Dear families,

As I arrived at school this morning, I was met with the joyful sound of two kookaburras greeting me with their early morning song. Little things such as hearing their song reminded me to be grateful and to appreciate how I get to come to work each day in such beautiful surroundings.

Picnic & Athletics Sports

Our Picnic Sports was a terrific day with lots of fun, laughter, teamwork, smiles and a ribbon or two on display. Well done to our winning team Wannon, it was a very close result. A big thank you to Miss Purnell for all her organising for the day.

The Year 4/5/6s are now busy preparing for the SGSSA Athletic Carnival coming up on Wednesday 29th March at Pedrina Park. Miss Purnell has been very busy running trials and selecting teams for the events. This involves a lot of juggling to ensure maximum participation. We sometimes struggle to fill the teams owing to limited students in certain age groups and so some students will be entered in a team outside their proper age-group in order to make up the numbers, while other age groups have insufficient numbers to make a team.

To help with reducing costs, we do ask our families to bring and collect their children into Pedrina Park for the day. A permission note and program (when finalised by the SGSSA) will be going home very soon.

Parent teacher Interviews

Next Tuesday afternoon, we are having our parent teacher interviews for all our students. Thank you to the families that completed and returned the forms. Every student has been allocated a time. Please contact the school or class teacher to arrange an alternate time if this unsuitable. Tammy has tried hard to accommodate everyone's request. Each interview will go for only 10 minutes and we will endeavour our best to stick to the time allocation.

Please take some time and check our some of the amazing student work on display around the school while you are here for the interviews too.

School Council

On Wednesday night, the School Council held their AGM and then we held our normal monthly meeting. Congratulations to our newly elected councilors Simon Thomas, Carly Behncke, Ben Cross and DET members Sally Purnell and Amy Gray.

The 2023 office bearers for the council, as appointed at the meeting, are:

President—Simon Thomas

Vice President—Callie Leese

Minutes Secretary—Amy Gray

Treasurer— Carly Behncke

The School Council also co-opted two community members - Nikaila Glenn and Sharee Butler for a 12 month term.

The sub-committees for curriculum/policies; buildings/grounds and finance were also appointed at the meeting.

Sporting Schools - athletic lessons

A big thank you to the Hamilton Little Athletics and Jason Thomas (Emma's Uncle) for organising and running the athletic lessons in at Mitchell Park. Jason was super organised and was very encouraging to all our students. We thank him very much for donating his time to run these lessons for our students.

Paper truck loading - change of date

The date for the paper loading has been changed. It has now been set for Sunday 26th March. Helpers will be required from 10am onwards. If you can spare a small amount of time to help out on the day it would be appreciated by the members.

NAPLAN

We are in the middle of our NAPLAN testing. Students complete four tests - Writing, Reading, Conventions of Language and Maths. After a first day of technical hiccups, testing is going well and should be completed early next week. Results will not be available to later in the year.

Thank you

A big thank you to Carly and Jack Behncke who have generously donated some new food and kitchen items for the school cubby house. I am sure that the children will get great enjoyment out of the new items.

Home Reading

Many thanks to all families who are maintaining regular nightly reading and signing the reading journals. This makes such a big difference in reading achievement and matches all the work done during lessons each day.

Good Friday Appeal

Raffle books have been sent home this week. Some families have requested more tickets but I am waiting for more books to arrive in the post. Could families please return the sold/unsold tickets by Monday 3rd April. The raffle will be drawn on Tuesday 4th April.

Have a lovely weekend.

Lisa Ferrier

Working Bee