Mr Irwin's Message

Term 4 Week 10

Hello everyone and welcome to our final newsletter for 2019. It’s a chance to reflect on a successful 2019 year and look forward with excitement to 2020.

I want to start by offering a huge thank you to all of our volunteers be it parents or from the community who have helped our school this year. I’ve been overwhelmed with the amount of help we get as a school. I want our volunteers to feel appreciated and I’d love for this help to continue strongly into 2020 as it does improve the opportunities we provide our students.

Our helper morning tea on the 18th of December goes a small way to acknowledging the effort you’ve all put in across the year. On behalf of our students and staff and huge thank you to everyone who has volunteered within our school in any capacity this year. Please come and join us on the 18th for our helper morning tea.

2020 Structure and Staffing

Tuesday 10th of December is Orientation Day across the state of Victoria. It’s a chance for students to spend time in their new level and get to know their teachers for 2020. A lot of thought has gone into placing students into classes for next year. The groupings on Tuesday are preliminary and teachers may opt to make some final tweaks to these classes, however this very rarely occurs. This won’t be an opportunity for requests from families however. Being nervous and anxious about a new class or teacher is a perfectly healthy way for students to feel about moving to a new class. Being able to successfully work through this in the New Year is an important life skill they’ll need as an adult.

Our preference has been to provide consistent composites across the year levels where possible and provide even class sizes. Having 4 specialist teachers in the school next year has streamlined timetables across the school and means in most sessions of the day, classes will combine and work in a team teaching environment. Whilst your child will be placed in a class with a designated teacher you can expect they’ll work with both teachers listed for those year levels throughout the year. However your child’s designated teacher will be your first port of call.

Let’s have a look at our structure for 2020.

Firstly, we’ll have two Prep/1 Classes. Mr Lindsay and Mrs Fletcher will teach these students. Mr Lindsay will also be the Junior School Leader. As part of the Junior school there will also be two year 1/2 classes. Miss Kearney and Mrs Wells will teach these classes.

Our Senior School Leader will be Mr Smith. He will be in year 3/4 along with Miss Child.

We round out our 8 classrooms with a 4/5/6 and 5/6. We have added some year 4 students into these composites to balance out numbers in the senior school. Into 5/6 we welcome two new teachers; Mr Brad Maskell and Miss Shae Armstrong. Mr Maskell will be joining us from Meredith Primary School and Miss Armstrong joins us from Christian College. They bring attributes I believe make them ideal to join our team at Teesdale and know students will enjoy having them as their teacher in these classes next year.

Our Specialist team includes Mrs Christoe continuing with Visual Arts. We are excited to welcome Mrs Kelley back from Family Leave to be our PE specialist, Lisa Clarke who will be our performing arts teacher and we are finalising an appointment of a Science specialist.

Our ES team will continue unchanged in 2020. We are fortunate to have such a dedicated and experienced team to support student learning across the school.

With new faces arriving we have some departures from our school too. Miss Wojcik, Mr T, Miss Dennis and Ms Ray won’t be with us next year. I want to thank them all for their contributions to the school be it for just this year or in the case of Miss Wojcik many years of leadership. Next year she’ll be an Assistant Principal at Drysdale Primary School. I’d encourage you and your children to take the time to personally thank these teachers for the contribution they have made to your child’s learning. In most cases for teachers it’s the words and messages of thanks at the end of the year that do mean the most.

In fact I’d encourage all families to show their appreciation to their child’s teacher towards the end of the year. They put in a huge amount of work to meet the needs of students behind the scenes. This was evident last week with our staff giving up days away from home so students can enjoy attending a school camp. A card or message does make this all worth the while.

That’s a wrap for this week. Over the next fortnight I expect to be on family leave for the birth of my second child. Miss Wojcik will be Acting Principal in this time, however I will be around at various times to see our year 6 students graduate, join in at carols and celebrate what has been a great 2019 at Teesdale Primary.

Thank you.

Healthy Lunch Box Choices

For more information go to: https://heas.health.vic.gov.au/schools/healthy-lunchboxes