From the Office 

News From the Principal

Welcome Back

A very warm welcome back to Term 3 to our students, staff and families. As mentioned in the previous newsletter, Term 3 has lots of exciting things happening both in terms of curriculum and extra-curricula activities and events. 

Lions Junior Public Speaking Competition

Please refer to the article below for important information regarding the events tomorrow and Sunday week.  

Gymnastics

Don't forget that for the first five Thursdays of this term we will be attending Jett's Gymnasium as part of our Health and Physical Education Program. Our sessions will now run from 1:45-2:45pm and we expect to now be able to return to school for our usual dismissal time. 

Our first session is this afternoon. 

Melbourne Museum Excursion- whole school

This is on Wednesday August 7th. All of the details and permissions can be found on the uEducateus platform. Please read and sign, taking special note of the times and student requirements for the day. 

Parent, Caregiver and Guardian Opinion Survey 2024

This online survey will be available to complete online from Monday 29 July to Friday 30 August 2024.

The survey seeks feedback on school climate, community engagement in learning and teaching practices for student engagement and outcomes.

Each family will receive a personalised invitation and links next week. We would greatly appreciate it if each family could take the time (about 10 minutes) to complete this survey over the four week period that it is open. More information will be forwarded next week, but if you have any questions or concerns, please contact Lisa at the school. 

Junior Public Speaking Competition

Our school-based competition will be held this Friday in the main building, commencing at 2pm. We invite anyone who would like to come along and listen to our Year 3-6 students deliver their speeches. This event provides real-world practice for our students with a live audience and judges (will will have specialist judges to give our students feedback), before they compete against their peers from East Loddon College on Sunday week.

The Junior Public Speaking Competition for our Year 3-6 students will take place on Sunday July 28th commencing at 12pm (for a light lunch) and will be followed by speeches. Please let Lisa or Bree know if you are attending and how many guests you will bring, as they Lions Club would like to know for catering and seating purposes. This event is held at the Lions Den, opposite the East Loddon College in Dingee. We would love to see as many of our families, friends and community members there to support our students. 

Bike Track 

Our bike track is now complete, with the majority of the work taking place over the holidays. We intend to hold a grand opening of the track and invite our students, and any other community members to come along with a decorated bike, scooter or other non-motorised vehicle to try the track out. This event will take place later in August and we will be announce the date and times soon.  

We hope to secure some donations in the near future that will allow us to purchase some scooters and other wheeled structures for our students to enjoy at school. We will also be purchasing the necessary safety equipment. At this point we are requesting that students do not bring along their bikes and scooters to ride within school time as this may present safety issues on many fronts as well as supervision concerns. Once we have our own equipment that we can correctly fit to the size of our students, ensure it is in safe working order and tht we have the necessary safety gear (fitted correctly), our students will be able to use the track throughout our break times. 

New Cubby

A huge thank you to all of those involved in the pick-up,  transportation and set up of our newest playground addition, a cubby house! A special mention to the Blake Family who did the majority of the organising so that our students could have a new play space. Thank you also to Jason Hill for helping dismantle and remove the cubby from the place of purchase. 

As the cubby will have some equipment inside it we will be keeping it locked over night and on weekends, with the equipment being stored inside the main building over longer breaks. 

Our cubby has required some repairs, which we are most grateful to Jarrod for undertaking.  Toward the end of this term (when the weather warms up a bit) we will be asking if families can spare a few hours to come along and do the preparation or painting works on the cubby. Rather than have a working bee with a lot of people in each others way, we have decided it would be better if families or individuals could just come up when they are free to either sand, prime or paint the cubby. We would have the necessary materials here for you. More information regarding this will be in future newsletters. 

Enrolments

This is a final call for Prep Enrolments for 2025. I intend to contact the kindergartens in coming weeks to organise a Term 3 visit with our enrolled student's teachers. These visits form the first part of our orientation program and are important as they provide valuable information that will help us make the transition from kindergarten to school, as smooth as possible.

Of course we accept enrolments at any time, but visits to kindergartens may not be possible if the enrolments come after mid term 3 as we do have a number of Prep 2025 students due to begin school with us next year.  

Orientation sessions at our school will commence in Term 4 for those students who have enrolled.  Dates and times will vary so as to best suit all of our future students and their families (as we have students attending a range of kinder and long-day care settings with different days and times for their sessions). I will be in contact with each family in late August to provide them with the Term 4 orientation dates and times. In the meantime, if there are any questions, please reach out. 

That's all for this week- Lisa Duffy

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