Successful Year 2 – 6 Swimming Program

A big thank you to parents and families for supporting our Year 2 – 6 Swimming Program. I know this was a bit of a change from previous years and it was fantastic to see our older children getting into the pool and practicing their skills. Whilst we have varying degrees of swimming proficiency across our cohorts of students, we do have several students for which this experience was vital in increasing their confidence around and in water. Audrey has included some information about water safety in this edition of the newsletter in preparation for summer.

Halloween Disco

Last Friday afternoon and early evening we all enjoyed the Halloween Disco. What an extravaganza it was! A big thank you to Jess S our ‘P and F’ (Parents and Friends) superstar and her team of helpers for organising the night and to our staff for coming along to join in the dancing and provide supervision. Thank you also to students Elizabeth, Sadie, Liam and Miranda for all their help in researching the games and assisting me to run them at the event! Approximately $800 was fundraised for our school. A great result.

Country Gardener’s Nursery BBQ

Back on Saturday 29th October a team of parent and staff volunteers manned a barbeque stall down at a Country Gardener’s Nursery raising $338 for our school. A big thank you to those who helped out, those who came down to grab a sausage and to our friends down at the nursery for inviting us and providing the opportunity.

Class structures for 2023

I would like to thank the parents who took the time to share information with me recently, regarding their child’s class/group placement for next year.

We will now begin the process of allocating our students to classes.

Our staff work hard to set up balanced, fair and productive classes across the whole school. As staff continue with the thorough process of allocating children to class groups, many discussions occur, with all children being placed into a class group for next year with a least one friend of their choosing.

We are currently putting together our plans for 2023 and this looks like:

1 X Prep class

2 X Year 1/2 classes

2 X Year 3/4 classes

2 X Year 5/6 classes

The Enterprise Bargaining Agreement signed this year between the Victorian Government and teaching staff has allocated extra non face to face teaching time for teachers to prepare engaging lessons for the children. We will be running Science as an extra specialist area in 2023 alongside our existing specialist program of The Arts, Physical Education and Japanese.

The Department of Education have also provided funding for tutoring (Tutor Learning Initiative or TLI). This has been allocated by the Department to support children coming out of two years of Remote Learning. The fact that this has been continued next year is in part due to the recognition that in most schools in Victoria, tutors were required to cover teacher absence this year, due to the lack of casual relief teacher in the system. We have been fortunate at Launch to have reliable replacement teachers who have supported us through this time, with our tutoring program only being interrupted a handful of times and classes only being split as a last resort.

Our intervention programs will continue in 2023 with some of these opportunities moving back into the classrooms and some external programs continuing. The final design of these will be based on what staff identify to be a good match for our individual students’ needs.

Family Fun Arvo

I hope by now all families have received their invitation to the upcoming Family Fun Afternoon. In my application and interview for the principal position at our school I spoke about building our school’s connections – internally but also with the wider community.

The Family Fun Afternoon is an opportunity for everyone to come along, play some games, have some treats and just enjoy being together. Stay for 30 mins, stay for the whole time – that’s up to you! It would be great to see lots of families come along.

Staffing

Toko our much loved Japanese teacher will finish up at Launching Place PS at the end of 2022. Toko has taught at LPPS for many years and is now retiring with intentions to explore travel, more time with family and other pursuits. We thank Toko so much for her dedication to our students and school. She will be greatly missed.

I’ll keep our community informed as recruitment processes take place to appoint a replacement Japanese teacher.

Parent Education – Raising great learners

Working in education and also being a mum to four girls I am invested and passionate in trying to improve my knowledge in how to best parent my own children to achieve their personal best and how to support the parents at our school to achieve the same goal with their children.

As adults we know that participation and achievement in education improves life outcomes for individuals. As a child I was very lucky to have parents who saw the value in education, even though they had not necessarily been afforded all the educational opportunities that they ensured my sister and I received. This excerpt below is from a book ‘10 Steps to develop great learners: Visible learning for parents’ by John Hattie and Kyle Hattie. Each newsletter I would like to share a little bit with you about how you can support your children to be great learners.

Mindframe One: I have appropriately high expectations

Children are born into a world of expectations which form the basis of how they will interact, learn and develop. Your expectations for your child matter. Supporting your child to become a great learner means setting expectations that are high but appropriately so – as the Goldilocks principle would have it: not too hard, not too easy. We would also add, not too boring. To meet expectations a child needs to have developed an emotional bond with the parents – preferably one based on trust. This is known as attachment. This sense of attachment and trust allows the child to make mistakes, learn from them and develop resilience and other attributes. A child also needs encouragement, a sense of fairness in how you react to them and your direction to learn right from wrong. Your role is not to make your child depend on you but to help them develop autonomy and a sense of competence. If you would like to learn more about the 'How' of having 'high expectations' check out the chapter from the book I've uploaded on Compass.

Year 5/6 Camp 2023 – Save the date!

We are very excited to announce that our Year 5/6 camp in 2023 will be a 5 day adventure to Koroonda Camp. Please save the dates for 6th March – 10th March. Information will be supplied to families shortly via Compass.

Super writers