District Athletics - Bendigo

It has now been almost two weeks since 13 of our students headed to Bendigo for District Athletics – and there is still plenty to celebrate!

There were some outstanding individual and team performances on the day. Our 9/10 Boys 4 x 100m Relay Team became Division 1 District Champions, winning in 1:09.96, while Ethan claimed 2nd in the 100m and 4th in Long Jump, and William finished 2nd in the 200m.

Our 12/13 Girls 4 x 100m Relay Team finished 4th, with a special mention to our Year 3 competitor who stepped up to race alongside the older students.

And Ollie had an incredible day, becoming District Champion in both Discus (20.61m) and Shot Put (7.04m). He will now progress to the Divisional Athletics competition and represent Bolinda at the next level. We wish him all the very best!

While those results deserve celebrating, the part of the day that made us proudest wasn’t recorded on a results sheet.

It was the weeks of children practising at recess and lunchtime. It was teammates encouraging one another. It was children congratulating students from other schools, dealing with disappointment, celebrating success and proudly wearing the Bolinda colours.

Thirteen students went to Bendigo and represented our little school exceptionally well.

The ribbons were terrific. The effort and character behind them were even better.

Father's Day Breakfast

We’re looking forward to welcoming dads, father figures and the other special people in our children’s lives to Bolinda for our Father’s Day Light Breakfast on Friday 4 September from 8.00am–8.45am.

While we call it our Father’s Day Breakfast, we know families come in all different forms. Dads, grandfathers, uncles, father figures and other special people in your child’s life are all very warmly invited to come along and be part of the morning.

Our PFA has been busy getting everything organised, with doughnuts, tea and coffee on the menu, as well as savoury muffins prepared by our Kitchen Gardeners.

One of the things we love about these mornings is that they don’t need to be complicated. Come in, grab something to eat, have a cuppa and spend a little bit of time at school with your child before the day gets underway. The children will even be taking on some of the serving duties!

If you’re planning to join us, please complete our quick RSVP so we can make sure we have enough food for everyone:

Father’s Day Breakfast RSVP: https://forms.gle/obEQqhbfQhzDPtR97

We hope to see plenty of our Bolinda families there!

Pizza & Family Bingo Night

Earlier this month we floated the idea of adding another family event to the Bolinda calendar – and we’d love to make it happen!

We’re looking at Thursday 17 September, from approximately 5.00pm–7.30pm, for our first Pizza & Bingo Family Night.

The plan is a very Bolinda-style evening: nothing too fancy, just families getting together, children making pizzas, everyone sharing dinner and then finishing off with a few rounds of bingo.

Our students would help prepare the pizza dough during the school day, with families then making their own pizzas that evening. We’d simply ask for a small contribution towards ingredients.

Before we commit to the night, though, we need to know whether enough families can make it.

If you haven’t already responded, please complete our quick expression of interest by Thursday 27 August:

Pizza & Bingo EOI: https://forms.gle/BBvS18cq2uFMMLKf6

Our Family BBQ continues to be one of our favourite nights of the year, and we’d love to

create another opportunity for our community to spend some time together.

Super User Status

We’re very proud to share that Katie’s work within AIMS has been formally recognised at the ‘Super User’ level – the highest level of recognition!

For those wondering what AIMS is, it’s one of the Department’s systems that helps us manage many of the important administration, maintenance, facilities and safety requirements that keep our school operating safely and smoothly behind the scenes.

Katie does a tremendous amount of work in this space, much of which families would never see. From administration and facilities management to keeping on top of our OHS and safety requirements, Katie plays an enormous role in keeping Bolinda Primary School running.

This recognition is very well deserved, and we’re incredibly lucky to have Katie looking after our little school! Congratulations, Katie!

CDS Support for Bolinda!

Bolinda Primary School is now officially set up to receive donations through Victoria’s Container Deposit Scheme (CDS).

We currently have two CDS regions activated for our school, which means families can donate the value of their eligible containers directly to Bolinda Primary School using our school barcodes.

