Principal Report

Teaching & Learning in 2025

The Education Department have made changes to our  English and Maths curriculum (2.0) and you may have heard all about the 'Reading Wars' about best evidence based practices for the teaching of reading. The talk in town is all about The Science of Teaching. This has a great deal to do with the ability of children to recall and remember information - their cognitive load!  This is something that Ms McAlister and I have been investigating and sharing with our teaching staff in the last few weeks. 

We are very fortunate to already have a synthetic phonic program in years P-4 and in 2025 this will head into the year 5/6 program (they have been implementing some elements this year). This is what is now mandated across Victoria for P-2 only.  Good on us!

However, we will be implementing a more structured explicit Literacy Block in P-2 which includes our already PLD program of synthetic phonics but will be further enhanced with greater focus on repetition and direct and explicit feedback.

It will be teacher directed and explicit all focused on ' Learning To Read'.

Elements include:

• phonemic awareness and phonics 
• word knowledge
• manipulation of sounds
• modelled sentences
• dictation sentences
• vocabulary 
• oral language and writing
• handwriting
• reading fluency
• making meaning/comprehension

It is important for you our parent community to know that we are always driving for continuous improvement to ensure the very best of teaching and learning we can provide for our students. We know that education has a huge impact on their lives and can make all the difference to them when they attend secondary school. Hence why we place this new change as a priority as it is to cater for all students and to ensure all students succeed at 'learning to read'.

FENCING

We finally got our fencing to protect our Indigenous garden.... but a little too late as we have lost many of the plants that were planted. 

Thank you to Ms McAlister for finding this company to erect the fence to help keep the garden free of  balls and students running over to retrieve them.

We will be doing some weeding very soon to fix up this space and we will endeavour to re plant in 2025.

I have logged a REQUEST FOR NAME IN WOI-WURRUNG with the Woi-wurrung  Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation. This can take up to 6 months to get a meeting with them to discuss our project and our request.