Principal's Report

Pakenham Springs Primary School acknowledge and pay respect to the Traditional Owners of the land on which the School stands.

Parent Teacher Interviews

Thank you to all our families who made it to parent-teacher interviews last week.  We had over 700 appointments take place as we celebrated the students learning so far this year. Teachers are currently conducting a variety of assessments to inform the mid year reports that they are working on.  Reports this year will be available on Compass - you will receive a notification near the end of term when they are complete. 

New Playground Equipment

There was much excitement last week as some of the new playground equipment arrived - I'm not sure if staff or students were more excited! 

We now have a small train, cubby and naughts and crosses for the students to enjoy in the garden area.   More equipment has been ordered to be placed in different areas of the school for students of all year levels to enjoy.

STEM Excursion

As part of a STEM enrichment project, eighteen lucky Year 6 students had the unique opportunity to join researchers for a day at the Phillip Island Nature Park. They were joined by a ranger who taught them the ins and outs of how to monitor penguins and the important work they do to keep the colony of Little Penguins thriving in our part of the World. Through a series of workbook related activities and hands-on experiences, the students learnt how to collect and study data for research projects. 

They were also fortunate enough to contribute to the colony by building nesting boxes that will help with the rehabilitation of the colony. 

The students will now be working with unpublished data taken from a tracking device on one of the thousands of Little Penguins on the Island to find out where the penguins forage for their food in Western Port Bay so that the researchers and rangers can better protect them at sea.  They will, with the help of the Media Arts teachers develop and create a digital story to portray the foraging path of one Little Penguin. This digital story will then be displayed on the Park's website to be shared with other schools and the community.

We are grateful for our STEM teacher, Kristina Bennet who went above and beyond to have our students accepted in such a fantastic program and I can't wait to see the result. 

NAPLAN

This week our Years 3 and 5 took part in NAPLAN (National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy). NAPLAN tests the skills that are essential for every child to progress through school and life, such as reading, writing, spelling, grammar and numeracy. The school will receive the results in September and use them to help teachers identify where children are at with their learning and to indicate the performance trend of the school in the teaching of literacy and numeracy over a number of years.  Individual student NAPLAN results will be sent home with each student, maintaining confidentiality.

Mother's Day Stall

A massive thank you goes to our Mother's Day stall helpers.  This is a huge task and the opportunity couldn't be provided without many volunteers.  We hope all the mum's in our school community enjoyed a gift from the stall. 

Kerryn Baillie

Principal