Sunbury Barcode

Romsey, Woodend, Gisborne & Kyneton Barcode

Feel free to save the barcodes to your phone and share them with grandparents, friends, neighbours and extended family. Every 10-cent container might not seem like much on its own, but together they can add up – with all funds raised going back to benefit our students.

We’ll be giving the barcodes a test run ourselves shortly, but hopefully everything works exactly as expected! If you try one and have any trouble, please let us know so we can get it sorted.

A simple way to recycle, reduce waste and raise a few extra dollars for our little school at the same time!

New Benches

Families may have noticed something new appearing in our undercover area!

Thanks to the wonderful people at the Lancefield Men’s Shed, we now have a fantastic set of new timber benches for our students to use.

They replace the colourful couches that have occupied the space for many years but had reached the point where age and plenty of use had well and truly caught up with them.

The new benches have already been put to very good use by the children and are a brilliant addition to the area.

We are incredibly fortunate to have community groups like the Lancefield Men’s Shed willing to give their time and skills to support our school. Projects like this might seem simple, but they make an immediate difference to the spaces our children use every day.

A huge thank you to the Lancefield Men’s Shed from everyone at Bolinda Primary School!

Book Week

This Thursday is our Book Week celebration, and we’re looking forward to a great morning together!

We’ll kick things off with our Book Week Parade, where children can show off their costumes and celebrate some of their favourite books and characters. Parents and families are very welcome to come along and watch the parade.

Once the parade wraps up, our students will head into multi-age literacy rotations, mixing across year levels for a range of fun Book Week activities.

It also seems that a special guest has already made an early appearance in our school yard! Our Book Week visitor has left the children with something to keep them busy, creative and entertained during their breaktimes – and it has certainly generated plenty of interest already!

We can’t wait to see what everyone comes dressed as on Thursday and enjoy a morning celebrating all things books and reading.

Curriculum Day

While our students enjoyed an extra-long weekend, our entire staff came together on Monday for a day of professional learning led by our very own education guru, Leighann Bloomfield!

Our focus was on a simple but important question: how do we use what we know about how children learn to make our teaching as effective as possible?

We explored how children learn and remember new information, the importance of breaking learning into manageable steps, explicitly modelling new skills, giving children opportunities to practise, and regularly checking that they have actually understood what has been taught.

We also revisited how these approaches come together in reading, writing and mathematics, as well as how we support children who need additional teaching or a different approach.

An important part of the day was also looking at how we assess children here at Bolinda. Assessment isn't just about tests or reports – we use a range of information throughout the year to understand what each child knows, where there may be gaps and, most importantly, what we need to teach next.

Having our teachers and Education Support staff learning together helps us continue building a consistent approach across the whole school.

A huge thank you to Leighann for the enormous amount of work that went into preparing and leading such a valuable day!

How Are Our Students Tracking?

Over the past few weeks, we have been spending time looking closely at our whole-school learning data – not just how individual children are progressing, but what the bigger picture tells us about learning across Bolinda.

And there is plenty to celebrate.

Across the available curriculum judgements made by our teachers in Semester 1, 2026, 85% are meeting or above the expected Victorian Curriculum standard.

Put simply, more than 8 out of every 10 judgements show our students working at or above where they are expected to be.

When we look back to 2023, approximately 81% of our available curriculum judgements were meeting or above standard. To see that strong level of achievement continue – and improve – is something our little school should be very proud of.

Importantly, results like these don't happen by accident.

Over the past few years, we have worked hard to build a consistent approach to what we teach, how we teach it and how we assess whether children have learnt it. Our teachers regularly look at assessment information to identify what children already know, where there are gaps, who needs some extra support and who is ready to be extended.

The data then helps us answer the most important question: what do we need to teach next?

It has also been fantastic to see this work gaining interest beyond Bolinda. I recently had the opportunity to present to the Macedon Ranges Principal Network, sharing some of our teaching, assessment and whole-school practices and how they are contributing to the strong learning results we are seeing.

For a small school like ours, having other school leaders interested in learning more about what we are doing is something we can be genuinely proud of.

We will always look for ways to improve, but sometimes it's important to stop and recognise when something is working.

Our children are achieving strongly, our staff are doing fantastic work, and that's absolutely worth celebrating.

Bolinda Birthdays