Principal News

Our amazing colour run is what everybody is talking about. What a wonderful event having our school community watch our students run through the colour run track ending up covered in every colour. Our staff showed that they are very handy when it comes to launching coloured powder and firing water pistols! The colour run was not only a fantastic fundraising activity but a wonderful community event. The joy on students faces and the laughter shared between parents/carers and staff is like the glue that unites us together as a school community. Let's make sure that we savour these moments and maintain those feelings of fun and excitement that we shared to keep  our school culture thriving.

On Friday we celebrated World Teacher Day and I want it to be known that the teachers at Banyan Fields Primary School are the best. We celebrated with a special lunch for our teachers and students made posters for each teacher to remind them of how special they are. I want to acknowledge the dedication and passion our teachers show and encourage parents/carers to take a moment to do the same. Our teaching staff do what they do because they really care and have our students at front of mind. They are often quite humble and I am sure would appreciate being reminded about why we appreciate them so much.

I recently participated in some professional learning around maths and numeracy teaching which has been a big part of our work at Banyan Fields this year. One of the key take always for me from this session was around how important it is for students to engage in Productive Struggle as part of the learning process. As teachers and parents the thought of our kids/students 'struggling' is something that we would usually try to protect them from. However, when the level of struggle is just enough to challenge and engage learners, this is when the greatest opportunity for quality learning occurs. In order to prepare our kids/students to experience 'Productive Struggle' we need to make the environment for this welcoming and safe and prepare them for what to expect. Ways that we can do this may include modelling examples of us engaging in productive struggle and articulating what it feels like, sharing photos of people/students who are engaging in productive struggle to show see what it looks like, making students aware if they will be undertaking productive struggle or a practise task and supporting students to understand what productive struggle feels like to them (it may be different from one person to another) and to then be able to prepare themselves to expect this as part of the learning process.