Assistant Principal's Report 

What an incredibly exciting start to the school year it has been at Orchard Park. Granted there has been some unwanted COVID interruptions, but the focus on learning that our staff and students have still been able to maintain is a credit to themselves and the culture of learning that we have established here at OPPS.

This week marks the end of what we call our 'Learning to Learn' block of work. This is through which our classes explore our expectations and values in different areas of the school and in different subject areas. They learn about how these values of Respect, Responsibility, Resilience and Safety should be demonstrated in each area of the school and how they can be supportive in our learning as well. They learn how to demonstrate respect towards one another as learners, how to be a responsible for themselves and their belongings, they learn that mistakes are a part of learning and that we can be resilient when these happen. They also learn how to stay safe and use the spaces and resources safely. 

Whilst it will be incredibly important throughout the year that we maintain this focus, we won't explore it as explicitly as we have done during these past four weeks. We believe that by devoting so much time to 'learning to learn' as we say, at the start of the year, it will give us a really nice platform to support our learning in all subject areas throughout the year. 

In addition to exploring our values and expectations however, we have also commenced our mode academic based learning as well, right across the school. Our teachers have been busy commencing what we call 'cycles of inquiry' where we assess students to determine their level of understanding on different topics, so that they can map our learning programs, based upon the Victorian Curriculum, that are targeted at the point of need for students. We then monitor and measure student progress closely and adjust the learning pathways where needed. 

In Prep, there has continued to be a strong focus on learning the different letters and sounds of the alphabet. Students have been reading and writing these letters and identifying the sounds that they make. I have noticed at times outside the Learning Community that the teachers have left notes to show parents which letters have formed their focus each week. If you have a child in Prep, be sure to ask them about these letters and practice at home. In Numeracy, there has been a big focus on learning our numbers to 10. This is such an important foundational skill and a prerequisite skill for so much of the learning that will follow. Students have been counting forwards and backwards, ordering the numbers, counting collections and matching the digits to pictures. This will hold them in excellent stead when we start to explore concepts such as ordinal numbers, numbers to 20, place-value, addition and subtraction.

In Years One and Two students have started to explore the concept of place-value. This means developing an understanding of the digits within numbers and what they represent. For example, knowing that the 6 in 367 represents 6 groups of 10 and has a value of 60. This supports them in reading, writing and ordering larger numbers. They have been starting to explore larger numbers and were even reading numbers into the thousands when I was teaching in there briefly this week! Writing in the Junior school has continued to be around personal recounts. Students are being supported to recall events verbally, to record some basic information to create a plan and then draft a recount of that event. This is heavily modeled and scaffolded by the Teachers. After drafting, students at some point will get the opportunity to actually publish one or more of their personal recounts. We look forward to being able to send these home at some point!

In the Years Three and Four, students have not long completed a unit of work in Numeracy around data. Data plays such an important part in the world around us. Lots of different people need data, in its many different forms. From political polling to sports statistics and COVID case numbers of late, data is everywhere. Students have been exploring different ways of collecting data among themselves and then different ways of representing this data, typically through tables or graphs. This has also required them asking questions of their peers and getting to know them a little better. Often in doing this, common interests are identified and friendships can be struck! Middle school students have also continued to hone their persuasive writing skills. This could be all important later in the year when our Year Threes complete their first ever cycle of NAPLAN testing. But in the meantime, they are really enjoying learning new skills and techniques that could be effective in persuading someone to share their opinion. It will be interesting to see if they try to use some of these strategies on Mum and Dad at home!

In our Senior School, the focus has been very similar to in Middle School with a focus on data in Numeracy and persuasive writing during their Literacy block. Students continue to do this through learning about health and civics. Their reading and writing topics link directly to this unit of work to ensure that the students see real purpose in their work. They can see how different reading comprehension strategies can be applied and be supportive in learning new content, as well as how their persuasive writing skills can be applied purposefully, linked to important topics. These past two Fridays have been very exciting for our Senior School students as they have participated in Interschool Sports for the first time in a long time! We have very proudly sent off basketball, volleyball and cricket teams to complete against Pakenham Primary School and Nar Nar Goon Primary School. The teams have applied themselves incredibly well and made us proud for their efforts both on and off the courts and fields. Our cricket and volleyball teams in particular have been very successful, with our basketball team's effort, application and sportsmanship just as impressive. All competing students should be very proud of the way that they have represented the school.

Having completed our Learning to Learn unit of work across the school, we had planned to celebrate with a whole-school assembly to discuss the learning and enable students to compete in our first house event of the year. Unfortunately, it was decided that in the current climate that this was not the right move and instead, we will celebrate on Friday afternoon within each Learning Community and still enable students to participate in some fun tasks through which they can earn some points for their houses. Mr Jagoe has been buzzing with excitement about some of the possibilities. I believe a rock, paper, scissors competition is his latest idea. Be sure to ask your children about what they actually ended up doing during this time!

Well that is it for another fortnight. I look forward to hopefully seeing plenty of you at our outdoor cinema night next Friday. Last year was such a fun experience and I am sure that this year will be equally so. Let's hope that the weather is kind to us!

Until next time , take care.

Danny Forster

Assistant Principal