Welcome back to school for Term 2! I hope that over the Easter break, you enjoyed some time together as a family.

I had the pleasure of travelling to Uluru in a caravan with three children and largely no reception; a far cry from our usual holidays it reminded me of the importance of quality time over almost anything else. Our challenge now, beyond getting red dirt stains out of everything, is to try and capture this in the business of more normal life. I encourage you to try to do the same this term as yours and your children’s lives roar back into full force. The Family Peace Foundation recommends that just 8 minutes a day of uninterrupted time with your individual child(ren) can make a huge difference… and is a lot less dusty than my approach!

Classroom Libraries are Here!

Over the past 6 months, some 6000 books, all carefully aligned to student interests and abilities, have been ordered, processed and organised before making their way to your children’s classrooms last week. This was possible due to generous donations from our book drive in 2023, many fundraising events, significant school investment and parent volunteers labelling and sorting.

What this means for students is that they now have access to approximately 200 books in their class. These books are a variety of fiction and non-fiction, series, picture story books and graphic novels. Students will have the opportunity to select a range of these books for their personal book tubs where they’ll use them to practice reading strategies and skills being taught in class. Being able to apply these reading skills across multiple text types and in a range of scenarios supports transferal from short term memory to long term memory (the definition of learning) and given the autonomy they will have in selecting these texts and rotating them frequently, enhances learning engagement and boosts an overall love of reading.

I’m incredibly excited by this initiative and thank all the parents involved in fundraising over the past 6 months, who stuck stickers on books, donated books or contributed in other ways. A huge thanks also to Madi Grace (Reading Learning Specialist) for the work put into curating and organising these texts.

The Importance of Attendance

Attendance remains the single largest factor in influencing your child’s academic and social outcomes as well as long-term perspectives regarding the value of education. Whilst students in our school missed fewer days last year than similar school and state school averages (16.4 days compared to 16.8 and 20.5 respectively), this still equates to nearly two and half terms over the course of seven years of primary schooling. If you extrapolate this over 12 years of school, it equates to a whole year of school missed. The compound effect of this is significant and whilst we strongly encourage you to keep your child home if they are unwell, and understand that sometimes there are other reasons your child misses school, I ask you to consider the cumulative impact of unnecessary time off.

We have already seen this year a large number of days missed for a variety of reasons this year, including:

Late Arrivals or Early Departures (not medical related): 974 days
Family Holidays: 746 days
Parent Choice: 322 days
Unexplained absences: 316 days

Let’s work together to see if we can beat Term 1s attendance rate of 91.06% this term!

2025 Enrolments Open

Enrolments are open for 2025 Foundation students, and will remain so until the end of July. For those of you who have younger children starting at HPS next year, please find the enrolment information and forms on our website, or come to the office to collect hard copy forms. If you have friends/family that don’t attend Hampton, they can find all tour information and bookings available on our website.

Second Hand Uniform Stall

Thank you to Melissa DaSilveria (coordination) and Megan Lester, Kirsten Morris and for supporting the Second Hand Uniform sale late last term. This sale not only raised $450 which contributed toward texts for the aforementioned class libraries, but ensures our uniform is financially accessible to all families and sustainably reused.

New & Important Dates

ANZAC Day Service: Wednesday 11:10am
No Assembly this Friday: ANZAC Service held today instead
House Cross Country (Gr 3-6): Tuesday 30th April
Wonderful Women’s Day: Friday 10th May (2:00pm in Quad; 2:30pm in Classrooms) – No Assembly this day

To stay up to date with all events and key dates, see the Compass Calendar.

Celebrations

Congratulations to Silla G (Grade 6) for finishing 3rd in the State Swimming Championships last week in Butterfly. Whilst not her preferred stroke, Silla broke many personal bests and district/regional records throughout qualification stages for the Championships in butterfly and backstroke and performed incredibly well. This is an outstanding achievement!

Going Green