4 March 2022

Newsletter Articles

PRINCIPAL’S MESSAGE

Dear Parents, Friends and Students,

Welcome to our first edition of the Pinnacle Newsletter in 2022. I am hoping we will have a great year with our students, staff and parents InshaAllah.

I would like to welcome all of our new parents who joined the Pinnacle family this year across all year levels. Traditionally, we have our Welcoming BBQ to meet the parents of new students however, as you would expect, we had to cancel this program due to the pandemic. We will seek other alternatives to compensate for the loss of this wonderful event throughout the year.

I would like to start by giving you some great news about our construction which we have been planning for a couple of years. The GG high school building construction has commenced. The new facilities will open many alternatives for our students and their learning. I will keep you posted in the upcoming newsletters.

We were able to offer the Miniroos Soccer program to our upper primary students this year. Students are enjoying training on the oval with their coach. The program is currently planned to run until the end of term 1.

Our PE teacher, Ms Andrews, has started her afterschool sports club at GG campus. Please contact the school, or Ms Andrews directly, to get more information regarding the club as early as possible as places are limited.

I would also like to remind you that you can contact me at atilla.sinik@pinnacle.sa.edu.au or by booking a face to face meeting via the front office. Please do not hesitate to bring up any issues throughout the year, even if it's very minor, so we can work it out when the matter is easy to resolve. Also, please forward any positive or constructive feedback you may have as this will contribute to the development of our school and community. :)

Stay safe and stay well.

Kind Regards,
Mr Atilla Sinik
Campus Principal

SECONDARY COORDINATOR

Welcome back!

What a start to 2022!

The year most definitely started a little differently this year. The majority of our secondary students showed a great commitment to their learning through their engagement with online lessons, which assisted in a smoother start to the year. The self-discipline the students exhibited only demonstrated the maturity, engagement and responsibility of our students. Thank you to all parents/caregivers and families for supporting their children during this time. It has been great to see the girls back at school.

As the new Secondary Girls Coordinator in 2022, I am excited to work with the Pinnacle College community in what is a time of great growth for our School, in particular our Golden Grove campus. There are many exciting new developments for our students.

The construction of the secondary building is underway. This will open up new elective opportunities classrooms, science labs, art rooms and common areas specifically for our secondary students.

We have introduced STEM initiatives including the STEM Girls Academy, which will be run with the University of South Australia. A huge thank you to Mehmet Aslan and Genine Meredith who have begun this initiative with our high school girls.

There will be an after school secondary girls’ sports club, run by our very own Miss Andrews. This will provide students with opportunities to participate in a range of selected sports, and to delve deeper than they are able to during HPE lessons. This will be an excellent opportunity for our students to develop their skills and fitness. This is very exciting as our secondary students have not had this opportunity before.

Our School and House Captains have gone through an online selection process this year. We had several amazing candidates but I believe we have an excellent team of leaders this year. This provides the students excellent opportunities to develop their leadership, organization and public speaking skills, along with working closely with the school community. I’d love to see some house competitions running throughout home group. Congratulations to all our School and House captains. I can’t wait to see what we achieve.

Lastly, students must continue to enter school via the gates by the gym, while temperature checks are required. We also ask that the students are dropped off between 8.30am and 8.45am. Before this time, there is no duty supervision. I understand this can be difficult but please adhere to our school supervision times as best as possible.

Please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions or concerns about your daughter as partnerships between parents, teachers and our school are vital in providing the best possible support for our students.

Kind Regards,
Molly Affolter

PRIMARY COORDINATOR

Thank you to all families for supporting us in the beginning of the school year. It has not been easy but working together has meant the lack of class time led to minimal impact. It was refreshing to see students return and I know teachers have missed them and the ability to teach in a normal fashion.

Currently, staff are performing temperature checks for students each morning. Please ask students not to enter the front office and instead, use our gates by the gym. Similarly, we ask that for the near-future parents do not enter the school grounds. Parents are welcome to enter the front office to complete any administrative requests.

I also request that families aim to drop-off their children no earlier than 8:30am and collect them by 3:45pm at the latest. We appreciate issues may arise but please be aware that there is no duty supervision outside of these times.

Kind Regards,
Myles McLean

JUNIOR PRIMARY CURRICULUM COORDINATOR

The beginning of our 2022 school year has been quite different from previous years. It has been a challenge for some, however our students have risen to the occasion once again and have returned to face-to-face teaching with such positive energy. I would like to thank students and parents who have responded with great flexibility and understanding. We are very grateful for your support!

