A note from Mr B

It has been a great start to 2024 in our classrooms.

For the first two weeks of the year our teachers and students complete our beginning of the year program, ‘Rigour and Routine’. The program is designed to establish strong relationships, high expectations and routines in a way that we can all experience success in this school year. Teachers and students work together to:

develop routines and expectations when entering the classroom in the morning, or after recess and lunch
discuss our school Consequence Continuum and Stages Process
establish book work expectations
build a shared understanding of our school values – Respect, Resilience and Responsibility
complete team building activities
develop processes for literacy and numeracy lessons, including how we work as a whole class, in small groups or independently.

It has been a pleasure to visit each of the classrooms and see the way in which students are working and the relationships that are being built between students, their peers and their teachers.

Our Year 3 and 5 students are building towards completing their NAPLAN testing later this term, from Wednesday March 13th to Monday 25th March. Students will complete testing in four areas – Writing, Reading, Language Conventions (spelling, grammar and punctuation) and Numeracy. The majority of the testing is completed online (other than Year 3 Writing). Our students already complete a number of assessments during the year, many of which are online, so the process will be very familiar to them. Classroom teachers in Year 3 and 5 spend some class time this year making sure students are familiar with the testing platform, which should help to reduce any anxiety that students may feel.

Later in the year, parents and carers will receive their child’s results, showing how they performed in each area compared to other students in Australia. As a school, we also receive these results, as well as a more detailed breakdown of how students performed. As is the case with other assessments students complete, as a school we can look at this data and use it to help plan for future learning.

More information can be found on nap.edu.au and you can also access sample tests through the public demonstration site - https://nap.edu.au/naplan/public-demonstration-site.

Rowan Balzary

Assistant Principal