If you haven't already, mark it in your calendar - the 2025 school musical is Madagascar Jr.!

The cast will consist of students in Years 4, 5 and 6.

Please complete the following form to provide consent for your child to audition for, and if successful through that process, participate in the school musical, including after school rehearsals and performances. Please note that this form is for cast interest only. Information regarding the backstage crew process will be sent at a later date.

Please complete this no later than Friday 28th February to register your child's interest to audition.

EOI - 2025 MUSICAL CAST AUDITION FORM

Please carefully check the dates/times below, as it is expected that all cast members will attend all rehearsals and performances.

Audition dates (WSS Hall) - Auditions will be held on Wednesday 19th March OR Thursday 20th March in the afternoon after school from 3.00-4.15pm. Students need only attend one of these afternoons. In Week 6, students who are auditioning will be given access via Showbie to audition materials.

Rehearsal dates (WSS Hall) – every Wednesday and Thursday 3:00pm-4:30pm from Week 6, Term 2 (28th May) until Week 7, Term 3 (27th August). Please note there are some extended rehearsals with a finish time of 5.00pm. These are on the 20th, 21st and 27th of August.

Performance dates (WSS Hall) – Thursday evening 28^th August, Friday evening 29th August and Saturday evening 30th August. Each show will be performed at 6:30pm. Students will remain at school on the Thursday and Friday afternoons, to get dressed, hair and makeup and also to have a light dinner.

If your child is successful in the audition process, cast member families will be invoiced for $37.50. This cast levy is used to go towards the creation and/or purchase of props, costumes and cast t-shirts used across the entire cast. Parents may still be asked to contribute some simple items towards costumes, such as leggings/t-shirts, hair accessories etc.

If at any time you have any questions in regards to the musical, please email musicals@windsorss.eq.edu.au. Please do not direct these enquiries directly to your child's class teachers or individual staff emails. This central email address allows us to make sure the enquiry goes to the person responsible for that area of the musical. 

Cross Country Date Change- Important Update

In order to ensure that all of our wonderful students can run their cross-country (Year 3-6) or their house-spirit fun-run (Prep-Year 2) in the cool of the morning session, we are updating the dates of this year’s middle-distance running events.

Please note that the cross-country events were initially listed to take place on Wednesday 26 March.

The new dates will be as follows:

• Year 3-6 Cross Country
  • Thursday 27 March
    • 12 Years Events from 9:15am
    • 11 Years Events from 9:35am
    • 10 Years Events from 9:55am
    • 9 Years Events from 10:15am
    • 8 Years Events from 10:35am

• Prep-Year 2 ‘House Spirit Fun-Run’
  • Friday 28 March
    • Year 2 Events from 9:20am
    • Year 1 Events from 9:40am
    • Prep Events from 10:00am

The focus of the Prep-Year 2 events will be on participation and house spirit. These are non-competitive events.

The Years 3-6 events are competitive events. The top 5 placegetters in Years 3-6 will be selected to represent the school at the City Districts Cross Country event which will take place in Term 2.

For students in Years 3-6 who are seeking to get fit and in-shape for the upcoming cross country, we are offering a free before school run club, which will meet on the cricket pitch at 8:30am on Tuesday and Friday each week from now until the City Districts Cross Country Carnival in Term 2. Parents and carers who would like to join in on some laps of the oval are most welcome to join us.

The Windsor Way & the revised Student Code of Conduct

In 2024, we reviewed our Student Code of Conduct, as is good practice and a requirement of the Department of Education at regular intervals.

The 2025-2028 Student Code of Conduct is available on our school website, here.

As part of the review, stakeholders helped re-define our ‘Windsor Way’ poster, which consolidates the core values, character traits, social-emotional keys to success and daily conduct that helps us set our students up for success. This is imaged below, and a printable copy, for families that wish to print one for the fridge at home is available here.

Working in line with advice of acclaimed psychologist, Karen Young (https://www.heysigmund.com/) who has spoken to our school community on numerous occasions over the years, alongside guidance from the work of William Glasser (Choice Theory), there have been some adjustments to our code of conduct in line with moving towards a connected approach to recognition. We will no longer have a public badge system for Gold and Silver nor will you see charts in rooms with levels of behaviour on them.

However, we will still take numerous opportunities to celebrate students and provide positive acknowledgement of the values, character traits, keys to success and conduct that we wish to continue to strongly embed across our school.

The most notable and exciting update for 2025 is the commencement of a set of ‘5 Keys’ annual collector cards, which are pictured below.

