Ms D Principal Message

French Day

What a wonderful way to kick off Term 3! The whole school came together to celebrate French Day, which this year coincided with Bastille Day — and the atmosphere was truly magnifique.

A heartfelt thank you to our parent community for your efforts in helping students put together their costumes. They all looked absolutely fantastic. A very special thank you also goes to Madame Li, who worked tirelessly across two terms to organise the day, including coordinating with our Grade 6 leaders who ran the lunchtime activities with such enthusiasm and pride.

Curriculum Day

Last Friday we had the privilege of welcoming Emina McClean to TPS to work with our entire staff on strengthening English instruction. Emina met with our teaching and learning team in advance to plan and tailor the day specifically for our context, ensuring it was relevant and meaningful for both teaching staff and education support staff alike.

The day was structured around three key areas of focus:

• Reading comprehension — with a central theme of shifting the 'heavy lifting' from teacher to student, empowering learners to take greater ownership of their understanding
• Vocabulary instruction — exploring the importance of planned, sequential vocabulary teaching as a foundation for literacy
• Refining our planning — revisiting and updating current plans to embed the new learning into everyday practice

The impact has already been evident. As our leadership team has conducted classroom drop-ins this week, it has been wonderful to see the learning from Friday being implemented with such speed and enthusiasm. We are incredibly fortunate to have such dedicated and growth-minded staff at TPS, who embrace challenge and continue to invest in their own professional learning.

Emina will continue to work alongside our leadership team throughout the year as a critical friend, supporting us to refine our practice and ensure we are delivering the very best learning experiences for every student.

2027 Prep Enrolments

Enrolments for 2027 Prep are now open via the Student Insight platform: https://students.educationapps.vic.gov.au/s/

Enrolments close 31 July, and families will be notified of their outcome from Monday 3 August 2026. If you have a child starting Prep next year and have not yet enrolled through the portal, please do so before the deadline.

Industrial Action — Thursday 23 July

The Australian Education Union has called on its members to take stop-work action on Thursday 23 July 2026. Toorak Primary School expects to be moderately impacted, with approximately half of our teaching and support staff not available on the day.

To ensure student supervision and safety, we will be modifying our usual program. Classes will be combined into multi-age groups and supervised by available teachers and education support staff. Please be aware that your child's supervising teacher and support staff may differ from their usual classroom team on this day.

While much of the public discussion around this action has centred on staff pay, we want families to know that school funding is also a significant factor in the Union's decision to take action.

Classroom Snapshot

Over the past week I have been taught the compensation strategy by some Grade 3 students who were keen to share what they had been learning about in maths.  They shared the new strategy that they had learned, its application and how they used manipulatives and drawings to help them solve subtraction problems.

Jess De Angelis (Maths Learning Specialist) has introduced ‘facts on fire’ across the school to support the further development of fact fluency. Students dedicate 2 minutes, 3 times per week on fact fluency exercises and over the past week our prep students have come on board.  After just 3 days of practice I was blown away by all the students across the 4 classrooms who had learnt the routine of completing as many facts as they could in 2 mins - the beginning task was subitising (recognising dot patterns) and writing the corresponding number, they were very speedy and showed high levels of success.

Warm Regards

Suada Dzaferovic 

Principal