Woodend Primary School Newsletter

From the Principal 

Diana Ellis

On November 16th we presented our Australian Made concert. This was our first opportunity to host a concert since our last one out on the oval, prior to COVID.

We sincerely thank you for your attendance on the night and your understanding of the change and venue, and tight squeeze for the audience. It was so heart warming to see the sheer joy on the faces of parents and grandparents as you watched your child/children perform. Thank you also for your consideration of others and jostling around to ensure everyone could get that treasured photo of their child performing.

Please enjoy the photos from the night on the WPS Whole School Concert page.

 

I am sure the one thing that was most noticeable on the night was the amount of behind-the-scenes effort and practise that was required for an event like this to occur. Mr. Bromley has worked with our students for quite some time, class teachers have practised with their classes and many of you joined in at home. The range of songs certainly played homage to many of our iconic Australian musicians.

Apart from the great performance from each of our classes, the night had an extra special touch with the addition of our guest musicians and the very talented members of our school band. 

It was great to see the range of costumes on the night including a number of staff rocking the iconic mullet and our school Council President doing his best AC/DC air guitar.

 

The range of songs certainly brought back memories of the 80’s for me and also songs that my sons loved listening to when we were travelling in the car. I hope you left the night feeling the same sense of joy and celebration as we all did. I was still talking about it late into the night with my husband and there was certainly a lot of follow up excitement in the staffroom and yard the following morning.

We appreciate the many people who took the time to provide verbal and email feedback. We echo your sentiments about the asset we have in Mr. Bromley and his absolute commitment to always provide opportunities to engage our students and build their skills and confidence, whilst also building their love of performing arts.

 

Below I have added the email feedback that we received and acknowledgement of such a wonderful “feel good” night.