Teachers will take opportunities throughout the year, to recognise students who are demonstrating the 5 keys to success by making a special presentation in class to students, recording their name on the back and enabling the student to take home their collector card to cherish.

We would love to share some images of families celebrating students bringing home a card during the year by making a photo collage of celebrations, however they may look in your household. If you would ever like to share an image of either one-card coming home, or a completed set, we would love to see them shared via the below email address!

5_Keys_Collector_Card_Celebrations@windsorss.eq.edu.au

 Social Emotional Learning @ Windsor SS

 Supporting our school culture- Key Language for Home and  School

The old adage asserts that “It takes a community to raise a child.” At Windsor State School, we have a fantastic community, who are undoubtedly a large part of the reason that we have such wonderful students. It is through the work of all members of the school community, including staff, parents and carers that we are able to have a collective positive impact on the lives of our students.

In order to support the key language and social emotional keys to success that we aim to promote within our students at Windsor State School, we would greatly appreciate the continued support of parents and carers emphasising, reinforcing, recognising and acknowledging the 5 keys to success at home, as we do at school.

As such, we encourage you this week to find an opportunity to  discuss confidence, organisation, persistence, getting along or resilience with your child.

The ultimate goals through the embedding of these social emotional keys to success are for all children to achieve to the best of their ability, develop positive relationships and behaviour and experience the highest levels of wellbeing.

    

     

      

As always, we welcome community members to join us on campus for school parades/ assemblies throughout the course of the term. Please see below for the “planned” parade/assembly schedule for Term 1 2025:

On Thursday 6 March, we will hold our first School Disco for 2025!

This evening, will coincide with a free Internet Safe Parent Education Evening, aimed at parents of students in Years 4-6 (part of our BYO iPad Programs). 

If you are a parent/carer of a child in Years 3-6 and wish to register to attend the free Internet Safe Parent Education Evening in our STEM Room (next door to the hall) whilst the Year 3-6 disco is taking place, please click here.  

Tickets for the disco will be available for purchase in the Quadrangle of a morning in the week leading up to the night. They will also be able to be purchased at the door with cash or card, but be mindful that long lines often form on the evening. Please have the correct amount of cash ready for your child's ticket purchase.  

On the evening of the disco, we also ask that you send your children with small denominations of coins or notes so they can purchase food easily.

The times for our discos are as follows: 

Prep- 2: 5:00pm - 6:00pm 
Years 3-6: 6:15pm - 7:15pm

Prep and Year 1 parents and carers are welcome to have a seat in the back of the hall during the Prep-Year 2 Disco. However, as we encourage increasing independence in our students, we ask that the parents and carers of other year levels please drop their student/s at the North-Eastern Corner of the hall, to be welcomed inside by staff. 

Parents are most welcome to drop their student/s in, leave the school grounds and then return at the end of the disco to collect them. 

At the end of each disco, students will be seated in class groups and parents/carers will be invited inside, to collect their student/s. Students will not be permitted to leave without a parent or carer there to collect them.

The disco will act as a fundraiser to help support families in need in order to enable as many students as possible to attend camping programs this year, particularly our Year 6 cohort who are heading to Canberra.  

Lisa Heard (Head of Curriculum)

Learning to read

Between entering school in Prep and leaving for high school in Year 6, a lot goes on in terms of learning to read.

In order to be able to read, we need to be able to decode fluently and comprehend what it is we are reading. Sometimes we can have one of those skills without the other and this leaves us perhaps having listening comprehension without being able to read a text or able to decode the words in a text without sufficient understanding of the vocabulary and background knowledge to make any sense of those words. For example, if you are trying to read a text written in a language that you don’t read/speak, you won’t be able to access it; however, if someone translates it for you and it is about a topic you understand, you will have comprehension of the text (listening comprehension). Alternatively, if you have no experience in the study of engineering, you may be able to decode the words in an academic text / research paper about engineering, but it might not make much sense because you don’t have the background knowledge and/or vocabulary to make sense of those words.  These are factors teachers need to consider when teaching students to read across all of schooling, not just in the first few years.

In the early years, students are in the stage of ‘Learning to Read’. During this stage our focus at school is teaching students the alphabetic code (sound-symbol correspondences) so that they can begin to decode words. This involves a lot of explicit teaching of sounds and how those sounds are represented by letters/symbols. A very important concept students need to understand is that letters DO NOT make sounds; rather, letters and combinations of letters represent sounds – this is quite a different way of thinking about letters and the alphabet. For example, ‘a’ does not ‘say ‘ay’ for apple’. Actually, the letter/symbol/grapheme ‘a’ can make many different sounds. At the same time as learning to decode and subsequently read fluently, children are also exposed to a large diet of literature which they read and analyse in terms of the language features, text structures and author techniques right from Prep. This combination of explicit teaching of the code and exposure to high quality literature ensures that students are being taught to both decode and comprehend.

