Mr Irwin's Message

Hello Families and welcome to this week’s Newsletter,

I wanted this week to share with you a look at Semester One reports. As I shared last time, these are modified for Semester 1 given circumstances surrounding remote learning.

Since students have been back at school teachers have been completing assessments they’d usually conduct with students at this time of year to help inform reporting.

The first major alteration to Semester One reports will be that no progression point judgement will be made. You may recall this as the ‘black dot’ that appears to show your child’s progress below, at or above their expected level.

Here’s how Semester One reports will look this time round. To complete these modified reports we have opted to incorporate the Victorian Curriculum Achievement Standards for English and Mathematics. These outline skills and statements of expected achievement from students to be considered achieving at a required level.

For English and Mathematics you will firstly see a table with dark green, light green and grey cells and the different year levels of school running from level D which is pre-Foundation, Foundation all the way through to level 8. If a cell is coloured dark green it means a student can independently demonstrate all of the expected skills in that level. If a cell is coloured light green it means they can independently achieve some of the skills in that level. If a cell is coloured grey it means they haven’t yet achieved any skills in that standard. This table is provided to act as a guide for where your student is working in both the English and Mathematics curriculum. One key point to remember is that we’d expect a grade 3 student to have achieved the grade achievement standards by the end of the year and not the middle of the year, the same for a year 4 on the year 4 standards and so forth.

Below the coloured cells you’ll see the relevant achievement standards continuum, and three columns; achieved, currently working on and future learning. Skills your child can independently achieve are highlighted in italicised grey font. These are the skills that they have been judged to independently complete by their teacher. Skills that are stated in standard black font are skills that students are yet to master independently. The ‘future learning’ column states the skills in the next relevant level of the curriculum for the student.

For specialist subjects, families will be provided with a summary of learning conducted in each specialist class. The amount of time specialists had with students in Term one and during remote learning made it unrealistic to provide descriptive personal statements.

The final aspect of the Semester Report will be student attitude; based on our 5 school values. These are marked by classroom teachers and have taken into account both Term one and remote learning habits.

As always, these reports will be published to Sentral, which will occur in the final week of Term.

As with any written report comment, any questions or clarification should be followed up with a further chat with your child’s classroom teacher. Teachers are more than happy to take the time to chat regarding your child’s progress at any stage during the year.

Healthy Lunch Box Choices

For more information go to: https://heas.health.vic.gov.au/schools/healthy-lunchboxes