  • We would like to express our gratitude to all involved in the school concert.  The efforts of the teachers and students should be commended.  It was a very entertaining evening.  Of course, a special thank you to Mr Bromley.  We are lucky to have someone so talented yet humble at the school. He has an enigmatic quality that I’m sure the kids appreciate as well as the parents.  
  • Please pass on our thanks to the amazing Joseph and all the team who helped stage today’s school concert. It was wonderful. So great to see all the kids excited and involved. It was the effort that went in from the school that impressed us the most. 
  • Well I think you nailed it last night by talking about warm and fuzzy feelings, I have woken up feeling so happy and joyous after last night. The kids were simply fantastic! Completely sparkling! The musicians, the singers -  Mr Bromley is such an asset to Woodend Primary pulling this together. Thank you so, so much to you and all of the staff for giving the students the opportunity to be part of something musical and big, part of a group performance. These opportunities are so important for community and development - absolutely just as important as the opportunity to be in a sporting team. Thanks again for all the hard work!
  • Please pass on my thanks and congratulations to Mr Bromley. What an amazing concert he created! And to the talented band of adults and students! Was a very fun night.
  • What a brilliant night! 
  • We are so lucky to have an enthusiastic and very cool music teacher like Mr Bromley.   Last night's concert reminded me of the spring dance on the oval from many years ago, which was one of the reasons we chose to come to Woodend Primary.   I realised recently that our family will be at WPS for 14 years (with a 1 year gap in the middle) so I look forward to many more wonderful concerts to come! 
  • Wow what a night! The kids were brilliant but couldn’t be done without the amazing work of Mr Bromley and all the other staff. Just fantastic to pull off an event/show and weren’t the Australian themed outfits awesome!
  • I just wish to say what a wonderful, fabulous evening had by all.  Joseph Bromley, thank you so much for sharing with the entire school community your passion, joy and enthusiasm for the gift of music. I have always admired the wonderful spirit you have, the joy you share with the children and your dedication in spreading the gift of music to all. The Woodend School is so very lucky to have you. The concert was totally amazing. I feel for you the disappointment of not being outside but really it was just so fantastic I just wish for you to know that you are completely wonderful and you did such a wonderful fantastic job. Thank you for being you and very cool and thank you for creating a magical musical spirit and concert. I was starting to learn all the songs as my boys were singing and playing around the house all the tunes. That in itself was a pleasure to see and watch their joy and see their musical spirit come alive. That excitement has been totally inspired by you, thank you.  Congratulations on a super school concert, thank you for encouraging children to be enthusiastic about music and I hope you have a well deserved rest.
  • Congratulations Diana and to the school staff for all their effort and enthusiasm for a brilliant school concert. So well done and such a wonderful evening.
  • Thank you to all a thousand fold. 
  • What a wonderful night last night was! So great to be celebrating the gorgeous WPS kids together again. Mr Bromley is such a treasure. Our kids loved their sets and went to bed asking if they get another concert next year! 
  • We wanted to say a huge congratulations for last night's concert.  Knowing how hard it is to pull something like that together, it was so impressive and the engagement from all the years was phenomenal.  Not to mention the song choices...we sang along to all of them :) Thank you also for being so encouraging of our daughter.  The twinkle in her eyes while singing was priceless.
  • We absolutely adored the concert last night! We included my two small children 4 and 2 who danced and smiled the entire time!
  • The music was delightful and the energy and enthusiasm from everyone, particularly Mr Bromley was just joyous! So much work goes into something like that and it was truly a hit. I’m especially appreciative of the considerate planning such as assuring us that costumes didn’t need to be elaborate and doing a relatively short concert - these things go a long way to making it accessible and enjoyable (Eve’s mum and dad could both come and stay the whole event because of the timing and not being too long, rather than one having to stay home with small kids or leave early etc). Most of all I am just so grateful we have a teacher of Mr Bromley’s calibre and style at our school. Our daughter adores his classes and enjoyed the concert preparation and practise very much. The kids learnt through music about important topics in the songs and got to enjoy the experience of music in bringing people together. I actually can’t rave enough about the entirety of it! Thank you Mr Bromley! And to you Diana and the rest of the staff for supporting such a great event. 
  • I’m not sure whether it’s my bias opinion as I’m a super proud mum at the moment, but the concert was fantastic! Even under the unforeseen circumstance of the relocation of the event, and the huge attendance of other proud parents, it ran smoothly. With everybody being mindful of seeing their own children perform, parents were shuffling around for other parents to get a chance to see their child perform, with the grades being allocated at split times, brilliant idea, with grades and parents moving out for new grades and parents to come in, rolled out for everybody to see the concert. Otherwise we would have been crammed in there like sardines for hours, and it wouldn’t have been so enjoyable.. Mr. Bromley, what a super star! I can not thank him enough from the bottom of my heart.. not just for the concert, which is outstanding on it’s in own merit, working with students from the whole school to perform such a enjoyable, entertaining and talented event is extraordinary achievement ..Mr Bromley has made a huge impact on our sons life, with his love for music and the encouragement giving max the courage to shine. For his influence on our son, I will be forever grateful .. thank you Mr Bromley.. Overall I’ll give it a 5 out 5 rating, there’s nothing I would change and everybody I spoke to had a great time as did I ..  Well done Woodend Primary School you should all be super proud of your outstanding performance!  Thank you 
  • What an amazing concert that the school put on Thursday night!  The students should be so proud of themselves. It's incredible how these young kids are able to stand up and sing in front of a crowd the way they did last night.  And Mr Bromley is worth his weight in gold. The enthusiasm, energy, support and confidence he provides to the kids is second to none. We had such a great time singing and dancing along with some classic aussie hits! Thank you.
  • The concert was fantastic! Mr Bromley did a wonderful job! It’s so valuable to give our kids the opportunity to perform, thank you!
  • What a fabulous concert we got to enjoy last Thursday! I had such a smile on my face watching all the children with their outfits & enthusiasm for all the songs. I loved it!  I wanted to give a shout out to Joseph & his amazing ability to engage the children so well! He is such a brilliant asset to Woodend PS! His musical talent & humble approach is next level & really appreciate how much effort he puts in for the children & school. Thanks to all!
  • I would like to congratulate you and all the staff involved in the school concert, in particular Mr Bromley. Such an amazingly executed undertaking! The enthusiasm of staff and students was beautiful to see and made me so proud to be part of this school community. Well done Mr Bromley!
  • It has taken me a little while to send this to you. We thoroughly enjoyed the Australian Made concerts last Thursday. Such a great initiative by Mr Bromley! Whilst I appreciate it’s a significant amount of work to organise an event such as this, I hope it can become an annual event at Woodend Primary. Everyone seemed to have so much fun. The band were amazing! They must have put in a lot of time to learn so many songs.

Staff and student placement

Recently we have had a number of parents asking for us to publicise the teachers for next year. At this stage it is unlikely that they will be published prior to our whole school transition day. 

We have a number of staff leaving and in the last few weeks we have had 3 positions advertised for which we have been shortlisting and interviewing. 

Behind the scenes a lot of work has been taking place on class placement. We spend a lot of time trying to make the classes as equitable as possible in terms of academic, social, emotional and gender balance. We also ensure certain students are separated and ensure that all students are paired with a minimum of one requested friend. We have also taken into consideration parent requests.

Principal

Diana Ellis