Assistant Principal's Message
Sue Gordon
A message from our Assistant Principal
School Transitions
School transitions include kinder to school, primary to secondary and cohort level to cohort level. These are certainly exciting times for children and parents. It means that the children are growing up!
However, it can be an anxious time. Michael Carr-Gregg talks about the need for parents to be aware of their child’s feelings during school transitions and minimise anxiety, so the process is an enjoyable experience for all.
“(Transitions can be) a particularly stressful period for both parents and children and it tends to get trivialised. Parents can often transfer their stress onto their child making transitioning unnecessarily more stressful.” Dr Michael Carr-Gregg
Transition or orientation programs are very beneficial to frontload children regarding what the next step in their learning journey will look like. Familiarisation with staff, other students and the environment are key in reducing concerns and worries.
With our multiage approach, our students have less transitions from one cohort to the next, i.e. Prep to Year 1; Year 2 to Year 3; Year 4 to Year 5. The students in the older year level are already familiar with how the cohort operates and can be leaders in their second year. Our students have the opportunity to know many students across the levels which ‘builds a village’ and greatly supports transition from year to year. Our leadership opportunities also bring students together from a range of levels, for example, Student Voice Council, Student Leadership in senior levels working with all levels of the school and opportunities for students to lead lunchtime clubs with a wide range of students across the school.
At MPPS, we conduct a range of transition experiences for our future and current students:
- Multiage days whereby students mix with a range of students from various cohort levels.
- Future Prep students attend multiple transition sessions over November and December whereby they visit the current Prep classrooms. They also meet their teacher in their classroom for the following year in the final transition session.
- Each cohort from Year 1 – Year 6 connect with one another at various times across the year to provide experiences for the students of the next year’s level.
- Moving On Up Day in December provides our Year 1 to Year 6 students the opportunity to experience several sessions in the next year’s cohort with the current year’s teachers. On this day, the students experience a range of curriculum areas, e.g. Maths, literacy, wellbeing.
- For our neurodivergent and students with support needs, we provide additional opportunities to connect with their future class teacher and to become familiar with their next learning space. This facilitates relationship building and frontloading to reduce anxiety or concerns.
As well as the transition experiences, our staff take very careful consideration as they create the next year’s classes. The current year’s teaching teams work closely together, across the multiage cohorts, to develop classes that have a balance of learning and wellbeing dynamics. We appreciate our parents’ respectful understanding of the complexity of this process.
On School TV there is a wide range of videos and articles discussing the various types of transitions children experience as they move through the stages of schooling and how parents can support their children. It is a great resource and worth a read/view.
https://middleparkps.vic.schooltv.me/newsletter/school-transitions
Thank you!
We would like to express our gratitude and thanks to the parents who supported us with the working bee last Saturday November 22nd. Thank you to the following families: Spalding, Fullard, Olsen, Morgan, Harris, Wastle, Daly, Hayes, Popa-Sathiamoorth, Yannakena and Roper. We were able to achieve a lot with the many hands!! We really appreciate everyone’s willingness to collectively look after our school facilities and grounds.
As this is my last newsletter for 2025, I would like to thank our amazing staff, students and parents for a great year! We are looking forward to the celebrations in the coming weeks. Enjoy the Christmas break when it comes in a few weeks!
Looking forward to seeing you around school.
Kind regards,
Sue Gordon