Our Reception and Year 1 students enjoyed having most of the school to themselves as they settled into their new learning environment. We have enjoyed welcoming our new Foundation students and loved meeting all our new parents. Staff have watched our youngest students navigate their first weeks of learning and they have all embraced their daily routines with increasing confidence. I am looking forward to watching our Foundation students grow and flourish in the years ahead.

Having your MYSIS login details will give you access to your child’s learning progress. This is a great way to know assessment dates, assessment types and results. If you have any questions in regards to MYSIS, please see your child’s teacher.

Tips for Junior Primary Parents:

Improving your child’s Pencil Grip

The most efficient way to hold a pencil is the dynamic tripod grasp (similar to that in the image below) where the pencil is positioned between the thumb and index finger with the pencil resting on the middle finger.

If your child needs support with using the correct pencil grip, fine motor activities can help them develop the skills they need to hold their pencil functionally, and write more easily. You can also purchase pencil grips (example below) to strengthen their grip.

Fine Motor Strength

Children need strong hands and fingers for a whole range of day to day activities for school and play. As well as enabling functional pencil grip, strong wrists, hands and fingers helps children write with endurance and fluency.

Some great exercises to help build your child’s fine motor strength include:

Paper Crumpling: Have your child crumple up sheets of newspaper or scrap paper into the smallest, tightest ball possible. Increase the challenge by only letting them use one hand to crumple the paper.

Playing with play-dough:

Make a spider or octopus by having your child first roll the play dough into a ball, flatten it, and then pinch out eight legs using their pincer fingers (thumb and index finger),

• Make spaghetti by having them pull off small pieces of play dough and roll them into long ‘noodles’,
• Making animals or objects using the play dough.

I look forward to witnessing all the students’ positive successes throughout the year.

Kind Regards,
Maria Vokolos

SECONDARY-HEAD OF MATHEMATICS

Hello everyone.

I, Sami Hussein, have taken over the role of Head of Department for Mathematics. There are a couple of important announcements regarding the structure of mathematics, in 2022, that I would like to point out. They can be summarised as follows:

1. Semester examinations have been removed for year 7-9s. Instead, major term tests that include a combination of topics have taken its place and the category weightings have been adjusted accordingly.
2. We have introduced “Quick Formatives'' as an effective tool of feedback. This affects 5% of year 7-10 grades and 0% of SACE grades. The purpose of these short quiz style papers is to provide the teacher with immediate feedback on student understanding (assessment for learning) and students will be given individualised feedback as the teacher marks the paper. Feedback is most effective when the student cares. They are completed at least twice a week. From feedback received from some students, it is evident that they are already seeing the benefits of these papers. Refer to sample paper.

If you require any further information regarding the structure we are using this year, please feel free to reach out to me at sami.hussein@pinnacle.sa.edu.au

Kind Regards,
Sami Hussein
Head of Mathematics

SCHOOL COUNSELLOR

Welcome back to another school year. I hope this year brings everyone health, happiness and prosperity.

For Mental Health and Wellbeing, we have hosted a Beyond Blue virtual event where we were lucky to have Josette, a Beyond Blue Ambassador, share information about Beyond Blue, mental health and her own experience. Josette talked about anxiety, depression and her journey of hope, recovery and resilience in the face of mental health conditions. The session was very interactive and informative. Please ensure that you always check in with your children as we learnt that family is a vital part of a support system. Please reach out if your child needs any support.

Kind Regards,
Zina Almufti

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT DEPARTMENT

Dear parents,

As a community engagement department, we would like to continue our programs with your valuable support. Hopefully we’ll start our activities with class afternoon teas in the following weeks. This is a great opportunity to get to know each other as parents of the students who have been sharing the same classroom setting for many years.

We would like to congratulate our year 9 student, Zoha, for her ongoing success and would like to thank her father, Mr Rafeek Muhammed, for opening their house for a visit.

A special thanks to the families who shared the beautiful grounds of Glen Ewin Estate last Sunday for a fig picking activity.

We look forward to your continued support.

Kind Regards,
Serap Sinik

FRONT OFFICE NOTICES

LIBRARY

Welcome to the library in 2022. There will be lots of exciting events in the library this year. The Premiers Reading Challenge is starting again. The forms will be kept in the classroom, so they don’t get lost or crumbled. Students only need to read 12 books to complete the PRC. We are hoping to have a prize for the 1st class (years 3-6) to completely finish the challenge. Please encourage your children to read any books and add to their PRC form in their classroom. The year 5-6s are volunteering for Library Monitors. There will be a Book Cup competition where the year 5 and 6 students will read 5 books and compete in a quiz style competition.

