Principal and Assistant Principal's Page

It’s been a chilly return to term 3. I hope that everyone had a restful term break. I had a ‘home’ holiday with lots of catch ups with friends and family, as well as going to the football. A highlight was visiting ‘Nightscape’ at the Botanic Gardens with my niece. It was spectacular!

School Review- Parent Feedback Sessions

This term our school embarks on the review process. Already the community had input into the review via a community survey. The feedback from this was included in our Pre- Review Self Evaluation.

As part of the review, we have a ‘Field Work’ Day. On this day, parents have the opportunity to give feedback to the school reviewer about the school. We encourage all parents to attend.

Date: 1 August 2024

Time: 9.00-9.45am

Venue: STEM Room

We are hoping to offer an online opportunity as well. Detail of this will be made available soon.

School Uniform

The weather is chilly in the mornings and its best to ‘rug up’ to keep warm! In the front pages of the school diary, it clearly states what your child can wear to keep warm. You can purchase a Huntingdale beanie and scarf as well as a soft-shell jacket from PSW to wear.

What can I wear?

Huntingdale items- your choice

Polo shirt
School Dress or pinafore
Jacket/jumper
Wide brimmed hat
Navy blue tracksuit pants, shorts, skirts, skorts and leggings

Accessories

Use a Huntingdale school bag
Any accessories such as tights, scarves, beanies, bike shorts must be navy blue

Additional Layers

Layers of clothing such as a rain jacket or puffer jacket may be worn in navy blue
Undergarments may be worn underneath the uniform for added warmth, provided these are completely hidden or are in navy blue or white.

Please ensure your child is warm - layers are best. We try and have students play outside and sometimes they can fall over in puddles. We suggest packing a spare set of school clothes in your child’s bag as a backup.

Change of details

At school we often need to contact parents for a variety of reasons. Over the break many families’ telephone numbers, home address and email addresses have changed. If you do change telephone numbers, email, and/or home address or there is an update on personal/medical/family situation, it is most important that you change your information on Operoo and contact Gill in the school office to let us know so we can update the school records. We thank you for your cooperation with this.

NAPLAN Reporting

Years 3 and 5 student NAPLAN results were recently released.

NAPLAN measures student achievement in numeracy, reading, writing, spelling, and grammar and punctuation in 4 proficiency levels. These are: exceeding, strong, developing and needs additional support.

Students’ NAPLAN reports will show how they are tracking against their peers and provide an indication of their skill levels against national averages and where we would expect them to be in order to get the most out of schooling. This provides valuable information to teachers about how we can continue to support your child.

Each set of NAPLAN results is an important milestone but it’s also important that students know that one result does not define them – these results are about making sure every student gets the support they need so they can continue to get the best from their learning.

We will let families of Year 3 and 5 students know when their results are available and how to collect them via Operoo.

Term 3 Respectful Relationships

This term’s Respectful Relationships is Topic 5: Stress Management. Children and young people experience a range of personal, social and work-related stressors in their everyday lives. Activities within this topic have an explicit focus on teaching positive approaches to stress management as through assisting students in recognising their personal signs and symptoms of stress, and developing strategies that will help them to deal with stress effectively, will help students cope with future challenges. The activities focus on the ways in which self-calming strategies can be used to manage stressful situations.

NAIDOC Week Excursion to South Oakleigh College

To commemorate NAIDOC Week, a group of our Year 6 students visited South Oakleigh College on 20 June to participate in a cooking class. Lead by the South Oakleigh College students, they baked shortbread biscuits using lemon myrtle, a traditional indigenous spice. Our students had a great time learning to bake, strengthening our ties with the college and learning about indigenous food sources.

Thank you to Chris Everett for arranging this experience for our students.

Red Shield Appeal

On behalf of the Student Leadership Council, we want to thank our school community on your participation in the Red Shield Appeal. We had an amazing amount of foods donated and we also raised almost $470! It was lovely to have members of the Salvation Army attend our school assembly on the last day of term. Well done to the SLC for their excellent organisation.

House Spirit Movie Day

Our Year 6 Leaders take part in a ‘House Spirit’ leadership course each term. Last term leaders

were responsible for organising student led events. For example, during Education Week a teddy’s bear picnic was organised for the foundation students and a lunch time Kahoot Quiz was organised for the Year 3-6’s.

The last activity was organising a Movie Day for the whole school. Captains Elin, Gabby, Preda, Kazuki, Tiana, Cora and Arielle organised popcorn for students and the option of wearing PJ’s for the day. Classes were able to select a movie of their choice- some of the movies were Pixels, Bugs and Yes Day. It was a fantastic activity to round off a busy term!

The House Spirit Leadership course has allowed our leaders to learn how to canvass student voice, organize ‘big picture ideas’ into a manageable event, how to organise each part and promote it to the student body.

Well done to all of our student leaders for their work in this area.

Emma Mickle Visit

We were fortunate to have Emma Mickle, para-cyclist, speak to our Year 4’s and 6’s last term.

Emma was a normal everyday person and working as a paramedic, until a hiking holiday with friends to New Zealand changed her life. She was squashed by a tree, breaking 20 bones in her body and injuring her spinal cord. Told she would struggle to walk again, losing her calf and movement in her left arm, Emma persisted with treatment and gradually learnt to walk again. As part of her therapy, she started riding a three-wheel bike. Riding became a passion for her and in 2022, with a lot of training, competed in her first ever cycling event, coming last! This did not deter her, further training enabled her to improve her times and enable her to compete in the Para- World Cycling World Cup in Italy and Belgium this year in June.

Emma is hoping to make the Para-Olympic Team.

