2025 Newsletter Issue 3 

Well done to Caro and the Inclusion Action Team on a fun and festive International Women’s Day last week! It was great to see so many staff and students wearing a splash of purple to mark the day, as we celebrated the achievements of the awesome women in our lives.

Grazie mille!

A big thank you to our wonderful parents and carers for getting involved in so many different ways at BSPS! Your support makes a huge difference in our school community. For example, Ciao Down Friday has become a delicious tradition, and we appreciate everyone who helps make it such a fun event. A special shout-out to Kelley Mackay and Vanessa Kowalski for their work writing applications for road safety and sporting grants, which will benefit our students for years to come. Grazie mille to Dan Ziffer, Thea Lange and Sophie Fisher for generously nominating as parent members on our School Council for 2025-6. Please keep an eye on Compass for other opportunities to join in, including assisting on interschool sport excursions in Term 2!

Learning about learning by learning about how our learners learn!

We look forward to hosting a delegation of Italian language students from the University of Melbourne next term, who will undertake an internship with us as part of their studies. Whilst not necessarily preparing for a career in education, participants are learning about language acquisition and the metacognition that supports this process. What better way to do that than by seeing BSPS students in action!

There will be many rich and authentic reflection opportunities for our students as they get to know our guests, who each studied Italian all the way through high school and are now continuing their learning into their tertiary studies. It’s sure to be eye opening and motivating to hear from these young people, who are so passionate about language and where it can lead in life.

Grazie mille to our Bilingual Engagement Leader, Nancy Cozzo and Matthew Absolom from the School of Languages and Linguistics at UoM for this exciting collaboration, which has now been running at our school since 2019.

Ed Connect Volunteers

We’re grateful to have the support of a diverse team of volunteers from Ed Connect, with whom we’ve been working with for a number of years. The lovely Liz and Marg will be continuing on in Foundation this year, and will soon be joined by Nikolas, Lisa, Karen, Jason and Eve assisting in classrooms and Mark, who will be volunteering as a student mentor. You can spot our volunteers by their Ed Connect lanyards; please stop and say hello!

NAPLAN

Our Year 3 and 5 students will be undertaking NAPLAN over the next couple of weeks. NAPLAN is just one of a suite of assessment and tracking tools used in schools and at BSPS, we view this in the broader context of student growth and achievement. It is a useful tool in tracking the progress of individual students over time, as well as at a year level and whole school cohort level, helping us to ensure that every child receives the support they need to succeed.

Teachers will provide students with opportunities to try some practice exercises in class to help them feel at ease with the format. Whilst specific preparation at home is not necessary, you might like to play some typing games with your child in the lead up to support their keyboarding confidence. Please refer to Chiara’s Compass post for further information.

Ciao for now, Kristie