Dear PVNPS Community

Thank you to Mr Gagliardi for his fabulous initiative and effort in the Community Trivia night. This was extremely well attended by staff, families and their friends. Everyone had a fun night and loved the variety of trivia that Mr G had organised. Many thanks also to Jo Howard for sourcing many of the donations for our raffles.

All the profits, approx $1900 will go towards Mr G's sports garage (which has sports games and equipment students can borrow out at lunchtimes) and the student led lunch clubs. These programs provide engaging activities for students to do during their recess and lunch breaks.

Mr Phypers Retirement

We held a gathering of past and present staff from PVNPS that have worked alongside Mr Phypers over the past 22 years. Yes, that is how long Mr Phypers has been teaching at PVNPS.

Mr Phypers is extremely respected by all staff and families over the many years. Mr Phypers was my Assistnt Principal during the 2020 and 2021 years of Covid 19 and we were a terrific team who worked well for our staff and community during these challenging years.

On behalf of the PVNPS community, Mr Phypers, we thank you for your ongoing dedication to everyone at PVNPS, your focus on making a difference and we hope to see you around from time to time.

Enjoy your retirement and play plenty of golf!

Parent Discussion Group

Thank you to the 8 parents who were able attend our parent session and also the feedback via email if you couldnt make it. Your ideas and thoughts for improvement in the areas of parent communication and feedback on student learning and homework will be fantastic for us to make improvements for 2024.

We will be reviewing our homework expectations and making this more transparent to parents for 2024.

The partnership between home and school is highly important as we work together to develop students academic, social and emotional skills. In 2024, we will further strengthen our communication portals by ensuring you know how to contact teachers and to access relevant information.

School Improvement

I just wanted to generally thank the community for their ongoing support as we continue to imporve and provide new opportunities for our stduents.

Teachers are always learning and have implementated a great deal of new initiatives in 2023. Our synthetic phonics program in Prep to 2 has been outstanding and I thank Ms McAlister for driving this change. The students are demonstrating high growth in their literacy abilities, especially spelling. This will now be taken into Year 3/4 in 2024 within their spelling program, which will now be based on a different structured phonics session.

Our mathemtaics program has had a makeover and the survey data shows that students and teachers are more positive about maths and are engaged more. Dispositions are highly important as this is an essential element for growth. Students have been learning to be in the learning pit and to understand the sense of struggle is part of learning. We look forward to this continuation in 2024 so that our students are further challenged to exceed.

Grade 1 Area

Ms Sarah Cotton, Mrs Amy Gagliardi and Miss Emmily Stenton