Assistant Principal Update

Welcome to Week 8. There are just over three weeks to go in term 2 and with the King’s Birthday long weekend coming up, hopefully families and students can have a mini break and rest for the final part of our longer second term.

STEM Club – PrintACar Challenge

Students in STEM Club are currently working extremely hard with Brody each week on their entries for the Quantum Victoria PrintACar Challenge. The project offers a comprehensive and engaging STEM experience for students. It combines design thinking, teamwork, 3D printing technologies, and friendly competition to foster creativity, critical thinking, and a passion for STEM education.

Students have a chance to test their creations against those of other teams. This aspect encourages students to refine their designs, optimize performance, and apply principles of physics and engineering to achieve the best results.

By participating in this challenge, students develop valuable skills that are essential for their future careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

With the various dates along the competition timeline fast approaching, next Wednesday 12 June, STEM Club students will have a full day working with their teams and Brody to work on their car development and portfolios. 

Offsite Evacuation Drill

Our planned offsite evacuation drill for last week was postponed. We will now do it tomorrow Thursday 6 June prior to recess (weather depending). We will evacuate the site and meet at the offsite emergency evacuation point at Alphington Park. Students in the younger years will be notified of the evacuation drill prior as it is the first one for 2024.

Term 3 Planning

Our staff meetings and team planning time for week 10 is dedicated to the planning and preparation of Term 3. During this time teams are meeting to develop their term unit planners for English, Mathematics, Integrated Inquiry and Wellbeing. Today teams will meet to plan their Inquiry Units. In Term 3 our school wide focus is ‘Historical Inquiry’. Students will learn about a period from our past and investigate the impacts events from these times had upon the people, culture and wider society. From this, students will develop a range of skills to compare, contrast, evaluate, and analyse how learning about history can be applied to our lives today.

Reports

Semester One Reports will be published via Compass on Friday 21 June. An electronic copy of your child’s report will be available for you to view online and download as required from Compass. If you wish to receive a hard copy of the report, please contact your child’s class teacher. The reporting on students’ achievements for the semester is an important part of the assessment process and each child’s individual journey. We recommend families sharing the report with their child, celebrating their achievements, and positively discussing the next learning steps.  If you have any questions regarding your child’s report, please do not hesitate to contact your child’s teacher.

Class Splits

In previous newsletters I have discussed our process for splitting classes when we are unable to secure a Casual Relief Teacher (CRT) due to staff absence. Recently there have been occasions when we were unable to get a CRT. This meant we did a class split.  I would like to acknowledge teachers who are flexible and adaptable to ensure that for those classes who were split, we were able to do it across their year level and all students continued their curriculum program as planned.

Term 2 and 3 are traditionally terms when we see an increase in staff absence due to the cooler months. Coupled with staff leave entitlements and the ongoing staffing challenge in education we envisage that we will need to split classes at times.

We do not split Prep classes while they settle into school and develop their routines. We also endeavour not to split year levels where there are only two classes. Fortunately, we have a few year levels with small class sizes which can be effectively merged and continue with their curriculum programs.

Enjoy the long weekend!

Shane Wilkie