We all need to remember to take care of our books, so they will last. Please do not have books around food, drink or pets. Please do not take books out into the weather. But the most important thing, please return your library books to the library. We still have quite a few books overdue from last year.

A reminder if your student has ANY overdue books (including overdue books from 2021) they are NOT allowed to borrow ANY books from the library until all books have been returned or paid for.

Keep Reading,
Lisa Preston

PASTORAL CARE

Welcome back to the new academic year! I hope 2022 will bring health, success and joy to our school community. In this issue, I’d like to talk about pastoral care programs in general and share the happy moments of the latest 2021 Summer Adventure (Maylor) camp. Pastoral Care programs commence from the second week and aim to boost students' wellbeing and motivation through activities and study sessions.

As for the Maylor camp, 44 students from different year levels joined the fun and educational activities such as canoeing, archery and swimming. Students participated in some collective discussions and also enjoyed the beautiful nature and delicious food. They were able to refresh their minds and learn a lot of new information. There will be other Pastoral Care camps for reading and opportunities for students to participate in small and large group activities throughout the year.

Kind Regards,
Pastoral Care team

LIFE SKILLS

The first few weeks of 2022 were a little hectic for everyone but thankfully we are now back into face to face learning. During week one of our Life Skills program, the students got busy in the kitchen cooking.They were all quite competent with cooking and cleaning up after themselves. They learnt some new skills whilst making their chocolate crackles.The best fun of all was being able to taste their own delights then being able to take them home to share with their families.

You never know we may well have a budding Masterchef amongst them!

Kind Regards,
Donna Freeman
SSO

MUSIC

Welcome to Music for 2022! It’s good to finally be back with hands-on, face-to-face learning. Although each year level is doing something different in their Music lessons this term, we are building on our musical knowledge from last year. Some of the topics being covered by Years F-6 are learning to play particular instruments; use treble clef notation skills; to craft our own instruments; and to digitally compose our own music. It brings me great joy to watch our students gain confidence in their ability to read, write and play music.

Kind regards,
Mrs Sarah Hateley
Music Teacher

FOUNDATION

The first four weeks of school have been full of many exciting and new learning experiences. I am amazed with how students have eased into school routines and have established many friendships within the class. Students are enjoying learning the Jolly Phonics sounds and actions and have made many improvements with writing their name and using the correct letter formations. We also had the opportunity to observe our pet caterpillars turn into cocoons, then hatch into beautiful butterflies! Students thoroughly enjoyed learning about the life cycle of butterflies and what animals need to survive.

Kindest Regards,
Mrs Vokolos

YEAR 1

Despite the difficult events that occurred at the beginning of the year our Year 1 students had an enjoyable start to the year! In English, we have been studying recount writing using our 5 W’s and connective words as well as information reports. Students have been working hard to write complete sentences with full stops, capital letters, fingers spaces and beautiful handwriting. We have been developing our ability to use descriptive language to make our sentences more detailed and interesting. In Science, students have enjoyed learning about living things which has led to many informative discussions about how animals protect themselves, what their habitats are and what food they need to survive. Students are looking forward to our excursion to the Adelaide Zoo to consolidate our understanding of living things.

Also, a big congratulations to Yasminah and Imran for being elected as this year’s SRC members for Year 1! :)

Kindest Regards,
Mrs Centofanti

YEAR 2

Welcome to Year 2! The student had a prickly start to the academic year with two weeks of online learning. I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know the students over Zoom and could not wait for face to face learning to begin. In the classroom, we have started our ‘My Connections to Place’ inquiry project and in the coming days, the students will begin interviewing their parents and grandparents to learn more about their connections to South Australia and the wider world. In Science, we have been exploring materials and natural resources. This week we made Ice-cream in a bag! As you can see from the photos, the students thoroughly enjoyed making the mixture, shaking it into ice-cream and then eating the results.

Kindest Regards,
Ms Villani

YEAR 3

Welcome back to school! A bit of a tricky start to the year, so I thank you for your patience and work with the students at home. We are working hard practising our Narrative writing, as we prepare for NAPLAN next term. We have started the term with some sizzling starts to engage our readers and get our creative juices flowing! Maths has been a bit difficult as students have learnt to tell the time to the minute and use five minute intervals. We are now moving on to mental and written addition/subtraction strategies.

