We would like to acknowledge the Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation as the traditional custodians of the land on which our school stands. We pay our respects to all First Nations elders, past present and emerging.

FriYay Fun!

We are not sure we’ve ever thought about filling our buckets with mud, but they sure did start to overflow last Friday! Thank you to everyone who was able to come along to our Mud Stomp event and get dirty, who baked treats for our plant & produce stall and who helped sell treats to our ravenous students!

It was such a joy to see so many smiling faces, older siblings returning from high school, grandparents and special friends, to hear the laughter, the music and the crackling fire and to feel elements of our much loved community events and traditions returning - even the weather was on our side.

A big thank you to Erik, Ian, Shalani, Cam, Denis, CET and everyone who helped make Friday so much fun - here's to many more community events in the future <3

Communications

As we are all aware, the COVID pandemic has made all of us very comfortable typing on our keyboards and sitting in front of screens at varying times of the day and night. Research also shows that when people engage in online communication, not seeing the recipient’s reactions and responses has an influence on what some people are willing to say and how they say it. In some cases, this has led to some parent and carer members of our community making the choice to write emails to staff using tone and language that they would not use (and that would definitely not be appropriate!) in a face to face situation.

We know virtually all Victorians are experiencing higher levels of stress and fatigue after two years of isolation, lockdowns and remote learning, but, being Victiorians, our staff have experienced those same stresses. These emails are having an extremely negative impact on the stress and job satisfaction levels of our amazing teachers. Reading and responding to these emails can also take time and energy away from staff engaging in teaching and building positive relationships with students, which we are sure we can all agree is everyone’s priority.

The Communications Committee is brainstorming some ideas to support positive communication between parents/carers and staff, highlighting that wIn the meantime we would like to remind everyone to think about the impact that their written words might be having on their intended audience. We are all here for the same purpose - to provide our young people with the best learning experience we can.

Phonics Forum

Next Tuesday 10th May at 6pm, we will be facilitating our second Community forum for the year and our focus will be on Phonics. The research and theory behind the teaching and learning of phonics evolves so quickly that it is sometimes difficult to keep up with what should be best practice. Our Literacy team will be sharing information about how we approach the teaching and learning of phonics at BNWPS. As with all of our community forums, we would encourage community members to ask any phonics related questions that they might have using the following link, and we can then tailor the presentation to the needs of the community.

Please enter any questions or wonderings you may have about the teaching and learning of phonics here;

https://forms.gle/3HegkHCbPus9pNsv8

And use this link to access the Forum at 6pm on Tuesday 10th May;

https://meet.google.com/euo-evbg-tpx

NAPLAN

This week, students in years three and five will begin the 2022 series of NAPLAN assessments. These assessments cover the areas of Reading, Writing, Maths and Language Conventions, and will be spread across a two week time period. All NAPLAN assessments will be undertaken through an online platform. Students will be supported to complete the assessments to the best of their ability. At BNWPS we acknowledge and remind our community that the NAPLAN assessments measure specific student achievement at one moment in time. The data that we receive from these assessments is used to discuss whole school growth and effectiveness of teaching and learning programs. Regularly, at school, our staff have so many other ways that they collect, analyse and respond to the learning growth of students - both in the moment and across periods of time. This teacher guided assessment provides us with a very real picture of where our students are at in all of their areas of learning and growth, and this growth is shared with families through student-led conferences, written reports and our new Seesaw platform. If you have any questions about NAPLAN, or student assessment, please speak with your child’s teacher.

Photo Week

Next week our students will have their individual and class photos taken. Over the past few years we have worked with Kids in Living Colour, who take stunning photos of our students. Individual photos will be taken of all students even if you do not submit an order, for use by the school in our administration system. We will share a photo schedule before next week.

Your child should have brought an order form home this week with additional copies available at the front office - otherwise families can order online. If you have any questions about our school photos, please contact the front office or you can contact the photo company directly.

Annual Public Meeting

Last Thursday our School Council and Sub Committees held our 2021 Annual Public Meeting to present our Annual Report and hear from each of our sub committee chairs. The Annual Report (which can be found below) is a legislated requirement of all Victorian government schools and contains a summary of the school’s successes and challenges across achievement, engagement, wellbeing and school finances. An additional element we include in each Annual Meeting, is a reflection by each of our sub committees on what was achieved in the previous year, as well as sharing our goals for this year.

Over the past two years we have seen increased attendance at our Annual Meetings, which we thought was due to the online format. Unfortunately we did not have a big turn out at this year’s meeting, with only a handful of community members attending.

A big theme in last night’s meeting was our sub committees calling out for interested individuals to join or to assist with smaller projects that have a limited obligation, such as the chicken run, pizza oven or trivia night!

We know that school council can seem overwhelming or out-of-reach to new families or people who have not yet joined council or a committee and would like to take this opportunity to invite any community members to try their hand. We are a friendly and engaged group of people who take great delight in building a better schooling experience for our young people.

Disclosure Training

Over the past two weeks, Deb Robins (our Wellbeing Coordinator) and Hannah have conducted ‘Responding to Disclosures’ training for our teachers, aides and OSHC staff. Along with anaphylaxis and asthma training, this forms part of our annual professional learning plan, to ensure we are maintaining a safe environment for our students and keeping up with best practice. We would like to thank our staff for engaging in this challenging but important learning and for maintaining a child safe environment at all times.

If you are experiencing or committing Family Violence and need support, please speak with Keir or Hannah as we can connect families to support services. Families can sometimes feel unsure about accessing services or be worried about losing custody of their children, but we would like to assure you that keeping families together and safe is everyone’s first priority. Alternatively, you can call one of the organisations below.

Ride & Stride

As you may have seen in an earlier edition of our newsletter, BNWPS is partnering with Moreland City Council for the Ride & Stride program in 2022. This week we met with Zoe from MCC, to start discussing what this program will look like for our community - and boy is it exciting! Based on the experiences of the two schools in last year’s pilot program, we are expecting to:

have a ‘Tag On’ kiosk installed, which allows us to track active transport data and gives parents and carers real-time notifications on when your child arrives at school;
have an e-bike open morning (date TBC) and a trial subscription for 10-20 families who are interested in trying out cargo bikes
have a number of ‘Open Streets’ mornings, where the streets around BNWPS will be closed for cars so we can imagine all the possibilities if we had fewer cars on the streets.

Road safety and reducing the number of cars near our school is a big priority for our school and school council. This partnership represents many opportunities for improvements in this goal.

Over the coming weeks our community will be asked to complete a survey about active transport. The information from this survey will be instrumental in guiding the direction of the initiatives, so we ask all families to complete the survey when it comes - no matter how you get to school.

If you are interested in joining the team to support Ride & Stride, please contact Tom Nelson at thomas.nelson@education.vic.gov.au or Tom Keeble at t.keeble@gmail.com

Sprout