.au/naplan/privacy