Wednesday morning was weird. The sky was an eerie red and a little bit scary. Many of us wondered what it was. The Weather Channel gave us the answer.
Sydney had been hit by the biggest dust storm in over 40 years. The dust came on strong winds from the central west of the continent.
It left everything covered in a thick layer of red dust. In some places it rained red mud.
Health experts advised us all to stay inside, no physical activity and all windows and doors closed.
Many classes explored the reasons for the red dust and expressed their feelings about it in both pictures and words.
Hope you enjoyed the work of Stage 2S which was inspired by the dust storm.

Book Week this year had the theme of Book Safari and we had a great time.

The teachers and our Librarian Mr Vitale organised all sorts of activities in the Library.

We had a Jungle Safari Performance which many of the students went to see.

During this week we have all worked really hard to earn money to buy more Home Readers for our school. We raised nearly $3000.00.

We had a Guessing Competition with the following great prizes: a bike, a DS Lite and games, an ipod shuffle, a teddy bear and a whole pile of Guiness World Record Books.

The Guessing Competition was drawn on Friday after our Book Week Parade.

The parents ran a Cake Stall so there was plenty of bad stuff to eat.

Wow!!! All the amazing characters that were walking around our playground were incredible. Check out the photos of the ugly group who are more often identified as the teachers.

The other photos are of the students who won their stage Best Dressed Competition as well as one of our teachers who won the Best Dressed teacher Competition. UGLY!!!!!

All the performers looked amazing in their costumes BUT it was the discipline and precision as dancers that blew us all away.

Congratulations to the group and to Mrs Papadis who created the entire piece along with her talented troupe.

Thanks to Mrs Harrison and Miss Salmon who helped Ms Papadis on the day and to all the other teachers and parents who went to the Opera House to support our team.

Enjoy this short video clip of the beginning of their performance.

This term the K to 2’s are dancing to be fit and to getting used to the idea that dancing is for all ages, shapes, sizes, boys as well as girls!!

The School Dance group has so many boys keen to perform because the school’s consistent and constant approach is to ensure all our students are given the opportunity to make up their own minds about dance and movement from an early age.

Nature's Light 'n Sound

All classes will be working with scientists from the CSIRO during the next 2 weeks.

They will be learning about Light ‘n Sound.

As usual the sessions will be very active with the students being scientists rather than observers of scientists.

If you want to find out more about Light ‘n Sound look at Hunkins Experiments Site.

The collection of space capsules, rockets, space stations, Hubble telescope is huge.

Hope you enjoyed a glimpse of the Space capsule that first circled the moon and came back to Earth. Look at the burn marks on it. It had to land in the ocean so it didn’t smash to bits or burn up.

The Space Capsule was sent into space on top of a big rocket like in the picture.

When did man first step on the moon? Can anyone tell me? Isn’t the picture inspirational?

The way man gets into space now is on the Space Shuttle which can go back and forth like a plane,
here is a picture of one of the Shuttles. How many were there? What were their names?

The Space Shuttles take astronauts to the Space Station now.

At this birds of a feather session at NECC 2009 we were looking at what it was possible to do with iphones / ipod touch apps.

Be entertained by the guitarist and his 3 iphone ‘appers!!!

This is a huge conference where over 13 000 people come to learn about the latest trends in technology.

People meet other people and talk a lot but mostly teachers spend time going to lessons and learning.

We’ve learned about;

• how powerful Google is as a web based engine for searching the Internet and that it helps focus and then organise your searching
• iphones and ipod touches and what great learning tools they can be in the classroom
• all sorts of amazing Apps from web 2.0
• literacy and how it’s so much more than reading and writing and how it is nearly impossible to test using old test formats
• making the classroom a happy and fun place to be
• what students think about the way they are being taught and how they would like to be taught using technology
• the importance of the web as a place for publication
• the new web, web 3.0

As we were walking through the Air and Space Museum I heard a kid say “they shouldn’t being doing that now.They should be doing it at night when we can’t see them doing it!” he was really indignant.

We thought it was great because we got to see that this amazing model was so simple to put together. With rolls of gold and silver foil, wire, sticks, black paint and glue we could make one too!

Is anyone at BSPS up for the challenge? After all aren’t we are all studying stars and space and things like that next term or the term after.