Dear Parents and Carers,

As we continue with Learning from Home, I would like to take this opportunity with some appreciation for our whole school community:

Thank you to our teachers who transitioned from face-to-face learning to remote learning; always with the aim of ensuring all students and families are fully supported to ensure their students' experience learning success.

Thank you to our office staff who are the backbone of our school's operation and the beacon of light at the end of the phone for some families. Their workload has increased significantly with the printing and distribution of work packs as well as continued communication in relation to new guidelines and school operations. I also appreciate the enormous effort from Mr Pantelli, our school's General Assistant who works extremely hard to ensure our grounds are cared for.

Thank you to our parents, carers and community. I appreciate the complexities home learning presents especially for families who are juggling working from home and coordinating their child/ren's learning. Thank you for your ongoing patience and I appreciate your feedback as it helps us to improve and ensure we are providing the appropriate support for each and every family.

COVID-19 Update

NSW Health have released a number of venues of concern in the Illawarra in the last seven days. These locations include: Warilla, Shellharbour, Unanderra, Kiama and Nowra. We also remind you, that the directive from NSW Health remains unchanged and children MUST remain at home unless there is absolutely NO alternative.

The Delta strain of COVID is highly contagious and caught and spread by children. Please make sure you continue to check the latest venue alerts, stay informed and follow the health advice.

ZOOM Q&A Sessions for Parents & Carers

As requested, we have scheduled two ZOOM Q&A sessions for families to connect and discuss various current topics. The ZOOM sessions are scheduled for:

Tuesday 17 August at 4:30pm

Wednesday 18 August at 4:30pm.

The ZOOM join details are:

Meeting ID: 933 525 0969

Passcode: windangps

P&C ZOOM Meeting - TONIGHT

All parents and carers are kindly invited to the P&C ZOOM Meeting on Tuesday 17 August at 6:30pm.

The Meeting ID is: 933 525 0969

The Passcode is: windangps

External Validation

On Tuesday 10 August 2021, the school’s External Validation Team Leaders (Principal, Assistant Principals, Director of Educational Leadership) met with an independent External Validation Panel to discuss the school’s external validation submission. Each school participates in an external validation process every five years.

In preparation for this meeting the required body of evidence was prepared, reviewed and annotated. Our submission included three evidence sets aligned to the School Excellence Framework.

The School Excellence Framework includes three domains: Excellence in learning, Excellence in teaching, Excellence in leading and fourteen elements.

The aim of the external validation process was to investigate if the school’s on-balance judgement for each element was embedded in our school practices and at what level: Delivering, Sustaining and Growing, or Excelling.

Of note, the external panel “bumped” our school from Delivering/Sustaining and Growing to EXCELLING as follows:

In the element of Well-being the evidence presented indicates the school is operating at the Excelling stage.

In the element of Reporting the evidence presented indicates the school is operating at the Excelling stage.

In the element of Student performance measures the evidence presented indicates the school is operating at the Excelling stage.

We are extremely pleased with the feedback provided, and as we head into the next four year planning phase we have a clear focus on areas of improvement.

The validation we received through the department’s external validation is indicative of the achievements and progress we have made in our delivery of education and community partnerships as a great small school in the Illawarra.

I am extremely proud to share our school’s “School Excellence – External Validation Panel Report 2021”.

Teaching Children to READ using DECODABLE Readers

The department has invested millions in research, personnel, resources and publishing what works best for teaching children to read. Along with purchasing & distributing decodable readers for all 1800 NSW primary schools as a strategy to ensure all students experience reading success.

Decode means to crack and that’s exactly what children must learn to do to become successful readers – crack the code. Systematic phonics has been proven as the most effective way to teach reading and haven’t we seen enormous growth in our students as a result of Soundwaves.

We teach students knowledge of letters and sounds and the skills of sounding and blending. We know the 5 essential components of learning to read are phonemic awareness, phonics, comprehension, vocab & fluency.

Decodable readers are used to provide students with opportunities to practise what they are learning. They contain a very large percentage of words that incorporate the letter-sound relationships that students have been taught. The books follow sequences which can be matched to the learning sequence in the classroom, so that students are practising to read words that are in their grasp and they can decode them independently. Decodable readers increase in complexity as the student learns more of the phonetic code.

At Windang PS, teachers use a variety of strategies to teach children to read including the Soundwaves Spelling; systematic synthetic phonics program K-6 to explicitly teach children the phoneme–grapheme relationships, spelling and vocabulary concepts. We will be adding decodable readers as another piece to our "Teaching Children to Read" puzzle as decodable readers are the conduit between phonics and reading.

This term we are investigating The Australian Decodable Readers with the aim of introducing the decoable readers at the beginning of Term 4. This will ensure our teachers are using latest-research best practice to teach our children to read.

"The more that you READ, the more things you will KNOW.

The more that you LEARN, the more places you'll GO".

Dr Seuss

Stay safe

Loreta Kocovska

Principal

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