Principal's Report

Dear Families, 

I had the pleasure this week of attending the Year 2 excursion to the Museum and would like to congratulate the teachers on their planning and organisation. I would also like to acknowledge our Grade 2 students. I have never been on an excursion with a more beautiful group of well-mannered, respectful and responsible children.  It was a joy to watch their excitement and curiosity throughout the day, from the city buildings and trams to the dinosaur and insect exhibitions in the museum.  I was so proud of the way they represented Skye Primary School. 

I am pleased to announce that works are finally underway to refurbish our student toilets. It has been a long slow process but the design phase is complete and the builders have been appointed to complete the works. We will also be getting roofing repairs on our older buildings as part of a VSBA initiative. We are currently in the process of investigating the repurposing of the old admin building to become modern classroom spaces for Art, Japanese, Kitchen Garden and Camp Australia. The school will have to fund these works and will be in discussion with school council as to how we can proceed in order to continue facility upgrades so that our students have the best learning environment  possible.  

Congratulations to our Year 3 and Year 5 students who completed NAPLAN earlier this year. Reports came out last week and we hope that parents have had an opportunity to discuss them with their children. We will be sharing more information about our school results in coming weeks, once DE have released more information about the new data that is now collected. Since NAPLAN moved to a different delivery mode this year, schools historical data no longer correlates with the new data for this year and so we are enable to comment on learning growth at this time.

We look forward to seeing many of you at our Science Expo next Thursday and hope that you enjoy participating in the numerous activities and experiments that we have planned. A reminder that our Pupil Free day is the following day. Our staff will all be engaged in a professional learning day with a focus on numeracy (more information can be found in Mr Bernau's curriculum report later in this newsletter). Our teachers collaborate as a professional learning community to ensure that we are delivering high quality learning programs to the students at Skye PS. We use that latest research and evidence based approaches to continually develop our capabilities as highly effective educators. Curriculum days provide much needed time for this work to occur.  Please reach out to Camp Australia should you require care for your child on this day. 

As part of our School Wide Positive Behaviour focus, students earn Class Dojo points for displaying the positive behaviours that we are seeking in the classroom and in the yard. They are able to earn extra Dojo points for simply being at school and being on time. 100 points earns a bronze award. Next level Silver awards are already being given out in assembly. To celebrate these great achievements you will see an Awards page in this newsletter. Recipients of the Silver awards will have their names printed in the newsletter and recipients of Gold Awards will have their photo added. Congratulations to our first round of silver award recipients. Look out for your name in the next tab!   

Have a wonderful fortnight. 

Kind Regards, 

Jane Briffa