From Year 2, students begin to read more independently and are exposed to more complex texts with richer themes and characters. They also transition to reading a lot of non-fiction texts to ‘bridge’ their decoding to technical vocabulary and build background knowledge needed for comprehension. We call this stage the ‘Reading to Learn’ phase of teaching reading and Year 2 move from ‘Learning to Read’ to ‘Reading to Learn’ throughout this year. From Year 3, students are expected to have mastered most of the alphabetic code and are reading more independently. The teaching of reading is absorbed within in all subjects/learning areas and spelling (Sounds Write). Students are required to lean more heavily on their comprehension and use reading to learn new concepts and content in all subject areas.

Throughout all phases of learning to read and reading to learn, students are supported by teachers and specialist literacy support teachers (STLaNs) to achieve mastery by being exposed to more repetition of what has been taught and practised. This is how we ensure the best possible path to success in reading for all students at Windsor State School.

What’s going on in classrooms this week?

This week’s year level spotlight is going to shine on Year 2, so let’s have a look at what they have been getting up to.

Year 2

What a great start to the year we have had in Year 2! In English, the students have been enjoying narrative texts together. They have been sharing their opinions about narrative texts, analysing them for language features that authors use to entertain the reader and practising writing descriptive sentences in preparation for planning and writing their own narrative text at the end of the term.

In Mathematics, students have been busy learning how to measure the length of objects, practising their number facts and using them to solve addition problems.

In Science, students have been investigating different materials. We have been using our senses to observe, feel and describe different materials using scientific property words. We have also started testing different materials for the properties of strength and water resistance. Soon we will use our knowledge of materials for a special Science project. Stay tuned for our creations!

Year 5

The start of Year 5 has been an exciting time for students.  They are making great use of the G block multi-space and have continued to show the Windsor Way with their interactions and movements around the school.  In Science, students have been engaging in hands-on experiments to learn about the concept of camouflage. Through these experiments they have witnessed how animals and plants use this technique to blend into their surroundings. Students have also been challenging themselves to improve their quick recall of times tables, extend their knowledge of vocabulary and sentence construction, and learn all about Democracy. 

Well done Year 5!

Scholastic Book Club Orders

Book Club orders have now closed and are being processed by Scholastic. Your order will arrive home with your child/ren as soon as it has been checked at school. Thank you to those families who have bought books as it provides us with funds to purchase new books for the Library.

Queensland School Library Week Competition

QLD School Library Week Competition is closing soon on March 1. It has been pleasing to see entries brought in to the Library, these are now hanging up as part of a display.

The primary competition has two categories, Prep - Year 2 and Year 3 - Year 6.  Students can win a $50 gift voucher and the school will receive a $100 voucher.

Prep - Year 2: What is your favourite story? Draw or paint a picture to illustrate this. Your picture should be on an A4 sheet. Add a caption if you like. Year 3 - Year 6: The theme is Window to the World. Produce an artwork to reflect the theme Window to the World.

If your child is interested in participating, you will need to fill out an Authority to Publish form which needs to be attached to their entry form. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5524677ae4b0456be51cacd8/t/5db8013f8af28129ea489e18/1572340045627/Authority+to+publish.pdf  

Please note, that if your child requires to have school staff administer medication for them whilst they are at school, you will be required to follow the processes embedded within the below hyperlink for each child and for each medication that requires administration:

Consent to Administer Medication Forms

Seawolves swim club is open every friday night. We have had huge interest this season and are enjoying seeing swimmers of all levels participate in this great community event. Information about our club can be found on our website https://windsorsspandc.com.au/activities/windsor-seawolves-swimming-club/ or by emailing seawolves@windsorsspandc.com.au

Reminders for club members:

• Seawolves IWO carnival this Sunday 23 February against Ithaca and Oakleigh clubs. Please check your email correspondence if you have nominated your swimmers.
• Save the date: Seawolves End of Season Carnival and 30th Anniversary celebration Saturday 29 March from 1pm. 

        If you’ve been part of the mighty Seawolves over the years—or know someone         who has—we’d love to hear from you!  

       Share your photos and memories with us by emailing             

               seawolves@windsorsspandc.com.au.

Amanda (Seawolves President)