Principal Weekly Update
Dear Armadale Community,
Hoping you are all well and enjoying our lengthy period of warmer weather. However, we will need some rain soon as our farmers will soon be very concerned about the dry conditions.
Election Day May 3rd
Thank you to our extraordinary PFA team led by Jemma, Scott and the committee made up of Sarah, Vijetha, Olga; Mahsa, Chebett, Anna and our kitchen garden educators, Karen and Clare for the amazing efforts in getting the stalls and sausages ready for sale. Thank you to all members of our community who baked delicious cakes, cookies, slices and muffins and to all those parents who volunteered their time to help at various times during the day. The stalls were all set up around 7.30am so it was a very long day for our volunteers.
Our school looked wonderful and so many of the community who visited the school to vote were very complimentary about what they noticed. We were also so excited to see so many ex-families and students pop back and visit us and share their latest adventures and successes. We have also recently engaged former student, Polly Yeats to work here in an education support capacity and Nate Portnoy who is currently studying teaching will come here and do his placement. What a wonderful endorsement of our school when parents and former students choose to work here.
We were so thrilled that our school raised in excess of $4000 profit to go towards our new front garden, so thank you again to everyone who supported our Election Day.
Healthy lunch boxes fuels children’s brains and helps them learn
There are never enough hours in the day to maximise student learning and we particularly want to capitalise on the learning that happens early in the day as this is where children’s brains are at their best.
We also recognise that to fuel those growing brains, children need to eat ideally, every 90 minutes and for most of the structure of the day, we accommodate this.
But our 9 - 11am block needs to be split at 10.00am to enable that food break. To not encroach on learning time, children can have a 2 minute break to eat a piece of fruit, vegetables, or a yoghurt as an example. Eating foods that have a high sugar content are detrimental to learning as they cause a sugar high and then a dramatic sugar low where children become tired and easily lose focus. You want to provide children with low Gi and low sugar foods.
At 11.00am they break for a 20 minute play where again they should have a healthy snack to eat with some protein and not a sugary treat.
Children have 10 minutes or more to eat their lunch and then they can choose to play or continue eating. Again, healthy food options are beneficial for the afternoon sessions, and this applies to our last break time between 2.20pm - 2.30pm, where the children again have the option to eat or not.
We thought it was important to let you know how many opportunities the children have to eat their food during the school day, in case they come home with a full lunch box and said “oh we ran out of time”.
Needless to say, whenever the children are cooking in the kitchen with Karen, or enjoying their snackadillo lunch, they polish everything off.
Mother’s Day Sunday May 11th
Wishing all of our school community’s Mums, Grandmothers, Step-Mum’s, Aunties and all of those special women in the lives of our children a very happy mother’s day on Sunday. Enjoy all of those treasured moments together.
Staffing news
Connie will be our Principal over the next 3 weeks whilst Rochelle undergoes some surgery and recovery, we have also appointed Rachel Jackson to continue the coaching and mentoring role that Zaim had with a maths focus.
Enrolment forms for Prep next year are now due as are the Year 6 - 7 transition forms which are due tomorrow
Thank you to all those parents who have already submitted these forms, we already have 1 class of Preps for 2026.
Warm regards
Rochelle and Connie
Principals