From The Principal Team

Hi Parents and Carers,

It was wonderful to involve so many people from our community in Tree Planting Day last Friday. Thank you to those who were able to come along, we hope you enjoyed the opportunity. You will notice many new plants, accompanied by a student's name stick, around our school grounds. These plants are native, coming from our local area and will be a lovely addition to our gardens.

We're very excited to share that our two brand new playgrounds, replacing the Prep Playground and the Colourful Playground, have finished being installed and are now ready for our students to use and enjoy. The surface has been topped up and is nice and soft underfoot for our students safety. Thank you for your patience while these works took place.

Our Year 6 students, teachers and our Performing Arts teacher, Mrs Carol Ray, have been working hard rehearsing and preparing for their production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This production will be held early in Term 4 across two performance evenings and we can't wait to see all of our students hard work come to life. Details on how to purchase tickets will be shared via Compass once we receive some final details from our concert venue.

Over the past three weeks all of our teachers have undertaken a series of Professional Learning sessions about the teaching of literacy, specifically explicit teaching of reading. The sessions have been facilitated by our Literacy Learning Specialists, Mrs Keli David and Ms Anthea Cain, and have been both informative and practical. Our staff participate in weekly professional learning sessions and this is a snapshot of a recent focus for our staff.

This week we had the pleasure of joining a Year 6 Japanese lesson, where Gall Sensei and Miss Wilson had arranged a Zoom call with our sister school in Japan, Minowa Elementary School. Altogether, our students had the opportunity to listen to the students at Minowa introduce themselves in English, talk about Japanese culture and their school. Some of our students also did an incredible job of introducing themselves in Japanese and sharing a little bit about themselves. A highlight was watching the Year 6 students sing two songs for the Japanese students, as well as seeing the Beaumaris Primary School hat and polo top being worn by Japanese students! This was a wonderful example of technology transforming learning opportunities and enriching the connection our students can make to the things, people and places that they're learning about. Gall Sensei and Miss Wilson are looking forward to coordinating further opportunities for our students to connect virtually with our sister school to experience these language and cultural experiences.

A large number of our Prep to Year 3 students have been participating this term in the Jump Rope for Heart program. So far they have raised an incredible $3,285. Thank you to so many of you for helping raise funds for the Heart Foundation. Our students will be celebrating the completion of the program at tomorrow's assembly (Friday 13th September). Thank you to Miss Rachel Slatter, Miss Melanie Kearton, Miss Katrina Hartley, Mrs Lauren Jones and Mrs Jane Prendergast for coordinating and running this program with our students. They've certainly had a lot of fun along the way.