From the Leadership Team
Dear families,
Wow! What a busy year! We give thanks to all members of our Greenwith school community for their support throughout another challenging and busy year. Whilst the latter part of this year has felt a return to some kind of normalcy, it is with reflection that we think of how hard this year started, with a staggered start to school, most of our students were learning from home, high COVID cases, strict mask measures in place along with strict testing and isolating procedures and many, many school routines and events were unable to commence. This made the first half of the year tough for our students, staff and school community. However, it does demonstrate the gratitude and patience we all showed and how we continued to support each other and provide the best learning environment for our children.
To the wonderful students at Greenwith Primary School - you continued to pursue your personal best and demonstrate our CORE Values of Collaboration, Organisation, Respect and Excellence in all that you do. We are so very proud of you all and your learning this year.
To the amazing staff at Greenwith Primary School - thank you for all your dedication, support of our students and of each other, your commitment to academic excellence and for providing a nurturing learning environment for our students.
Thank you must also go to our Governing Council which continues to support, guide and work towards the best learning opportunities and decisions for Greenwith Primary School. The working relationship between the Governing Council and the school is paramount to the success of all our students - it has been wonderful working with our Governing Council and we look forward to continuing the partnership in 2023. In week 8, we hosted a morning tea to thank our volunteers, who generously give their time to play an active role in our school. We appreciate your time and dedication to supporting our school.
As we head towards the holidays, we wish all our families and safe and happy holiday. For those students leaving us - we wish you all the very best in your next adventure and for our students returning in 2023 - we will be looking forward to seeing you and hearing all about your holidays.
Continue to stay safe, look after each other and be kind.
Tanja, Sara, Lesley and Jacqui
Classes for 2023
Class placement is always a complicated and delicate balancing act. At Greenwith Primary School we go through a very extensive process to allocate students, and ultimately, the staff make a professional judgement on the most appropriate placement; academically, socially and emotionally. We organise students into class groupings. To do this we need to have a number of classes with two-year levels (multi-age classes). If we didn’t we would have some classes with 35 and others with 19.
The most common concern for parents is that the teacher’s attention will be split and that they’ll get overall less learning time with their teacher. The research tells us that there is at least a 5-year gap developmentally from the highest to lowest achiever in any class, whether that class is multi-age or not. The most important factor in determining how well a student does is the quality of the teaching.
Parents/caregivers need to trust the professional judgement of teachers, who are placing their children. Please support the school with its decisions and help build resilience and confidence in our children. It is a life skill to be able to manage change and work with a variety of people. Throughout each day our students from Foundation – Year 6 are with a number of different adults and our students manage these changes extremely well.
At Greenwith Primary School every teacher adapts their teaching and learning program to suit the needs of the individuals in their class for 2023, whether it is a multi-age class or a single-year level class. We anticipate that we will be starting with 21 classes in 2023.