Altona Green Primary School Newsletter

A Message from David & Cam...

The start of Term 3 has gone smoothly with everyone returning from holidays refreshed, relaxed and happy. We have a very busy term planned that is filled with camps, activities, excursions and community events that everyone will enjoy. Our teachers have planned stimulating and challenging curriculum programs for our students - please have a look at the Curriculum Newsletters page of this newsletter to see what our students will be learning about this term. 

Term 3 Events

Along with the terrific curriculum programs for Term 3, we have a great range of different events and activities planned that we are all looking forward to. Here is a summary of events and things to remember for Term 3:

 

Camps & Excursions:

  • Year 4 Camp Allambee (Wednesday 4th September - Friday 6th September) We are very excited for our first Grade 4 camp at this venue. The camp is an adventure camp and sounds amazing. The camp and will challenge the students in a very supported setting. Information about this camp will be communicated very shortly. 
  • Year 2 Anglesea Camp (Tuesday 17th September - Wednesday 18th September) This year will be the third year we have attended this camp. It is a wonderful camp that be a fantastic experience for our students at their first school camp. There will be a presentation held over WebEx going through key details about the camp. The date of this presentation is Wednesday 7th August at 5pm. A reminder and specific details of the presentation will be sent out in due course.
  • Year 6 Canberra Camp (Monday 7th October - Friday 11th October)- Our annual pilgrimage to Canberra is also approaching! The Grade 6 teaching team have started to prepare for the camp and forms will be sent home soon in relation to medical conditions and dietary requirements. This camp is a wonderful 'rites of passage' experience for our Grade 6 students and provides many memory-making experiences!

Whole School Events:

  • Book Week - Book Week runs from the 9th-13th of September. It is always a great week with lots of activities centred around our favourite books. The highlight is always the dress up day - we cannot wait to see all the creative costumes!
  • Trivia Night - This is an adults only event running on the 9th of August. See below for more details
  • Father & Special Person's Day - We invite all dads and other special people in our students' lives to attend this event on the 30th of September. Details of this particular event are currently being finalised and further information will be sent via Compass.
  • Assembly - Assembly runs alternate weeks to the newsletter and is held in either the gym or under gumbuya depending on the weather. The remaining assemblies this term are:
    • 25/7 (Thursday) - 2/3V
    • 9/8 - Prep B
    • 23/8 - 2/3M
    • 6/9 - 6H

Pupil Free Day

  • Next Friday (26th July) will be our next pupil-free day for the year. Each year school councils may schedule up to 5 student-free days (when student instruction does not occur) for professional development, school planning and administration, curriculum development and student assessment and reporting. This day is focused on professional development of our staff aligned with our whole school improvement strategies, primarily on effective mathematics instruction. 
  • Due to this taking place on a Friday, the assembly for the fortnight will be held on Thursday afternoon where 2/3V will be presenting. Please also note that TeamKids is available for all day care on this date.

NAPLAN

Whole-school and individual student NAPLAN data has been made available to us, and we are pleased to share that our students have continued to perform very well on these tests and we have again received excellent whole-school results. We have continued to have a large percentage of students receive 'exceeding' or 'strong' results in many of the assessments and our overall results when compared with similar and network schools has remained very strong. These results align with our improved academic results in our other school-based assessments and show that the improvement strategies in place are having the desired impact.

 

Individual Student NAPLAN reporting

The NAPLAN results for students have recently been released and these reports give an overview of how your child has performed on the individual assessments. The NAPLAN assessments measure student achievement in numeracy, reading, writing, spelling, and grammar and punctuation and the results are presented in 4 proficiency levels. These are:

  • exceeding
  • strong
  • developing
  • needs additional support.

Students’ NAPLAN reports 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 provide a snapshot of student achievement at a point in time and are about making sure every student gets the support they need so they can continue to get the best from their schooling.

 

If you have any further questions about your child's NAPLAN report, please contact your child's teacher.

Student Achievement

Alex, Cooper & Imogen - Nippers State Finals

We were informed late last term about Alex, Cooper and Imogen's efforts representing Altona Life Saving Club at the Nippers State Finals. The event including obstacles, line throwing, mannequin carry and relays all in the pool. Our kids came away with 2 silvers and 3 bronze positions and Altona life saving club came 3rd in the state. What a great achievement - well done!