We thank Emma for her amazing talk- it was a great story of hope, courage and persistence. Emma gladly signed autographs for our students and commented how beautiful they all were!

State Cross Country Results

Last Week April from Grade 4, participated in the State Cross Country at Yarra Glen. April placed 4th in her race, beating her personal best time by 35 seconds! This result enabled April to qualify for the Victorian Team. What an outstanding result by April, who I know had been training hard for this event over the past few weeks! We are all very proud of you!

Attendance

Last week I sent out the Semester 1 and June attendance newsletter. I hope this enabled families to reflect on their child’s attendance.

Quite often our F-2 teachers hear parents saying, “It’s better to have longer holidays when their child is in the junior years, and it won’t interrupt their learning in the senior years.” The opposite is true! In the junior years of schooling, children learn the fundamental skills of reading, writing, spelling, mathematics and interpersonal learning, which are foundational blocks that will help children develop their learning in the senior years. They also develop friendships and routines. For example, by taking two weeks off, students will miss a whole unit of mathematics such as counting and place value. This type of learning links to other mathematics topics e.g. addition and subtraction and they then find it difficult to catch up.

Please remember there is no safe level of absenteeism for students.

If your family is having any issues with attendance, please contact the school.

2024 Parent / Caregiver / Guardian Opinion Survey

The Department of Education is conducting a survey to find out what parents / caregivers / guardians think of our school. The Parent / Caregiver / Guardian Opinion Survey is an annual survey offered by the Department of Education that is designed to assist schools in gaining an understanding of families’ perceptions of school climate, student behaviour, and student engagement. The survey is optional, but we encourage all families to participate. Our school will use the survey results to help inform and direct future school planning and improvement strategies. The survey is completely anonymous.

All families are invited to participate in the survey. The Parent / Caregiver / Guardian Opinion Survey will be open from Monday 29 July to Friday 30 August 2024.

The survey will be conducted online, only takes 20 minutes to complete, and can be accessed at any convenient time within the survey period on desktop computers, laptops, tablets or smartphones. The online survey will be available in English and 10 other languages including Arabic, Greek, Hakha Chin, Hindi, Japanese, Punjabi, Simplified Chinese, Somali, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

You can complete the survey using the following link https://www.orima.com.au/parent and use the pin that be emailed out from 29 July 2024.

Please speak to the school office if you would like more information.

Lunch eating time at school

We have received a number of parent concerns about how long students have to eat their lunch at school. All of our staff give students the full eating time

We are starting to do announcements for students to remind them about lunch eating time:

To sit quietly and appreciate the food that has been prepared by their parents
Be mindful and enjoy eating lunch
That the 10 minutes is for eating and socialising can happen outside

We also ask that parents:

Do not overpack your child’s lunch. We often see that there is too much food, and your child cannot eat it all.
Discuss with your child what they like in their lunch and the amount. What are their favourite things? What do they dislike?
Pack lunch together so your child knows what they will have.
Set realistic expectations of what they can eat.

New Playground

Earlier this year, School Council approved the installation of a new playground to replace the old, original playground under the blue shade sail. Funds raised by Watashi Mo are going towards this project. Two designs were sourced. Late last term I met with 33 students from F-6 to choose the preferred design. The design from Adventure Plus was the overwhelming favourite. Comments from the students included that their design was more interesting, bigger and had more play options. They said that students won’t get too crowded, they liked the ramp and that kids can spread out and choose things. I then visited all classes to show the design. All students got to vote to choose the colour scheme and the panels in the design. The results were shared at assembly at the end of last term. The playground is due to start on 24 October and should be finished before the 70th birthday celebrations. Thank you to School Council and Watashi Mo for funding this project.

Updates to the Victorian Curriculum

The Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA) has released the Victorian Curriculum F–10 Version 2.0.

The release includes The Arts, Health and Physical Education, Humanities, Languages (Chinese, French, Italian and Japanese), Science, Technologies, capabilities, foundational skills and cross-curriculum priorities. This follows the curriculum release of English 2.0 and Mathematics 2.0.

Over the coming year, our staff will work on familiarizing themselves with the updated curriculum and implementing it over the next couple of years.

To read more about the Victorian Curriculum F–10 Version you can visit the VCAA website

Have a fabulous fortnight! Keep warm!

Ruth Biddle

Principal

Assistant Principal Report

I hope you enjoyed spending time with my parents during the recent school holidays in Japan. It is nice to see children coming back to school with enthusiasm and feeling refreshed. We have a pretty exciting term coming up with Science Week, Book Week, Literacy and Numeracy Week.

Morning Tea Hang Out

You are invited to join our School Chaplain Susan, every Monday from 8:45am for morning chat and coffee in the STEM ROOM.

Health and Wellbeing Support

We have joined the Psychs in Schools Program for Semester 2 to achieve greater mental health outcomes for our students.

We welcome Anna Block (provisional Psychologist). Anna will be onsite at our school on Wednesday and Thursday each week.

If you have any concerns with your child with Academic delay, anger/aggression, anxiety/worries, behavioural issues, carer support, depression/sadness, emotional expression, inattention/hyperactivity, low self-worth etc, please feel free to contact Naomi.

Parents don’t need to pay for this service.

School Uniform

We have been having many cold and windy days recently. Please make sure that your child/ren come to school with warm clothes with school colours.

Lost Property

Lost property is mounting up again…Please check the tub in office to see if anything belongs to your child. And, please remember, that if you put your child’s name on their lunch box, jacket, hat, etc., there is a better chance of them finding their owner. At the end of each term items left are disposed of responsibly.

Naomi Mori-Hanazono

Assistant Principal