Your Move At Coolbinia Primary School Term 1 Update

Wow! 2019 has well and truly started and a lot has been happening at our school in the five weeks that we've been back. To start the year, new staff to the school were given a professional learning on the various sustainability programs being run at Coolbinia (Year 3: Water Wise program, Year 4: Waste Wise Warriors, Year 5: Your Move and Year 6: Energy Smart). Given that focus on sustainability at our school, the members of the Cross-Curriculum Priorities team thought it was crucial that new staff receive PL on the programs that will be running around them. On two occasions I have provided a further snapshot/update about the Your Move program at our weekly communications meeting to ensure that all staff are aware of any Your Move events for the week and are promoting them accordingly in their classrooms. As the Your Move Champion and program coordinator at Coolbinia Primary School, I drew up a manual and exemplar templates that contain all the relevant information for anybody stepping into the coordinator role in the future or for staff who need further support with integrating it into their classrooms.

Our first Your Move student team for the year was established in the first week of the school term given that we have Year 5 students across four different classrooms this year. We started off our meeting by discussing what Your Move program is about, what active transport is, why it's important and what can be done about it within the school community. We then used a calendar to map out the school term and identify the roles and responsibilities of the first student team. We discussed the need to integrate the learning activities into our regular learning activities so that they were embedded into the curriculum rather than 'adding another program on'.

The Your Move students published their first article in the school community bulletin this week (please see attached document). This year we decided to relaunch Fume Free Friday's as a regular active travel day, which will take place on a fortnightly basis on non-assembly weeks. To further integrate Your Move into the sustainability and leadership programs in the school, we decided to reward travel smart students with our PBS behavioural tokens rather than raffle tickets. Students will receive a respect token (for caring for the environment) and a character token (for actively participating in community events). Our first Fume Free Friday will be taking place tomorrow, which the students are very excited about.

The Your Move team also conducted our start of the year hands up survey two weeks ago. The hands up survey was integrated into Mathematics as part of the Statistics and Probability strand of the curriculum. After the survey was conducted, we used an Excel Spreadsheet to tally our results and convert scores to percentages to further analyse the data. Students defined the issues that were currently road blocking a higher number of active travel, which included recently hot weather, new students not knowing about active transportation and lack of promotion regarding Your Move for 2019. Students decided that the first action point on their plan is to ensure that adequate promotion is conducted this term. We looked at previous examples of Your Move posters from 2018 to see what was effective or ineffective about them. This viewing component of the curriculum was embedded into English, while the poster design and creation was conducted during Visual Arts lessons. Posters for our upcoming National Walk To School Day are almost completed and so are the Fume Free Friday relaunch posters. The students decided to have a soft launch this week without posters to generate a buzz around the event.

Overall, we are very excited for the upcoming year and can't wait to see what new challenges the new students rise to occasion on.