Principal's Message

Welcome to Term 3. We have a number of major activities in the coming weeks, including Education Week, the Opera House excursion, Book Week and Stage 3 Canberra excursion. Please check the calendar section of this newsletter and look out for the more detailed School Bytes calendar which will be activated on the parent portal in the coming weeks.

NAIDOC celebrations

Thank you to Mrs Howlett, Mrs Russell, Miss Jarman, the NAIDOC committee, teachers and families for supporting our NAIDOC celebrations at the end of last term.

Highly commended

Congratulations to Charlotte Ford, who received a 'Highly Commended' award last week in the NERAM/UNE Acquisitive Art competition.

Education Week

Next Week is Education Week, in which we celebrate the learning of our students. Kindergarten students were the first to celebrate their learning today, as they reached the milestone of 100 days of primary schooling.

Please see the calendar for dates and times for events involving Stages 1 to 3.

Breakfast Club

Ben Venue now runs a breakfast club for students who have missed out on breakfast. This service is free to students and is run by Mrs Russell from the canteen between 8:40 am  and 9:10 am daily. Breakfast club is not intended as a regular alternative to breakfast at home, but as a support to student wellbeing and is an emergency option to prevent students starting their day without breakfast.

NAPLAN

Last week, students in Years 3 and 5 received their NAPLAN results. NAPLAN provides one measure of school and student performance that compliments other assessments including our use of the Progressive Achievement Test and ongoing monitoring by class teachers.

Preliminary analysis of school-level data shows that Ben Venue performed above the national average in all five domains in Year 3 and scored averages in the 'strong' category in all areas across Year 3 and 5, with the exception of writing in Year 5. We will now use the data to identify themes in student responses to inform our teaching at both a student and group level.

Intrinsic motivation

Throughout last term, our school sought feedback on our approach to recognition of student effort and achievement, and the development of intrinsic motivation. While we did not reach the response rate required to make confident assumptions about the perspective of our community, the results of the online survey reflected a 50/50 split on support for our focus on recognition over awards.

One clear trend in responses was that our families want more information on the approach and the reasons behind it. For this reason, I will be providing snippets of information in each of this term's newsletters, including information on our system and how it links to the empowerment of students in their learning, as well as videos and links to research that have informed our approach. This week, I have included below a link to a video that I have referred to before - Dr Hellen Street's 2019 TED Talk on competition, wellbeing and intrinsic motivation.

Once I have shared key evidence and research related to our approach, I will post a video explaining how we have incorporated key considerations of this research and student voice to support important outcomes we are working towards for our students.

Cam Pryce

Principal