From the Principal Team

Natalie Shanahan, Sam Fleming, Claire Johnston

Welcome back! We hope you all had a relaxing break. And welcome to the first edition of Banyule Bulletin for Term 3.

We had an exciting start to the term with a great day of teacher professional learning about the Victorian Teaching Learning Model and the Department's new Positive Classroom Management Strategies, Grade 2 swimming, 100 days of school for our Preps and the highly-anticipated (feels like 3 years!!) opening of our wonderful new playground.

Playground

We are all thrilled with our new play space, and boy has it received a warm welcome from the children. Be it swinging from the monkey bars, trying to dig for treasure in the sand pit, balancing on the climbing logs or clambering up and down our climbing tower the kids have had a ball exploring everything it has to offer. It's great to have such a huge part of our play space back and aside from a few pieces of fencing around a couple of tiny spaces that needing finishing we are pretty close to being fence free!

Playground norms

Coming out of our Positive Classroom Management Strategies professional discussion, particularly around expectations and encouraging expected behaviour we launched our first iteration of our playground norms. These have been shared with students at an assembly and within classroom discussions. The playground norms aim to encourage students to play safely, fairly and respectfully. We've attached the playground norms below for you see and help remind and reinforce at home.

playground norms.pdf

Student Safety Reminders

We need to provide a reminder that teachers are on yard duty at 8:45am-9:00am and from 3:30 until 3.45pm in the afternoons. Anytime children are at school outside of those hours, they are not supervised unless by a parent or carer. Parents needing to drop off or pick up children outside of those hours are encouraged to use the outside of schools hours care service.

Yesterday our teachers provided a reminder to all students regarding safety when walking to and from school, with a particular focus on stranger danger. It is important for children that these conversations happen regularly both at school and home. Some points that you may like to reiterate with your child may be;

-Explain that strangers are people they don't know, and they should never go anywhere with a stranger or accept anything from them

-Say no to strangers and remind them not to accept anything from strangers

-Stay aware of your surroundings and avoid distractions like phones

-Walk with siblings or friends whenever possible

-No, Go, Yell, Tell: Teach children to say "no," go away from the situation, yell loudly, and tell a trusted adult.

Parents parking in the staff car park

A reminder to parents/carers that there is no access/use of the staff car park between 8am and 4.00pm each day with the exception of the disabled car park. This includes foot traffic. For safety reasons, children and their parents are required to walk on designated footpaths and not through the staff car park.

Want to see more?