From Daniel 

What a celebration of our Community!

Our Connecting Community mural is now complete and we are all thrilled!

After months of planning and hard work from artist Merilyn Duff (Aunty Merm) and a team of dedicated parents, students and staff our mural is now finished.  It is a wonderful representation of our diverse school community and the different journeys we all experience as we move through life at our beautiful school.

I don't want to give too much away, as we will be celebrating the stories behind the mural at a special assembly next Friday (22nd November), however I can say that the joy I have seen in students as they have found connections to their own lives in the artwork has been just fabulous.

I will say more at our assembly, but before then check out this video of Aunty Merm talking about the project.

Thank you so much to Aunty Merm, Miss Harris, Caroline Lansche, Mary Mumbler and the team who made this possible.  We truly appreciate your efforts, talents and strength.

Exciting things on the horizon as we head to 2025

As the 2024 school year begins to draw to a close, a key aspect of my work is planning for 2025.  And I have to say, I am excited about what is to come.  We have been doing some significant work over the past couple of years in building our capacity deliver explicit instruction in our classroom and we are now ready to take the next step as we make a few changes to our teaching of literacy in 2025.

Our team has undertaken a huge amount of research over the past 12 months, looking into evidence based practices and what the Science of Learning and Science of Reading is saying about what best practice is in the area of literacy.  As a school we do a terrific job of knowing our students, understanding their needs and providing the appropriate supports to meet their needs.  The research we have done has affirmed many of our practices are already consider best practice.  What we have seen is that whilst some of our approaches are effective for some students, they may not be effective for all.  We have also seen that some of our practices while effective, may not have been as efficient as they could possibly be.  So we are making some changes to our approach.

You may begin hearing some new (and not so new) words from your students over coming weeks and definitely in next year as begin to fully embed this approach. 

Key components of our Structured Literacy approach include building students':

Word Recognition

 - Phonological awareness  (knowing the sounds of words)

 - Decoding Skills (knowing the alphabet and spelling-sound links)

 - Sight Recognition (automatically knowing familiar words)

and 

Language Comprehension

- Background Knowledge (understanding of facts and concepts)

 - Vocabulary (a broad bank of words and their meanings)

 - Language Structure (how sentences are made)

 - Verbal Reasoning (understanding things like metaphor and inference)

 - Literacy Knowledge (knowing types of text, genres and print types)

These are summed up in the following diagram that demonstrates how these all combine together to become a skilled reader.  

You can read more about this here a this website. 

We will be holding some parent information sessions early in 2025 to provide parents with an overview of these new approaches and the evidence behind them.  If you have any questions before then, please come and speak to me or one of our teaching team.

Key dates coming up...

Please check our calendar for the many key dates and activities that are happening before the end of the year.  There are still many great things to occur before we call an end to 2024.

Friday 20th December 2024 - last day of the year - 1.30pm finish.

Tuesday 28th January - Teachers return to work (Pupil Free Day)

Wednesday 29th January - Teacher Planning (Pupil Free Day)

Thursday 30th January - Students return school

Our Foundation students will complete half days on 30th/31st and will not attend school on Wednesdays for the month of February.  More information will be sent directly to 2025 Foundation families.

Pupil Free days in 2025 were agreed by school council this week.  They will be:

Tuesday 28th January

Wednesday 29th January

Tuesday 22nd April

Tuesday 10th June

Monday November 4th

Term dates for 2025 will be 

Term 1 - Wednesday 30th January to Friday 4th April

Term 2 - Wednesday 23rd April to Friday 4th July

Term 3 - Monday 21st July to Friday 19th September

Term 4 - Monday 6th October to Friday 19th December

Have a wonderful weekend.  See you all at the Assembly next Friday at 2.30pm!

Daniel

Daniel