Mr Irwin's Message
Hello families and welcome to this week's newsletter,
I’m using this newsletter edition to announce our structure for 2021. Our structure for next year builds on the work we’ve done this year to launch 'Discoveries', provide an engaging Specialist program as well as have classroom teachers work collaboratively to best meet the needs of students.
We’ll once again use composite classes to allow teachers to work collaboratively with cohorts of students rather than in isolation. This ensures students get the support they need every day as well as getting to work with a wider range of students over their time at Teesdale Primary. Whilst we’ll continue with class lists and a home group teacher, you can expect your child will work with all of the teachers listed in their cohort for literacy and numeracy during the week. Each teacher in a cohort will work collaboratively to provide flexible groupings in literacy and numeracy to support all students.
Next year we have 10 classroom teachers employed. The allocation of classroom teachers is as follows;
2 Foundation Teachers
3 Year 1/2 Teachers
3 Year 3/4 Teachers
2 Year 5/6 Teachers
These teachers will work as a Junior and Senior school, both of 5 teachers and will run the Discovery Learning subjects of Personal Learning, Inquiry, Indonesian, Digital Technologies and Physical Education. One teacher will be responsible for the running of these in both the Junior and Senior school.
Visual Arts, Science and Performing Arts will be run by our specialist teachers.
Miss Kearney is the only teacher fare-welling us at the end of 2020, having started her maternity leave. We wish her all the best and look forward to hearing of her exciting news over the holiday break.
But for now, let’s meet our 2021 team.
In Foundation we have Mrs Fletcher and Mrs McHenry.
In Year 1/2 we have Mr Smith, Mrs Wells and welcome Miss Kelsey Whyte to our team.
In Year 3/4 we have Miss Child, Mr Maskell and welcome Miss Caithness to our team.
In year 5/6 we have Miss Armstrong and Mrs Kelley.
Mr Lindsay and I form our out of class Leadership Team. Mr Lindsay will be responsible for instructional coaching and co-ordinating our Program for Students with Disabilities. He’ll also be working a day in the Foundation and 5/6 team.
Our Specialist team is Miss Beltcher in the Artroom, Mrs Clarke in Performing Arts and we welcome Mrs Moloney to Science.
Mrs Watts, Mrs O'Mealley and Mrs Elijah will continue to provide classroom support for students with additional learning needs.
In the office Mrs Aitken and Mrs Smith will again be on hand to assist you with all of your enquiries.
As in other years, we do offer parents the chance to put in a request for their student regarding placement. As mentioned in previous years, this isn’t a chance for students to pick the teacher they want in 2021. These are requests and will only be considered if deemed absolutely necessary. It’s also perfectly normal for a student to feel nervous and anxious about a fresh year of school. Coaching them through this to succeed can be of greater benefit to them than making a request for the same teacher the following year. Students will have the chance before we develop class lists to nominate other students they’d like to be with next year.
However as explained earlier given our move toward team teaching and flexible grouping of students it can be reasonably expected that for example a student in year 3/4 will learn and work with all other 3/4 students on a daily basis.
To finish up this week's newsletter I want to thank the families who took the time to participate in the Parent Opinion Survey. We received these results just yesterday. Whilst the general satisfaction of the families that participated was very high, we’ve received some excellent feedback to help us improve, particularly in the area of providing feedback on student learning.
Thank you, and have a great week.
Final Book Club for the Year
Many thanks to all families for ordering books throughout the year. Book Club benefits our school —for every Book Club order placed, Scholastic gives back 20% of the order spend to school to purchase valuable educational resources via its Scholastic Rewards program.
Brochures have been sent home with students this week. The deadline for orders is Friday 27th November. Click on the below brochure image which will take you straight to the LOOP ordering page.
