principal's message

health in the heat

I hope you have all recovered from the very hot Thursday we experienced this week. It unfortunately seems to be increasingly common to experience extreme weather conditions across our country - I don’t recall a day we have had to keep students inside at recess due to hot weather! In addition to the extreme heat, many of our students have experienced breathing difficulties due to asthma. At the front office, we have seen a number of students present with challenges breathing, who are not recorded as having asthma. Given the current health warnings from ASCIA, if your child has recently complained about troubles catching their breath, we recommend visiting a doctor as a precaution.

transitions and pathways

The Department of Education promotes a cycle of continuous improvement; the idea of which is that we, as individuals and an organisation can always improve the way we work. We apply this approach to every aspect of our school (sprinkled with plenty of opportunities to celebrate our successes, of course) from teaching and learning to everyday administration.

This year, we have continued to make improvements to our transition program, in response to the needs of our students, as identified by teachers as well as students themselves.

From Kinder to Foundation, we have had visits from a number of local minders, to see what Big School looks like. We also continue to run our Wednesday morning transition program, reviewing each session in response to feedback. This year we have introduced Foundie buddies to role model in the early sessions and are providing more information for Parents and Carers on how our school community operates.

From Foundation to Junior School, our students have spent the past four weeks acting as detectives; working in small groups to find different grown-ups across the school, learn their name and their role within the school.

From Middle School to Senior School, our students engaged in a BNW scavenger hunt, unpacking the expectations and norms of the Senior School, which students can sometimes approach with a mythical level of rumour and guesstimation. This was a fantastic idea, developed between the students and teachers in ⅚.

From Senior School to high school, we continue to work closely with our feeder high school, Brunswick Secondary College, to expose students to a high school environment, the curriculum and an upcoming transition day for our grade 6 students in their future school.

We are also reviewing our whole school transition practices. We are mixing up our students across three different sessions over the next two weeks, seeing how the dynamics shift with different group arrangements. Please note, these groupings are not your child’s future classes, but an opportunity to explore a number of possible combinations.

Once we have finished our class formation process (which takes our teachers a number of weeks to complete) we will have a whole school transition day. Previously this was only a session, where students would meet their new teacher and new classmates. In response to student feedback from our Senior Student forum, we are extending this session to a full day, to provide students with more opportunity to understand the differing expectations of their new year level.

We understand that these transition sessions have some impacts on the continuity of our learning program and thank all the students, teachers and community members for their patience and understanding of any inconveniences. I want to also assure all community members that we would not conduct these sessions if they were not of benefit. These transition sessions assist us to form strong, supportive and effective learning communities for the new year and our students have communicated how much it helps them prepare themselves for the new year. If your child is experienced anxiety from any of these sessions, we ask that you speak with your child’s classroom teacher to discuss strategies on how to support them during these sessions.

community bucket-filling

Everyday we talk about Acts of Kindness and filling each other’s bucket at BNWPS. Whether random or responsive, demonstrations of support, compassion, empathy and gratitude help forge strong and positive relationships within our community and beyond. A little while back, a family (who shall remain anonymous) received support from Sprout during a time of need. Last week this family went out of their way to thank Sprout for the helping hand, explaining the positive impact this support had on the family. I understand the family even made a donation back to Sprout, to ensure ‘Sprout’s bucket never dried up’. I want to thank this family for the thoughtfulness and reciprocity of the kindness you experienced. We never engage in kindness with a goal for it to be returned, however, your own act of kindness was hugely appreciated, moved us considerably and certainly motivates further acts of kindness. Thank you.