Assistant Principal

Our wonderful SRC representatives, our ambassadors, captains and our wonderful Mrs Melke have been hard at work trying to help effectively improve our school for its fantastic students and amazing community.  Here are some of the ideas and suggestions that we have come up with during Term 2.

During these hard times, a large population of children have been online more often, so we thought that it was appropriate for SRC reps to teach students about being cyber safe. Online security and safety is incredibly vital for our students, otherwise they could be exposed to or left vulnerable to cyber bullying, inappropriate materials and online criminal activities like scams.  We decided to add cyber security lessons during our class meetings that included many helpful websites to increase our students basic understanding and knowledge of cyber security and how to further protect themselves from the unknown. 

Our next  promising idea was to implement an anti-bullying initiative.  SRC have been learning about some minor bullying incidents at different year levels, so we have decided to try and reduce the incidents, to ensure that these acts can permanently cease.  We will be  looking at ideas that classes have put forward, and then finding suitable activities that could be informative for our students.

Sadly, Harmony Day was postponed at the end of Term 1 because of the newly initiated lockdown.  However, Harmony Day is a great learning and entertaining experience for our students and it would be a pity if they missed out. That is why we have decided to move Harmony Day to a later date in Term 3.  The activities may be changed to be more hygienically friendly but they will of course still be very entertaining! 

Let us know if you have any suggestions, issues or feedback for us and we will put that into account for any and all future activities that SRC plays host to. 

Harshitha and Jayden 

School Captains

SRC- Term 2 update

I would like to send a huge congratulations to all of our SRC representatives and ambassadors in Year’s 3 to 6, as they made a fantastic contribution to school based decision making during term two.

Our SRC members met many times during the at home learning period via Webex, and they also made fantastic contributions to the assignments set for them in Mrs Melke’s Google classroom.

SRC is a space where our students can put ideas forward in a safe environment and then vote on the ideas they wish to action in the school.

The first task for SRC in term 2 was to identify and then make suggestions on how SRC meetings could continue to operate whilst students were learning at home and the types of things SRC could discuss with their classes during online learning.  Once ideas were put forward, SRC were able to discuss them during their first Webex meeting and an agreed upon format was established and ideas decided upon.  SRC was then formally up and running for term 2.

One of the first ideas put forward by SRC was for the all students at Syndal South Primary School to be aware of the importance of Cyber Safety, especially since learning was being conducted online.

SRC were given the task to investigate the three most important things that they thought all students needed to learn about Cyber Safety.  From a very, very long list of over 20 ideas SRC narrowed it down by voting and choosing that students should:  be careful what they download;  choose a strong password;  be careful what they post;  be careful who they meet online; keep their privacy settings on; not enter important details on unknown websites.  These points were then the focus of class SRC meetings which were held by our SRC reps either with their class or the junior class who they represented, via Webex.

Our SRC reps did an amazing job completing this task and I have included below an email I received from one of our class teachers.

“I just want to let you know how amazing my SRC reps have been! I met with them yesterday to discuss the SRC meeting and how they will deliver it to my class and my first rep was so organised, she emailed me with reminders of the meeting, and even sent through the meeting link and code in case I had forgotten or lost it. My second rep was awesome at thinking of alternative working to help the foundation kids understand the questions about cyber safety. I thought you should know.”

All of our SRC reps were then required to post an idea on Padlet which SRC could run with, either at the end of Term 2 or during Term 3 depending on the restrictions imposed by COVID-19.  Our students overwhelmingly voted to hold Harmony Day which had been unfortunately postponed in term one due to COVID-19.  So we are all very excited to get this event up and running next term if we can. 

Our SRC reps are currently working on two new ideas with their classes.  Firstly SRC reps are revisiting with their grades the use of our very bright purple Friendship seat, sitting underneath our magnificent Friendship Tree.  Why do we have the friendship seat, what is its purpose and how will our students use it?  As we have all spent a very long time in isolation at home the use of the Friendship tree is very important for our students as they try to reconnect with their peer group at school.  I Iook forward to all the responses to these questions when we meet again as a group on the last Thursday of term.

Secondly, the SRC reps will be finding out from all of our students what they can do as an SRC group to help students understand more about bullying e.g would posters made by SRC reps and put up around the school be useful?  This was a topic which was brought up by SRC just prior to the COVID-19 lockdown, and was seen as an important topic to revisit now that we are back on site. I also look forward to the rigorous discussion this topic will generate next week and which actions will be the best to implement next term.

Again, well done to all of our SRC reps for their contributions this term and helping Syndal South be a fabulous school.