Principals Report

Imagination garden 

The Imagination garden planting was completed by Richard Bellamo ( landscape architect) working with grade 4B this week in preparation for the opening of the new play area. Next week, grades will visit the space to explore and develop their understanding of how to care for the plants and equipment. The following week, we anticipate that all children will be able to use the play space during break times as well as an additional outdoor learning area. 

Grade 5 camp

The grade 5 students and 7 staff  had a wonderful time at  Cave Hill Creek camp last week, experiencing many new adventures and challenges. The Halloween disco was a big hit along with the canoeing, hut building and abseiling.

I would like to thank Geoff, Louise, Samim, Tyler, Meg, Andrew, Skye and Sallie for their dedication and time attending the camp and ensuring everyone enjoyed the experience.

Parent teacher Interviews

We will be conducting Parent Teacher Interviews on 4 and 5 December this year. Bookings for Parent Teacher Interviews will be open via the Compass portal from Monday 20 November

Both these days are normal days of attendance for the students. The class teachers will be released to conduct the interviews and the students will be supervised by specialist staff for each afternoon.

Interview days:

Foundation to Grade 2  Monday 5 December

Grade 3-6 Tuesday 6 November

The meeting information for the PT interviews will be sent out via Compass and will be held virtually over Webex. We have chosen to remain with virtual meetings as they allow us to conduct interviews while the students are at school, are more time efficient and provides working families options to logon rather than having to take time out of the working day to attend the school. 

Concert tickets

Our concert is fast approaching and we will be releasing tickets next Monday via Trybooking.

We are having the whole school involved this year after 3 years of having no special arts events due to the pandemic. Due to venue capacity, a school of 580 (25 classes), cannot perform  all together on the same night. We developed a vertical split of the grades over two nights to make it logistically manageable. We felt if was important for all children to have the chance to perform and celebrate the Arts as a school and for no one to miss out. 

Finding a venue that will accommodate all families over two nights has also been a challenge. We understand that there will be some families that have children performing on different nights, but this was unavoidable from a teaching perspective, as the dances and songs are taught during Performing Arts lessons. 

As a consequence, there will be a limit of 3 tickets on each night for the first round of tickets. The venue capacity is 720 per night so with 300 children performing each night, this is fair allocation to enable all families to be there. To support families who may need to attend both nights, we have reduced the price of tickets to $25 per adult and $15 per child. 

If there are remaining tickets in the week of the concert, we will release more tickets for those who may want to include other family members. Thank you for your understanding in supporting us to deliver this amazing school community event.

Funding for Tutor program

The Tutor Learning Inititative has been extended for the next two years and we will receive funding based on 2023 Naplan data. As a school, our Naplan data was very strong so our funding has been decreased significantly.  We will be assessing students and analysing the data towards the end of the year to identify the students who will be included in the tutor program next year.  The Department of Education has recommended that schools continue to focus on Numeracy as this area continues to be a priority for Victorian schools in 2024 and is one of our key improvement strategies in the current School Strategic Plan.

Smart watches

While it is wonderful to see students wearing watches, it is apparent that some of these are "smart" watches that can be used to make or receive text messages. We have been advised that some children have been using their watches to text parents or are receiving texts from their parents  during school time. The Department of Education is quite clear on their mobile phone (and devices) policy. Smart watches must have their capacity to make calls/texts switched off (similar to flight mode) or not be brought to school.

"Students who choose to bring mobile phones to school must have them switched off and securely stored during school hours. For the purpose of this policy, a mobile phone is a telephone with access to a cellular (telecommunication) system, with or without a physical connection to a network"

This policy applies to iPads, smart watches and all mobile devices. Please help your child set their device so that they are not inadvertently breaking the rules.