The Moorabbin Primary School Community touch the land and think of the Bunurong People and surrounding Clans of the Kulin Nation who cared for the land before us.

We share our gratitude to their Elders past, present and emerging. As we touch this land, we promise to treasure it, taking care of all its people, animals, plants and waterways. We at Moorabbin Primary School appreciate this land. Thank you.

Dear Families, carers, and friends of Moorabbin PS,

It is hard to believe how fast this term is going! We have lots planned in the lead up to the end of the year so be sure to keep your eye on Compass and the newsletter to ensure you know what’s happening.

This Wednesday evening, we had a fantastic workshop on “social media, smartphones and our kids” that was run by two of our parents Laura Bos and her husband Daniel Nitsche on social media, supported by Silke Nixon, allrepresenting “The Moorabbin Alliance”. It was attended by 40 of our community members and it was heartwarming to hear that we are all very concerned about our children and their engagement with the current online platforms from games to apps to the ever-popular Instagram/Snapchat and TIKTOK! It was frightening and eye opening to see the data that is available in regard to the effects on behaviour, depression, body dysmorphia, self-harm and overall social interaction that is being observed and that more that 60% of children under the age of 10 have been exposed to some sort of sexually explicit content and bullying online.

You would also be aware that in the media at the moment there is a lot of discussion for the reduction of access to certain platforms and the possible ban. We are not sure where and how this is going to lead but as a society and community we need to work together. One of the first places is what we as parents are or aren’t doing on the home front to support, protect, monitor our children when we provide them with access to a phone and or device that is essentially a “minicomputer”.

Please see the attached presentation and resources that you might find useful as a starting point. I am very interested in Laura and Daniel putting on another workshop with strategies that parents and carers can use at home. More information to come shortly. Thank you to our organising committee and thank you to all parents that gave up their time to be part of this workshop.

REMEMBRANCE DAY

On Monday 11th November, all students observed Remembrance Day in their classrooms. Students participated in activities about the significance of this day, finishing with 1 minute’s silence at 11am, and at our assembly today where our student leaders informed our community about the symbolism of the Poppy and our choir singing a beautiful song to end the week of ceremonies.

PRINCIPALS CONFERENCE ON TUESDAY 12TH NOVEMBER

Mr Corrigan and I attended the termly conference where as leaders of our schools it's important to be part of the next wave of initiatives that DET will be rolling out into Government schools, important data in regards to NAPLAN results, statewide attendance data, indigenous learning data, the implementation of the new curriculum in English and Mathematics, along with the opportunity to listen to our colleagues from other schools, presenting important strategies and ideas that we can bring back to Moorabbin.

You may have heard earlier in the year that the Minister for Education, Ben Carroll, announced an updated Victorian Teaching and Learning Model with explicit teaching at its core.

“All students from Foundation to Year 2 will be taught using a systematic synthetic phonics approach as part of their reading programs, with a minimum of 25 minutes daily explicit teaching of phonics and phonemic awareness. Systematic synthetic phonics is a structured approach that explicitly teaches the relationship between sounds and letters to read words.”

This is to be a core component of a comprehensive reading program that also includes the essential elements of reading, known as the ‘Big 6’ (Konza, 2014):

Oral language – knowing and using spoken words to express knowledge, ideas and emotions
Phonemic awareness –which is the knowledge of sounds (phonemes)
Phonics – knowing the sound (phoneme) and letter (grapheme) relationships
Fluency – reading accurately and at an appropriate rate with expression
Vocabulary – understanding words in isolation and in context
Comprehension – making meaning from text which includes developing knowledge of grammar.

The good news is that the teaching of English at MPS already includes all of the ‘Big 6’, and students are exposed to at least 25 minutes of explicit phonics teaching each day. This is further supported at home by the use of decodable readers and our mentor texts used both at home and in the classroom.

Our staff continue to keep up to date with best practice in the area of literacy, and it is wonderful to know that the government recommendations are already well established at our school.

If you have any questions about the teaching of reading or ways you can support your child’s development at home, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with your child’s classroom teacher.

MATHEMATICS AND OUR WORK WITH PROFESSOR JILL BROWN FROM DEAKIN UNIVERSITY

Our staff under the leadership of Mrs Mary Tsekouras, has been immersed in the discovery of the updated Mathematics curriculum now called version “2.0” and, have also been working with Professor Brown across this year around problem solving and how to use version 2.0 under our pedagogical model at MPS. (Direct explicit instruction)

We are lucky to be engaging with Professor Brown who is also on the committee, implementing and working on lesson plans for the new curriculum, as a staff it's important to be continuously learning and updating our practices. It was fantastic to see Professor engagin with children from Foundation through to Year 6, teaching and using strategies for effective problem solving, and how we can now utilise these lessons and embed them into our new scope and sequences that Mrs Tsekouras and the maths team at MPS will be implementing in 2025.

Have a wonderful weekend

Noxia Angelides

Principal

MPS IMPORTANT DATES

2024 DATES