Principal  Message

As Victoria begins it's fifth lockdown today, we approach remote learning with a sense of familiarity. Students were apprehensive and hopeful yesterday afternoon that the lockdown would not be called, however by 4:45pm our predictions were confirmed with 3 days of remote learning and 5 days of lockdown in our homes.  Whilst the news is not welcomed, as a community we are committed to making the best of it.

Once again, our staff have outdone themselves and demonstrated professionalism and commitment by helping with onsite learning for our essential worker families and vulnerable students.  It's difficult to teach online while supervising and teaching onsite, but our teachers and ES staff always rise to the challenge.  

However, rather than focus on remote learning in this newsletter I would like to focus on some very positive changes you may have noticed when returning to Term 3.  

We have been able to launch our Classroom Libraries this term with the donations provided by our generous families. The money you donated on Compass has put more  high quality books in our classrooms than ever before at WPS. In fact, we have been able to purchase close to 100 books.  These texts are all either award winning or specifically identified as being mentor texts that teachers and students can use during the Literacy block to learn what good readers and good writers do.  

Each text can be used in a variety of ways. It can form the basis of the whole class part of a lesson, where the teacher ‘thinks aloud’ as they read to the students, modelling and demonstrating their thinking and comprehension of the text. It can be used as a Shared Reading activity where the whole class practices fluency when reading aloud. The texts are also available for students to use during their shared practice or independent worktime.  Selecting a text that both interests them and gives them the chance to apply strategies and skills in reading and a voice in their learning.  They can also use the texts to innovate on by creating their own texts, looking at the style, themes at ideas that their books provide them.

Our vision is not complete yet. We will continue to build our libraries and budget for more texts in the future and continue to build a love of reading in our students that goes beyond just reading for necessity.  We want all our students to leave primary school reading for pleasure and expanding their knowledge of the world through books.

I would like to thank all our families that have donated via Compass for these valuable resources.  There are now dozens of new books in all 7 classrooms.  We will keep the donation button on Compass and would still welcome any donations to continue this initiative. Feel free to come into our classrooms (restrictions permitting) and sit with your child before school and read them a book. The more we read with them the more they want to read too.

Take care over the weekend,

Nieta