Principal News
School Hours /Daily Routine
The school hours for students are from 8:50am until 3:25pm daily.
Students will be supervised from 8:35am daily and therefore should not be at school before this time.
School dismisses at 1:30pm on the last day of each term.
Morning Session 1 8:50am to 11:00am
Morning recess 11:00am to 11:30am
Morning Session 2 11:30am to 1:30pm
Lunch 1:30pm to 2:20pm
Afternoon Session 2:20pm to 3:25pm
Meet our SAT Team
Each year our students elect eight representatives in Years 3-6 (two from each classroom) to be members of our Student Action Team (SAT). These students, together with the SAT Leader, Trish McVeigh, will meet regularly to organise special events and discuss any issues or ideas from classroom meetings. Congratulations to our SAT team members, Willow, Davey, Archie, Charlotte, Hudson, Lilianna, Charlie and Sylvie.
School Council
Thank you to those people who have completed nomination forms to be a parent representative on our 2026 School Council. Nominations are set to close on Monday at 4pm. At the time of publication, we still have more vacancies than we do nominations and it would be great if we could have some fresh faces as part of our council.
Our first meeting of the year is on Tuesday February 24th and we will elect our office bearers at this inaugural meeting of the 2026 School Council. This meeting will be held at the school and commence at 6pm.
Spelling Homework (Grades 1-6) ✍️
As of 2026, Spelling Rules will no longer be implemented as our whole school spelling program. This decision has been made in line with the changes to the Victorian Curriculum for English and Department of Education Guidelines, where all Government schools are expected to implement an explicit systematic synthetic approach to teaching phonics instruction, comprising of focusing on sound-letter relationships, decoding, and spelling from Grades Prep to 2 and morphology, etymology, and complex orthography from Grades 3-6.
This teaching is referred to as 'Word Work' which is included within our Literacy block.
Students in Grades 1-6 have been provided with their own spelling homework book to allow them to practice the learning occurring at school at home also. Therefore, each week/fortnight (depending on the complexity of the focus), a focus spelling pattern/rule will be communicated home in this book. Unlike past years where students received a set list of weekly words to practice and then be tested on a Friday, there won't necessarily be a set list given, due to the limitations this provides. As this focus is practiced within the classroom, there are opportunities for application and consolidation of spelling rules, as well as differentiation through the exploration of prefixes, suffixes and multisyllabic words.
Should you have any questions, please reach out to your child's classroom teacher, Emily or myself.
The annual NAPLAN Testing Program will be operating throughout Australia in March. All students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 are expected to participate in a series of externally marked tests in the areas of Literacy and Numeracy. All tests (with the exception of Year 3 Writing) are completed online. Whilst individual student results are sent back to schools (and parents), cohort and school results are seen as important indicators for schools to evaluate our teaching and learning programs. Our testing times and dates are below:
Wednesday March 11th- Writing
Thursday March 12th - Reading and Conventions of Language
Friday March 12th - Numeracy
Whilst we would prefer all students to be present on testing days, there will be an opportunity for catch up sessions in the following week.
Classroom teachers will spend some time familiarising students in Years 3 and 5 with the testing format ahead of the testing times.
If you have any questions about he program or concerns relating to your child's participation, please make a time to speak with me.
Click on the link below for more information about the NAPLAN testing program
Sustainability Club
Thanks so much to Echuca Plant Farm for kindly donating veggies for our school garden!
This year we’ll be selling the veggies we grow, along with eggs from our chickens. You can grab these from the table at the front office for a gold coin donation. All money raised goes straight back into supporting the garden and looking after the chickens.
That's all for this week, Lisa Duffy