From the  Principal 

Diana Ellis

As we reach the end of Term 3, I would like to express my heartfelt appreciation to our staff, students, parents and community members, that help make Woodend Primary School the wonderful place that it continues to be.

Although Term 3 always seems to be a challenge due to the cold Winter weather and illness, I would like to acknowledge the positive, caring and resilient nature of people.

Despite the challenges we continued to work steadily towards our school goals and priorities, and we celebrated many whole school events, including those organised by our wonderful staff being our sensational Mathslympics and Family Maths night and events organised by Parents and Friends such as the Father’s Day breakfast & Trivia Night.

Footy Day

This week footy fever hit WPS with our annual Footy Day celebration. The school was a sea of colour with jumpers/jerseys, socks, beanies and scarves. Soccer, rugby and AFL were all represented.

To go hand in hand with our footy day celebration is our ‘footy lunch”. A huge shout out of appreciation to Jenny and her helpers for delivering just under 400 orders. Behind the scenes, Jen spent a huge amount of time collating all the orders and purchasing the food. What a wonderful service, Jen and her helpers provide. A sincere thankyou to our small cohort of volunteers.

Images in Newsletter

Recently we sent out a consent form regarding Photographic images and the publication of the newsletter on our website and social media pages. Many parents have returned the forms saying they do not give consent to images of their children being published. We totally understand people making this choice. However, going forward there will be less photos of individual students in the newsletter as it will become too difficult to monitor. We will endeavour to still put many photos that demonstrate student learning photos. 

In the newsletter this week I have included some photos of our beautiful Carlsruhe Campus in Spring glory and some photos of writing that our Foundation students did when they celebrated 100 days of school. Some of the responses are quite amusing.

Term 4

Although we are just finishing term 3, we are already well planned for term 4 and we have already started our planning for 2025. We are currently working out class sizes, staffing and class structures for next year, always a challenging task.

Unfortunately, each year, we lose some of our very treasured staff members. We are extremely sad to say goodbye to Mrs. Andrea Evans who has accepted an ongoing position at another school, and she will commence there in Term 4. Miss Cameron has been appointed and has been in the class, getting to know the students of 5/6E this week. In the two years Mrs. Evans has been here she has been known for her mentoring and guidance of other staff, her excellent classroom teaching skills and her ability to show such warmth and kindness and compassion to students, staff and parents. We wish Andrea all the best.

In Term 4, Mrs. Deb Thompson will be taking leave from her year 1-2 class.  Deb has been at Woodend Primary for a number of years and is a well known and loved. We wish Deb well as she has some well-deserved leave.

Term 4 start and Student Free Day

The return date for students in Term 4 is Monday October 7th. Our student free day is Monday November 4, the day before Melbourne Cup Day.

End of Term 3

Just a friendly reminder that school finishes tomorrow at 2.30pm.

Principal

Diana Ellis