Dear Families,

I had the privilege of joining our Year 6 students on camp yesterday at Orana Girl Guide Camp, Roches Beach. It was a fantastic experience for everyone involved!

The students had an incredible time engaging in a range of activities, from a fun and challenging orienteering session run by Orienteering Tasmania—where they worked together to navigate and find flag markers around the site—to a refreshing beach walk along the coast.

The evening was filled with laughter and good food, with a classic BBQ dinner featuring hamburgers and sausages. We capped off the night around the campfire, toasting marshmallows while sharing ghost stories, jokes, and plenty of campfire fun.

The first day and night of camp were a great success, and we look forward to hearing all about the adventures of the next two days!

This Friday, we will come together as a school community for our annual Harmony Day Assembly at 11:45am. Harmony Day is an opportunity to celebrate our diversity, acknowledge our different cultural backgrounds, and strengthen our sense of belonging. Student are encouraged to wear cultural dress or orange, the national colour for harmony.

As part of this year’s focus, we have been deepening our understanding of our new Goulburn Street Primary School - Our Expectations matrix:

• Respect – We are kind and care about others’ feelings.
• Courage – We speak up and stand up for others, being an ‘Upstander’.
• Connection – We acknowledge and celebrate our diversity through cultural events.

A key part of our learning has been raising awareness of racism—understanding what it is, how it feels, and what we can do to stop it. We want our school and wider community to be a welcoming and inclusive space where everyone feels safe, valued, and supported to learn and grow.

We look forward to celebrating Harmony Day together and continuing to build a culture of respect, courage, and connection at Goulburn Street.

Warm regards,
Michael

Students are invited to join in Harmony Week Celebrations at Goulburn Street Primary by wearing cultural dress or the colour orange on Friday 21^st March, 2025.

Harmony Week will also be celebrated at the assembly on Friday at 11.45.

We have had a beautiful start to our year in Kindergarten. It is incredible to think we are already approaching the end of Term One!

First term is such an important time for our Kinders. They are learning and adapting to new routines and expectations, exploring and becoming familiar with a new learning environment and beginning to build relationships with teachers and peers. Our Kinders have enjoyed outdoor play, playing with our classroom mud kitchen, painting, construction, messy/sensory play, music and songs and imaginative play.

Children have also enjoyed many first such as PE with Mr Latham, Music with Miss Farell and Library with Mitch.

Throughout Term One, our class have explored the concept of belonging with an emphasis on identity, relationships, communication, collaboration and diversity. We read In My Heart by Jo Witek and then created our own Happy Heart drawings. We talked about the things that make our heart happy.

Harmony Day

As part of our Harmony Day celebrations, we have been learning more about our classmate Kevin and his family’s Korean heritage. We had a visit from Kevin’s parents who talked to us about South Korea. They told us about traditional Korean food (kimbap and bibibap), traditional Korean dress (hanbok) and we even practised saying a few phrases in Korean.

Kinder and Primary Music Newsletter Report

Thank you to everyone at Goulburn Street Primary School for welcoming me into your community, it has been a pleasure to get to know the wonderful staff and students during Term One. The Kinder and Primary classes have had fewer Music lessons than usual due to school events and public holidays, but we have packed a lot into our time together!

The Kinders have been learning about the routines and expectations in Music, including how to hold percussion instruments and when to start and stop playing. They have also been developing their ability to play in time to the beat, which we have been calling “the heartbeat of the music”. We have explored this through hand-held percussion, body percussion, and action songs.

The beat is an essential element of music, and the 3-6 Primary classes have also started the year with a review of their beat-keeping skills. To do this, we have played the Cup Game, an exciting game in which students must perform a percussive pattern on a cup before passing their cup to the next person in time to the steadily accelerating beat. If someone passes their cup out of time to the beat, we end up with a cup traffic jam and the game ends! We are continuing to focus on beat through a variety of learning experiences such as name chanting games and performing with percussion instruments.

During Term 1 Mrs Ovens and classes from Prep to Gr 2/3 have been enjoying playing marimbas. We have been having fun developing our basic mallet (or ‘sticking’) skills. Working with partners and small groups has also been a focus, aiming to develop listening skills, co-operation and working as a musical ensemble.

We began the year playing ukuleles and revisiting our strumming skills. “Rock around the Clock” and singing/dancing games have been favourites.

We hope you enjoy these photos of our music making!

Our LiL program runs each Friday morning from 9-10:30am in the Kindergarten classroom. Any child who is aged from 0-4 years is able to come along with a parent or carer to participate in a range of activities including painting, role play, construction, small world play, craft, stories, singing, sensory play, nursery rhymes and gross motor skills.

This week our book focus was Pete the Cat – The Wheels on the Bus and we enjoyed extending our prior knowledge of one of our favourite nursery rhymes! The children made some fantastic Pete the Cat puppets with the help of their parents and had fun experimenting with paint stamping and rolling! We always love playing with construction equipment and mark making with texts, dot markers and paints!

Book covers

We started the year by designing and painting covers for our Writer’s Notebook.  We used a neurographical technique which we later built upon for our new artwork that was used for the Explosion boxes.

Harmony Day

As part of our Harmony Day activities the class has been exploring the concept of bias, and the science of skin colour.

? **Expression of Interest: Rock Ukulele Workshop ** ?

Does your child have a keen interest in music performance and a desire to explore playing in a contemporary band?

Keen and experienced GSPS parents have floated running a Rock Ukulele Workshop after school on Wednesdays. The workshop would provide GSPS students an opportunity to learn ukulele basics, with the aim of forming a ukulele rock band and perhaps performing later in the year. In addition to multiple ukuleles, there may be scope to include a rock rhythm section (e.g. drums, percussion, bass) and vocalists in the band.  

Initially the workshop would be open to grade 5-6 students, but will open to grade 3-4 students should numbers allow.

There will be a very reasonably priced fee per student applied to cover costs and to contribute to GSPS fundraising.  

? If your child is interested, please contact Adrian ?

- Email (preferred): adrian_p-t@outlook.com

- Text: 0439 380 182

Thank you to families who have returned raffle books and bought along an easter treat for the raffle. There are still a few more weeks to do so before the draw on the 11th of April.

Recognition for our school health nurses

School health nurses play an important role in our school community, delivering health education and promotion, and supporting student wellbeing.

The Department for Education, Children and Young People (DECYP) has recently introduced the internationally recognised DAISY Award program in schools through the School Health Nurse program.

Those with a health background may already be familiar with this program. Run by the DAISY Foundation, it is a way to acknowledge and celebrate the care and compassion that nurses deliver to the people they care for each and every day.

The program is run in 38 countries, but this is the first time anywhere in the world it will be delivered in a school setting.

Nominations are now open for the DECYP DAISY Award.  If you or a family member have had a positive experience with a school health nurse and would like to see their work recognised, why not consider nominating them! 

You can nominate them using this form, by sending an email to daisy@decyp.tas.gov.au, or getting in touch with school staff for help or more information.

Whether you’re a student, parent or carer, or a DECYP staff member, anyone can nominate a school health nurse you think is worthy of recognition.

Nominations will close on 13 June, with winners announced at an awards ceremony on 4 July. For more information, you can also visit DECYP’s website.