Principal's Report

Congratulations Violet

Once again well done to Violet for her participation in the Eastern Championships this week. Violet ran an excellent race in very tough conditions. It is such a great accomplishment for her to have made it so far and we are all very proud.

Writing is Thinking

As part of Upper Ferntree Gully's Annual Implementation plan we have been focusing on improving our teaching of writing. We had the privilige of working with Deb Sukarna in our classrooms this week. Deb is a bit of a guru when it comes to the teaching of literacy and in particularly writing. Last year we attended a writer's notebook professional learning session and that inspired us to learn more. We introduced the Writer's notebook and workshop as part of our Literacy teaching. We invitied Deb in to help reinforce what we had learnt and to teach us more about how to conference with our students and help them learn about writing. Deb visited classrooms and took classes for teachers to observe. Our teachers are inspired and this has fuelled their passion for teaching writing and helping our students to improve their writing skills and their ability to think of themselves as writers. 

2017 Principal's Forum

For the last two days I have been attending the 2017 Principal's Conference with over 700 schools from the North-Eastern Victoria Region. The conference gave us the opportunity to her from speakers around the world about how they have improved their educations systems to achieve great results. 

Education is ever changing and is very much influenced by changes that happen in the world around us. Technology has a huge impact on where students will be in the future, what jobs they will have and how they will live. However it is not the be all and end all our students, our children need to be literate. In order to succeed they need to be able to read. Literacy is the priority of what we do. Reading , writing, speaking and listening, even mathematics are all about being literate. The Education State initiative is all about giving the best quality education to our students in Victoria and providing equal opportunities for all students across the state. That means access to great schools with great teachers.

What I took away from the conference is that we are doing a lot of good things at Upper Ferntree Gully. We work together as team when planning for our students.

We all know the students at our school not only as learners but as individuals with different interests.

We talk to our students about what they want to learn and we help them to set learning goals that they can achieve.

We also have a lot of fun and enjoy being at school.

We care about our students and what is happening in their world.

We work hard to provide an education for the students at Upper Ferntree Gully that means they will be good citizens of our world and can leave our school feeling confident that they have done their best and we have done ours.

The other thing I took away is that we all need to continue to learn. In schools things are changing all the time becasue the world we live in changes and so we are constantly learning more about how children learn best and what they need to learn. At Upper Gully we are all committed to doing that, to continuing to learn and to sharing that learning with our students to help them be successful. I am proud of the fact that at our school all of our teachers are committed to this and all want to make sure that all of our students achieve.

Have a great week.

Tabitha