Principal's News

A busy fortnight has passed and an exciting fortnight ahead, I combine my excitement for what is happening in our school with the sullen support that I am offering my football team at the moment as Carlton continues its trend of mediocrity.

We are looking forward to our special Grandparents Morning next Thursday. We will also be celebrating and acknowledging the importance of Reconciliation Week in our classrooms, the beginning and end of Reconciliation Week acknowledge the two important events in the reconciliation journey — the successful 1967 referendum, and the High Court Mabo decision. We are looking forward to sharing in these events with our students and I look forward to welcoming our Grandparents to our school next Thursday morning.

A Great Day Out

Congratulations to our district Cross Country team that represented our school last Friday afternoon at Port Melbourne, my thanks to Miss Molloy for organising this opportunity for our students and to our parents and families that were able to take time to watch and support our team. These events are always highly competitive and give our students a great opportunity to compete and participate against our partnered schools. Further details are available in our Staff News section of this newsletter. Well done everyone!

Emergency Drill

I wanted to ensure our school community were aware that next Wednesday we will be completing an emergency management drill, schools complete these each year as a part of our emergency management compliance. I want to replicate our term 1 lockdown when a residential fire caused us to enact our emergency management plan. Whilst all students, staff and families did a wonderful job on that day, we can review this and a replication of the lockdown will ensure that we have reflected and improved on these procedures and improved our response and processes. I will share this information via SchoolStream in the lead up to Wednesday.

School Fete

Could I please encourage you to navigate to our School Fete sub-heading in this edition of our newsletter, our fete committee are continuing to work behind the scenes and our catering group are seeking your input around food and beverage options for the event. Our sponsorship team are once again seeking any offers of help and support to help reduce cost overheads on the day and ensure the event is a successful fundraiser for the school.

School Visit

We recently had a wonderful opportunity to host three educators and a school leader from New Caledonia, the purpose of their visit is to explore bilingual education as they are shaping their programs in their own school settings to become English-French Bilingual schools. They have spent time over the last few weeks at Caulfield Junior College and Camberwell Primary School (Both offering Bilingual French programs) and took an opportunity to spend a morning with us and engage in some professional conversations around our own settings and philosophies on bilingual education. It is always a pleasure to seek some external affirmation around the validity of our bilingual program and our visitors identified what a great quality program they were observing as we toured our classrooms together.

Congratulations

I spoke to Shima (Grade 6) on Wednesday and she reluctantly agreed to allow her recent achievements to be shared in our newsletter. With her approval, I am able to extend our congratulations to Shima for her performances at the National Gymnastics Championships held recently on the Gold Coast. Shima performed amazingly well, achieving an individual result of 3rd in the overall rhythmic performance, including a 1st place in the ball apparatus routine. She combined with her sub-junior Victorian team to finish 2nd overall. On behalf of all of us, congratulations Shima!

Car Parking

A reminder to families that the school car park on Poplar Street near our Prep building is not a school drop off or pick up zone for cars in the morning or afternoon. Please ensure you are not driving into this area in the morning or afternoon and are not dropping your child off from a vehicle in this area at any time. This is used as the main entry for many our prep and year 5/6 students in the morning and I would ask that this is kept safe and free from any moving vehicles entering the car park at all times.

Coffee Van

To celebrate the end of our first semester, I have organised a Coffee Van to warm up a winter morning. Please join with us on Thursday 15th June from 8am onwards and come together for an informal coffee and a chat with one another.

Smiling Mind Partnership

Wellbeing is essential to learning and there is direct evidence that links healthy students with positive learning outcomes and academic progress. With that in mind, we were recently accepted into the Smiling Mind Primary School Program, a partnership funded by the Australian Government Department of Education through the Emerging Priorities Program. The program provides us resources free of charge saving the school between $4000-$9000 and includes access to a curriculum workshop for staff, classroom curriculum resources, professional development learning and access to mindfulness and wellbeing experts. Meta-analysis and research evidence identified the following benefits for students:

Better emotion and behaviour regulation than 62% of those who didn’t practice mindfulness
Better academic performance than 66% of those who didn’t practice mindfulness
Lower depression and anxiety scores than 66% of those who didn’t practice mindfulness
Better social skills than 64% of those who didn’t practice mindfulness.

It means that our students will have the capacity to improve attention, improve their working memory, cognitive flexibility, reasoning, planning, goal directed behaviour and self-regulation. It allows us to focus explicitly on emotional reactivity, behavioural issues, anxiety and depression allowing our students to have fewer obstacles standing in the way of their learning. We look forward to sharing this work with you along our journey.

School Production

Okano sensei is busy working behind the scenes preparing our students for our whole school production. However, a production is nothing without vibrant costumes and props, to that end could I please extend a huge thanks to Cathy G (Mother of Luke - Year 3) and Maya B (Mother of Miles - Year 3) who have worked with a small and dedicated team (Sonia P, Carissa M, Kate W and Penny P) to create some amazing costumes for our students. This is a big job undertaken completely voluntarily and it is greatly appreciated, thank you Cathy, Maya and your wonderful team of helpers.

Meet and Greet

We enjoyed a really positive afternoon meet and greet session in our Prep - 2 classrooms last week, thank you to families for making time to join our classrooms for this opportunity. We look forward to opening our classrooms up again next Tuesday afternoon in our Year 3-6 area from 3:30-3:50pm. We look forward to seeing you there.

Enjoy a safe weekend, stay warm and I look forward to seeing you around the school.

Edward Strain

Principal