From the Head of Primary's  Desk

Dear Parents/Guardians

“Always remember what you have learned. Your education is your life - guard it well.”  Proverbs 4:13 

At HCC, we run several programs to support our students in the development of their Spiritual, Academic, Physical, Social and Emotional maturity – the 5 Foundations for a healthy, whole Heatherton child.

Some of these programs include:

In Grade 4, our 'Year in the Yard' sustainability program has allowed students to learn valuable hands-on skills while caring for our chooks; feeding them, ensuring they have fresh water, collecting their eggs and keeping the coop clean. They also look after the plants around the class, propagate fresh vegetables and oversee our recycling efforts. This experiential learning program offers opportunities to teach the students important life skills and responsibilities and allows them to work cooperatively on real life tasks.

Our Prep students are involved in the I Love Reading (ILR) program. ILR is a unique literacy program designed to facilitate the rapid learning of reading. This comprehensive program aims to remove the complexities from reading, empowering early learners to grasp literacy concepts from an earlier age. ILR combines proven literacy methodologies with an innovative approach to learning. This fresh model for literacy learning assists early readers to learn every sound, of every word of the English language through a multi-faceted yet simple phonetic coding system. The aim is to equip children as they move from Learning to Read to Reading to Learn and foster a love for reading along the way. Data obtained from trial schools which represent a wide cultural diversity and ability index, shows up to 2 years accelerated mastery of the decoding system for effective reading.

This semester has also seen some of our Year 10 students having the opportunity to participate in the Emerging Sciences Victoria (ESV) program. ESV runs under the auspices of John Monash Science School and is a real-time virtual classroom where students can collaborate with students from across Victoria. They explore some of the big ideas in neuroscience like:

• How we image the brain, and can we see thoughts?
• How do sleep and chemicals affect the brain?
• Bionic brains – how can we replicate senses and understand illusions?

In addition to this, our Inquiry-Based Learning program has gone from strength to strength and I was particularly impressed with the exceptional 'Travel Expo' which the Grade 5 and 6 students put on in Term 2. 

These are just some of the many opportunities that our students are exposed to at HCC and we are regularly looking at how we can provide even more occasions for our students to obtain a holistic education which will support them to develop into the person which God has created them to be.

Prep 2019

We are currently enrolling for our 2019 Prep class. If you have not yet enrolled your child (or know of someone who may be interested in doing so), we encourage you to do so very soon as spaces are filling up.

David Holloway

Head of Primary