Homework this term will be given on a Monday and collected on a Friday, this includes their Grammar books, Homework booklets, Mathletics and Literacy Planet. It is great to be back at school seeing all of the familiar faces after being away on Maternity Leave. I can’t wait to see what a great year we will have! We welcome Ayan and Arwa to the Pinnacle College Golden Grove campus.

Kindest Regards,
Mrs Rees

YEAR 4

Dear Parents/Caregivers,

Welcome back!

In Science, students have been learning about germination & plant life cycles. Students have started their experiment on germinating bean seeds & we can’t wait to see what happens within the following days. In HASS, we have been focusing on rainforests & their 4 layers (emergent, canopy, understory and forest floor).

I would also like to congratulate our 2022 SRCs - Cameron Idris & Farah Al-Alami.

Reminder:

• Our homework will be given on Tuesdays & will be due the following Tuesday.
• ‘No Hat, No Play’ - Students need to bring in a labelled hat for recess & lunch.
• Our PE day is Thursday (students need to wear PE uniform).

Kind Regards,
Miss Sawafta

YEAR 5

Dear parents/caregivers,

In year 5, we have developed a way to give recognition to positive behaviour shown throughout each and every day from our students. The Speck of Gold wall is a great way for students to name the school values they show to each other every single day.

By giving each student a chance to reflect and highlight positivity that happens day to day, it helps promote positivity. We often focus on things that we don’t do right, and forget about the things we do.

Every week, we choose a stand out Speck of Gold that will earn a Speck of Gold, Gold Star. Since we have been back, Aahil and Kawthar have earned a spot on the Speck of Gold Wall for showing kindness to their peers.

This week's Speck of Gold Star is Aaya for showing Initiative and kindness. Well done speck of gold stars.

Kind Regards,
Mr Incoll

YEAR 6

In Year 6 our focus is on the text type narratives. Students have selected one of two themes and are working well to incorporate dialogue and examples of punctuation and grammar to their work. As students acclimatise to the expectations in Year 6, please support them by checking their diary for daily work and making sure they are prepared for the coming day.

In Mathematics, students have completed place value and by the time you read this, units of measurement. In Science and HASS, students will be developing their critical and creative thinking as well as analytical research skills as they complete a STEM assessment on Renewable Energy, and comparing data of other countries to Australia.

Kind Regards,
Mr McLean

YEAR 7

Year 7 English students have been studying narrative conventions in preparation for their written narratives. They have been learning the conventions of fairy tales, analysing short stories, and practicing their figurative language techniques in class. They have made posters defining different language techniques, and tested their knowledge with many quizzes!

Kind regards,
Year 7 Teachers

YEAR 8

In Science so far, we've learnt about the safety rules in the science lab and how to perform a scientific investigation. We've also learnt how to analyse data and information to use it for charts and graphs as well as variables. In our science books, we have read and studied about the contribution of famous scientists, including Australians, to scientific knowledge. We've presented multiple group work activities by analysing data too. Finally, we completed scientific reports after conducting our experiments!

By: Meryem, Asmaa and Ayah Yr 8

Kind regards,
Year 8 Teachers

YEAR 9

The Year 9 students have made a great start upon returning to school! They have been very hardworking during their online learning and have carried this same work ethic into the classroom. In PE lessons, the girls have been learning about different fitness exercises and how to perform them correctly. They have been trying their best and working up a sweat during class time. Keep up the good work!

Kind regards,
Year 9 Teachers

Ronya, Abida and Eleina using their muscles!

YEAR 10

This term, the year 10 students have begun their practical HPE lessons with Badminton. We have been looking at film analysis to provide peer feedback on technique and skills to enhance performance. The girls are developing their match awareness and understanding and are able to view themselves during the match. The students are participating in both double and single tournaments, developing their collaboration, leadership, footwork and tactical analysis. For their sports elective, they are looking at fitness components and programs. The school has invested in gym mats, kettlebells and dumbbells in order to provide a new program for the girls.

Kind regards,
Year 10 Teachers

LOTE - Arabic

السلام عليكم و رحمة الله و بركاته

Welcome back to another year of learning. I hope you all enjoyed your holidays with your families.

This term we have some amazing new challenges to explore. In Year 1, students are focusing on pronouncing and writing the Arabic alphabet with short vowels. Students are learning how to join letters to make words. They are also learning how to read and write the days of the week in Arabic.

Kind Regards,
Soheir Habib
LOTE Teacher

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