Principal's Report

2025 Foundation Enrolments Closing Soon

The Department of Education has launched a new online enrolments portal that families with 2025 Foundation students can use to enrol students. Please speak to Luciana or Mel in the office if you have any questions about this system.

Early enrolment greatly helps our staffing and planning for 2025!

Minister's Phonics Announcement and InitiaLit Training

You may have seen in the media yesterday that Education Minister, Ben Carroll, has announced that from 2025, all Victorian schools will be required to teach Foundation to Year 2 students 25 minutes per day of structured phonics.

As outlined in a recent newsletter, we made a purposeful move towards phonics instruction more than three years ago and are already teaching above this new requirement on a daily basis.

Coincidentally, in order to further the development of teaching reading through a base of structured phonics instruction; our Foundation, Year 1 and Year 2 staff recently received training in the "InitiaLit" program, delivered by the MultiLit organisation. MultiLit is a research initiative of Macquarie University, specifically focused on effective, evidence based literacy instruction.

Our intervention teachers, Kelly Vimpani and Jessica Lipscombe, have been using the MultiLit intervention programs for a number of years, with the links between the two programs being a strong influence on our decision to implement the InitiaLit program into our classroom programs.

Given our financial and time investments into the teaching of structured phonics in recent years, the InitiaLit program won't necessarily introduce anything drastically new into the F-2 teaching programs from an instructional perspective, but provides teachers with a wide variety of new resources, activities and assessments to enhance our current approaches.

Our F-2 staff will send out some further information next term about InitiaLit, including how families can support reading at home.

Reading at Home

Speaking of reading at home, a reminder that dedicated daily home reading is strongly encouraged for all students. There is irrefutable evidence of the links between student achievement and reading - but not just independent reading. Students of all ages get an enormous benefit from being read to, and also from reading with an adult and sharing ideas and reflections of what you've read together.

I'd encourage all parents and carers to pause and reflect on your involvement in your child's "reading diet" - yes, our families are all busy, but an investment in more time reading with and to our children will pay dividends in the long term.

New Playground Installation

After a long period of fundraising and planning, the first stage of development of the area between the 3/4 classrooms and the gym is about to begin. This will take shape in the form of a climbing structure, with the area around to be built out in the years to come with natural and sensory elements, as per our Landscaping Master Plan.

Thank you to all families, particularly our PFA and School Council, for your efforts to enable us to proceed with providing our students with further options to enjoy within our playground!

We are anticipating a minimal level of interruption during construction, with the bulk of the work to occur during the school holidays.

5/6 Camp

Next week sees our 5/6 students head to Philip Island from Wednesday to Friday for school camp. Being very familiar with that part of the world at this time of year myself, please pack warmly!

Thanks in advance to the attending staff: Micah Gonzalez, Mollie Trounson, Sonia Robinson, Cameron Batt, Samuel Fenton, Stephen Roche, Finn Corbett-Davies, Heidi McArdle, Lisa Ralling & Peter Watson. Special thanks also to Hannah from TeamKids and student-teacher Michael Zukier who are both very kindly giving up their time to attend camp as volunteers.

I'm sure many lifelong memories will be made!

Peter Watson

Principal