 

Joseph - State U12 Rugby and Touch Teams

Joseph has been selected out of 180 students to represent Victoria in the U12 team at the upcoming National Rugby Championship in Canberra. This is such an exciting opportunity for Joseph to play at such a high level and we cannot wait to hear how he and the team go. Well done, Joseph!

 

Jensen - State Cross Country

On an absolute bog of a track, Jensen put in an incredible effort against the best runners in the state. It was really tight and Jensen just did enough to get the gold! This is an incredible result and our whole school community is so proud of his achievement. This result means that he qualifies to head to the Nationals later this year. Amazing effort, Jensen!!

The Meadons and the Wooles - Gold Coast Runners

The Meadon and the Wooles families escaped the Melbourne winter and participated in the Gold Coast Marathon running festival during the holidays. The girls participated in the 5km and 2km runs, had a great time and achieved great PBs. Well done to all the runners and to their parents who also participated in the events during the festival.

As always, please send us any student achievements that occur outside of school. We love celebrating their accomplishments with our whole community!

Maths Extension 

Alongside the Maths Olympiad, this week Cam has started to conduct weekly Maths extension lessons for students in Grade 4/5 and 6 that have been identified by their teachers as those that would benefit from these sessions. The Grade 4/5 students initially will focus on the use of effective strategies to calculate and then check the reasonableness of their answers when multiplying & dividing by decimal numbers. The Grade 6 students will be learning about the three key number properties (Commutative, Distributive & Associative) and then applying these laws to simplify and solve algbraic equations.

Maths Olympiad - Home Challenge

Have a go at this fortnight's Maths Olympiad questions!

  1. There are some blue, red and green marbles in a box. The probability of choosing a blue marble is 2/5. The probability of choosing a red marble is 3/11. There are 18 green marbles. How many red marbles are in the box? 
  2. Jan and Nika ride their bikes. Jan rides at 10km/h for 1 hour and then rides at 20km for 30 minutes. Nika rides at a constant 16km/hour. The trips cover the same distance. For how many minutes does Nika ride? 

If you attempt these problems at home with your child, please ask them to visit me. I would love to discuss how they went about solving these problems.

AGPS Disco & Crazy Hair Day!

A highlight of the term for many of the kids is the AGPS Disco. The theme this year was 'crazy hair' and was selected by our JSC. This event is totally run by parents and we cannot thank them enough for the effort that goes into giving our students such wonderful memory-making experiences. A huge thank you Leanne Grima and all the parent volunteers who helped in the planning, set up and running of the AGPS Disco. The gym looked amazing, the song choices were perfect and the kids had the best time! The event was a terrific way to celebrate the end of an excellent term. Thank you!!

Christmas in (almost) July Trivia

Friday 9th August 

We are very much looking forward to our upcoming adults-only trivia night on Friday 9th August at 7pm. The night will be filled with festive fun, games and general knowledge! If you haven’t attended one of these before, it’s an event not to missed. A child-free night out right in our little suburb! The theme is 'Christmas in (almost) July', so dust off those ugly sweaters and dodgy Santa costumes! 

 

So get a team together and if you wish to attend but do not have a team let us know and we will sort you out. This is a fantastic opportunity to come and meet new faces as well as support our fundraising efforts towards our new audio/visual system for Gumbuya. 

 

So grab some friends, come along and have some fun. Tickets are $30 per person and can be purchased via Compass Tix here - BOOK YOUR TICKETS HERE

2025 Enrolments

There is a great demand for places at our school and we are required to carefully manage all enrolments to ensure there are enough places for all students that reside within our school zone. To assist us with this, please inform us as soon as possible if you have a prep child starting in 2025 or know of any other students who may be joining us in 2025. Similarly, if your child will no longer be attending AGPS in 2025 please let us know. All this information helps us greatly with planning.

 

We are approaching the end of the Prep enrolment timeline and all enrolments are due by Friday 26th July 2024. Once all applications are received we will notify parents/carers of the outcome of enrolment applications by Friday, 9th August 2024

We hope you all have a great weekend!

 

Take care,

 

David & Cam