Welcome back to the first week of Term 3. I hope that everyone had a safe and enjoyable school holiday period, whether you spent it abroad or, like my family, stayed closer to home.

Our students have returned ready to learn and I have been particularly impressed with our Year 6 cohort, many of whom spent time on the holidays preparing for the PYP Exhibition, to be held in the SLC next Tuesday 18th July from 4:00pm until 6:00pm. I hope to see as many of our community in attendance as possible, knowing how proud our students are of their learning.

2024 Enrolment

You may have seen noticeboards on Bundeera Road recently, informing our community of important enrolment dates for Prep 2024 and advertising weekly tours of our school. Please carefully note the following:

All enrolments for Prep 2024 are due by 28th July (link to website docs).
School tours continue to run each Friday at 9:30am (book tickets here).
Enrolment enquiries are always welcome via our school office (email us here).

Early enrolment information is critical to support the school in planning for 2024. If someone you know is looking to enrol in any year level for 2024, please encourage them to join us on a school tour. These tours are co-led by Georgia and myself, alongside our School Captains. If anyone cannot make the weekly Friday tour, we are always happy to make alternate arrangements.

Staffing

Congratulations to Georgia Despotellis, who has been appointed as the substantive Assistant Principal at our school. Georgia has made a significant impact on our school this year and we are excited that she will now continue with us on an ongoing basis.
Welcome to Shelley Dagan, who has been appointed as the classroom teacher for 2B and to Sam Mansfield, who will join us from next week in the Year 6 team, replacing Ashleigh Preston when she commences family leave from week 4.
Welcome to Michelle Noonan, who has been appointed as our Business Manager for Term 3, as Margaret Salvatore is on long-service leave.
We wish Ellen Saunders all the very best, as she concludes our time with us from mid-next week. Ellen is often the first face or voice you see / hear at our reception, always greeting our students, staff and families with a friendly smile. Ellen, thank you for your wonderful contributions to our school and best wishes for your next adventure!

Feedback

In the final newsletter of Term 2, I included a survey for families to complete, reflecting on the school experience for students and families at CSPS. Thank you to the fourteen families who completed this. There were some consistency in what is going well for our school, including:

The early years literacy program.
‘Open classroom’ events.
Student and community-based activities, including lunchtime activities, incursions, excursions, camps, etc.
Positive relationships between students and care for students from staff.
School-wide communication improving, including positive moves to Compass and iNewsletter.

There were also some key points for improvement that we will continue to work on. Linked to this, our key areas for teacher professional learning this term include:

Highly-effective lesson and task design in mathematics.
Data-informed learning intervention and support.
Ongoing program improvement through a ‘professional learning teams’ approach in Literacy, Numeracy, STEM and Wellbeing.

I want to conclude my first report of this term by reinforcing the key message from my final report of last term. I expect two key mindsets of the adults in the school and broader communities:

Assume positive intent; I can guarantee you that every staff member and every member of our school community wants, more than anything else, for our students (and ourselves!) to have a great day, every day. Everyone is doing everything they can to ensure this!
Act with kindness; in the brilliant words of Maya Angelou, “…people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Be someone who makes someone else feel good, through your words and actions.

Thanks for your ongoing support and keep doing your best.

Rohan Cooper

Principal

Caulfield South Primary School News

Children come first at Caulfield South

Term 3, Week 1, Edition 12 · 14 Jul 2023

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