From the Leadership Team 

Dear families, 

It's been a busy few weeks at Modbury School. We are now around the halfway mark of this term and it's great to be able to share the learning across the school through our newsletter. It's so good that it is starting to cool down a little bit after the really hot weather we had last week. 

As the seasons are now starting to change, it is a good time to take stock of your child's school uniform and see if they require any additional uniform items. Please remember to label your child's belongings, as we are starting to see the Lost Property box start to fill up with clothing items, lunchbox containers and drink bottles. If you are missing any clothing or containers, please come and have a look through the Lost Property. 

Parent Connection Meetings 

Last week our staff were able to meet with our families in our Parent Connection meetings. This is such a valuable opportunity for families and teachers to build strong connections between school and home and gain insight into how their children have settled into the new school year. Building these strong and open lines of communication early in the year will ensure that we have set all of our learners up for success as the year progresses. 

These meetings also provided us with a wonderful opportunity to have classroom teachers and the leadership team meet together with our families whose children have a One Plan. It's crucial to have teachers, leadership staff, and parents meet to discuss a child's One Plan, as each brings unique perspectives and insights that can contribute to a more holistic and effective approach. This collaboration ensures that the child's needs are fully understood and that strategies are tailored to best support their development and success. We found it very successful to have these 3-way meetings, ensuring that all information is documented in the current One Plan to provide the best educational outcomes for our students. 

We would love to hear your feedback about our Parent Connection meetings to support us with our future planning. Please complete the short survey via the link below:

https://forms.gle/2fwAMFmeRkeH95of6

Pupil Free Day Learning

On Tuesday 12th March our staff participated in professional learning workshops. This was an extremely valuable day where we engaged in current teaching and learning research and practices to support our students in achieving the best learning outcomes possible. 

Our teaching staff engaged with Renee Book, a Literacy Coach from the Department for Education's Literacy Guarantee Unit. We looked at current research around Cognitive Load Theory and how best to support our learners through building our knowledge and understanding of the working memory. The working memory is where all our mental processing and real-time thinking takes place. It is where we combine incoming information from the environment with retrieved information from our long-term memory, and then use both to make a decision or complete an action. The most prominent feature of the working memory system is its limited capacity. We can handle only a small number of new items at any given moment. We engaged in current research around moving information learnt from our working memory to our long-term memory. We also spent time looking at Explicit Teaching and strategies, the Science of Reading and current best practices in the teaching of phonics, spelling and morphology. 

The Reading Rope which consists of lower and upper strands: the word-recognition strands (phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition of familiar words) work together as the reader becomes accurate, fluent, and increasingly automatic with repetition and practice. Concurrently, the language-comprehension strands (background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge) reinforce one another and then weave together with the word-recognition strands to produce a skilled reader. 

Our teaching staff also learnt about DIBELS and the sequenced reading assessments to monitor students’ phonological awareness, phonics, fluency and comprehension. We use the DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) assessment to measure year 1 to 8 students’ fluency by checking automaticity (rate and accuracy) when reading connected text. Students will be assessed 3 times a year. We also use the DIBELS Maze assessment to assess year 2 to 8 students’ reading comprehension. Students will be assessed 3 times a year.

Assessing students’ reading helps us to:

• measure students’ skills against expected benchmarks
• identify their progress
• evaluate the effectiveness of your classroom practice
• design learning programs for individual students
• implement targeted and multi-tiered support and intervention.

Our School Support Officers (SSO's) engaged in professional learning around behaviour strategies with our DfE Behaviour Coach and Inclusive Educator. They were also able to complete some training in positive behaviour support. This training will be beneficial for supporting their work with our students. 

NAPLAN

NAPLAN is a national assessment that tests students' ability in reading, writing, conventions of language (spelling, grammar and punctuation) and numeracy. 

Tests are scheduled in this order:

• writing
• reading
• conventions of language
• numeracy

We wish our Year 3 and 5 students good luck in their NAPLAN assessments. 

Bag a bargain 

We are thrilled to announce a fabulous opportunity for you to snag a fantastic deal!  We are offering our current stock of school uniforms for just $20 each, as we are making room for our newly designed uniforms. Now is the perfect time to stock up on spare uniforms or replace any items that have seen a bit too much adventure on the playground.

Please pop into the Front Office and see Kym or Liz to help you purchase t-shirts or jackets for $20. 

Please pay by card at the Front Office. Items are limited - be quick so you don't miss out!

Parent Workshops 

Next Wednesday is the last of our Parent Workshops offered for this term on Coping Skills - this was a 2 part workshop. Please see the 'Community News' section of the newsletter for more details. We have booked in some Parent Workshops for next term, however, we may try changing the time of these upcoming workshops as we have had low attendance. Please keep a look out in the newsletter and Class Dojo for upcoming information. 

Planting Indigenous Plants 

Susie, Marisa and our First Nations students recently worked with Dilanjali in our school garden. They have worked hard to create a native garden. Here are some pictures of their work:

Mid Year Intake 

Playgroup 

We warmly welcome Alysia Coventry as our Playgroup facilitator at Modbury School. Playgroup is run every Friday morning in our Pre-chool from 9.00 am to 11.00 am. Playgroup is a wonderful opportunity to bond with your child through play, stories and songs. Please see our Term 1 Playgroup program below: 

We hope you enjoy reading through the newsletter.  

We hope everyone enjoys the next few shorter weeks with  Easter and Anzac Day coming up! 

Warm regards, 

Sara, Ali and Sheila. 

Leadership Team