College Head of Learning

Parent Teacher Interviews

Parent Teacher Interviews will be held on Tuesday 20 March from 3.30pm until 6.00pm and on Wednesday 28 March from 3.30pm until 8.00pm. Bookings for Parent Teacher Interviews will open in the Community Portal at 4.00pm on Tuesday 13 March. Bookings close at 10.00pm on the evening before each of the interview days. You can access the Community Portal via the link at www.aitkencollege.edu.au. Instructions on how to make and cancel appointments will be emailed to all parents when the bookings open.

If you have misplaced your login details, please email ITsupport@aitkencollege.edu.au.

We know that Parent Teacher Interview evenings pose quite a logistical challenge for all concerned and we always endeavour to make the evenings run smoothly so you can speak with your selected teachers at the appointed times. To help ensure that parents are not kept waiting unnecessarily, we ask that parents are respectful of the appointment times of others:

If a teacher falls behind schedule, they will do their best to see parents in the scheduled order. We ask those waiting not to jump ahead of others who may have an earlier appointment time.
If an interview is taking longer than the allotted 5 minutes (secondary school) or 10 minutes (primary school), you and the teacher will need to make an alternative time to continue the conversation. This could be in person at a mutually convenient time, or via phone or email.

Occasionally, circumstances arise which prevent a teacher from being able to honour their interview times – usually this is due to illness.

If for any reason a teacher is unable to attend a scheduled interview time we will do our very best to let you know via email as soon as we are aware of the problem. In these cases, the teacher will contact you at a later date to reschedule a meeting time or to arrange a telephone interview.

Parent Information Session

The Primary School Coordinators have scheduled a Parent Information Evening that is focusing on 'How to support school learning at home' – for primary parents. The session is scheduled for Tuesday 13 March from 6.30 - 8.00pm in the Chapel and Performing Arts Centre . While parents of children in Prep to Year 3 will find the session of most benefit, the session is open to all Aitken primary school parents. The information evening will provide an opportunity for parents to understand integral aspects of their child’s schooling and strategies which can be used at home to consolidate what is being learnt in the classroom. The session will include:

Supporting children with research and inquiry projects
Current approaches to learning Maths
Using the “Mathletics” website at home – presented by Lauren Anderson from 3P Learning, the distributors of Mathletics
Literacy programs including THRASS (Teaching Handwriting, Reading and Spelling Skills), SMART Spelling, writing and general reading comprehension skills.

For those who attended last year, there will be some new content (particularly the Mathletics information) and some repeated content. This information evening is a parent only session; your children cannot attend.

NAPLAN 2018

This year Aitken College students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 will be participating in Online NAPLAN testing. More details about the test types, the test schedule and how you can support your child in preparing for NAPLAN will be sent home early in Term 2.

You may remember that the Online NAPLAN testing scheduled in 2017 was cancelled when the Federal Government agency responsible for NAPLAN decided that the electronic platform was not ready to be reliably used by schools across the country.

This year, in order for schools and the government to be certain that the electronic platform is reliable enough to cope with the huge amount of internet traffic the online testing will create, all schools doing online NAPLAN testing in Term 2 are required to participate in a practice test, occurring at the same time across the country. Consequently, all of our Year 7 students will complete a practice NAPLAN test on Thursday 22 March at 10.00am. Students will need to have their iPad at school, fully charged, and a pair of headphones. The school will supervise the installation of the NAPLAN Lock-down browser on the student iPads. The Lock-down browser allows students to access the test site and prevents them from being able to access other functions on their iPad (e.g. calculator, dictionaries, Safari) to reduce the chance of student results being compromised.

Further details about the practice test will be emailed to all Year 7 parents next week.

(Ms) Kerri Batch

College Head of Learning