Across Oliver's Desk 

Dear Parents,

It has been a big few weeks at Woori Yallock. Grandparents/Special Friends day was the highlight, with the school full to the brim with visitors.  Our book fair made the school around $1000 which will be spent on new books for our students. 

We had some magnificent dress ups on the day with Dixi Schaak-Taylor taking out the best dressed costume for students and Ellen taking out best dress staff member.        

COVID 19

Currently, and I always have to say currently, we will be heading into remote learning lessons on Monday the 31st of May.  If you have any difficulties with logging in please remember teachers are available by email or you can always talk to one of our very friendly office staff members.   This will be a new experience for our preps which isn’t the perfect way for them to be learning but our teachers do their best to still deliver quality lessons. 

I hope to see everyone back at school on Friday? Fingers crossed and I wish everyone the best in what is again a difficult time.   If you need our support don’t hesitate to get in contact with us. 

PRODUCTION

Over the last few weeks staff have been debating the issues around holding a whole school production like we did in 2019. 

In 2019 we received feedback that the production ran for too long and we also had complaints from parents that it was too taxing on our younger students. Therefore we have decided to change the production from a whole school production to a grade 3 to 6 production. This will still mean that as students’ progress through the school they will have the opportunity to be a part of the production.

To also make sure that our junior students still have a chance to sing and perform in front of an audience we will change our carols night to give the junior school a greater focus. 

Performing Arts is an important part of any school’s curriculum and we will continue to make sure that we have a Performing Arts component each year.

We will release more information soon regarding auditions for this year’s production; Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

COLOUR RUN

The colour run was an enormous success. I walked around the school and asked the students what they thought about the run and it was almost unanimous that it was the best day ever!  Thank you to all the parents that really got on board and encouraged the sponsorship money. I believe the last count was that $24,000 was raised. From that the school should receive about 40% which is a substantial amount of money. The money will be used to buy new sport tops so that all our students have the same tops when they compete at inter-school sport level. 

Thank you again, I’m so grateful to work in such a wonderful caring community, it is such a joy for me to hear and watch our children being so kind to each other. 

REPORTS

We are still trying to change the traditional reports that parents receive at the end of term 2 and term 4. Parents will always receive the dot points for achievement and our high expectations and respect page, with a comment. The change we are trialing is for parents to receive ongoing information rather than the teacher comment at half year and the end of the year. We don’t believe that traditional reports inform parents enough and we also don’t believe that the feedback students get from these reports is very useful. Therefore, we will continue to keep you updated through compass of how your child is going in mathematics.

This year the half year report will have everything as normal except for the teacher achievement mathematics comment. 

We are planning to release more examples of each student’s progress in mathematics through compass before the end of the term.

Stay safe and thank you again for all your kindness over the past week. We just have the best school community ever!