From the Leadership Team

Dear Parents & Caregivers

Term 1 is off to a great start! It was lovely to see so many families at our Open Evening in week 2. Thank you for your positive feedback regarding our Open Evening from our recent parent survey. It was really affirming to read your positive comments about the structure of Open Evening and connecting with families and we were able to share this feedback with our teaching staff at a recent staff meeting. We look forward to connecting with you during our upcoming Parent & Teacher Connection meetings next week. 

Parent & Teacher Connections

At Greenwith Primary School we focus on building strong and positive parent & teacher connections to support each child's progress and development. Information was emailed in week 4 to assist with booking your 10-minute meetings with your child's teacher/s.

Formalising the parent & teacher connections gives our parents a great opportunity to:

• Meet and get to know your child's teacher/s
• Build a relationship with your child's school
• Hear from you about your aspirations for your child/s:
  • academic development 
  • social/friendship development 
  • emotional development 
  • goals for your child this year 
  • and make plans with the teacher/s about how you can both support your child throughout 2023

We will send out a parent feedback survey after Parent and Teacher Connections to gain some information about this important calendar event. 

Governing Council 2023

Our Annual General Meeting was held on Tuesday, 7 February following the Open Evening. We are excited to announce our 2023 Council Office Holders and members:

Chairperson Andrew Foord

Deputy Chairperson Liesje Kaftan

Treasurer Sarah Harris

Secretary Steph Zajax

Council Members

Tanja Antoun (Principal)

Carrie Campbell 

Vicky Cheng

Natalie Cotton

Cherise Fletcher

Simon Gillett 

Tammy Lamey 

Emma Merrett 

Natalie Michael (Teacher)

Kelly Peel

Emily Willoughby 

We are very grateful for the commitment of our Governing Council members and thank them for volunteering their time to support our school.

The following Student Free / School Closure Days were endorsed by our Governing Council last week. Please add the following dates to your calendar:

Friday, 5 May (term 2, week1)

Friday, 9 June (term 2, week 6)

Friday, 1 September (term 3, week 6)

Monday, 4 September (term 3, week 7

Friday, 3 November (term 4, week 3)

NAPLAN

This week our Year 3 and 5 students participated in the NAPLAN Nationally Coordinated Practice Test (NCPT) which allowed us the opportunity to test our IT platform and give our students a chance to become familiar with the online format for NAPLAN testing. Everything ran very smoothly. 

From 2023 NAPLAN will be held in term 1. Moving NAPLAN to term 1 will allow schools to access their students’ results earlier in the school year, helping teachers to better identify what support students may need.

The NAPLAN 9-day test period will be in week 7, term 1 – Wednesday 15 March until Monday 27 March 2023. 

Teachers at Greenwith already use a variety of methods to assess students’ literacy and numeracy skills. The NAPLAN testing is an additional method of gathering information about your child’s current literacy and numeracy skills, using a snapshot in time. Parents will receive information outlining their child’s NAPLAN results later in the year. From 2023 each student's NAPLAN report will show how they are tracking against 4 levels of achievement, known as proficiency standards. These will replace the 10 NAPLAN bands. The new standards are:

• Exceeding
• Strong
• Developing
• Needs additional support

The standards are set at a challenging but reasonable standard of literacy and numeracy expected for the child at the time of testing. Reporting will include clear descriptions for teachers and families about student progress against these levels of achievement. Those descriptions will be developed by expert teachers. It's important to note that the NAPLAN test itself is not changing. 

Please make sure your child is on time for school to ensure they are settled and ready for NAPLAN testing. 

The NAPLAN testing schedule is set out below: 

Duration of Tests

Literacy Learning - Morphology

This year we are working with an Educational Consultant - Jocelyn Seamer, in building our knowledge in evidence-based instruction in reading. 

Teachers worked with Jocelyn in Week 0 learning about Morphology - which is the study of words and their parts. Morphemes, like prefixes, suffixes and base words, are defined as the smallest meaningful units of meaning. Morphemes are important for phonics in both reading and spelling, as well as in vocabulary and comprehension. We enjoyed this day with Jocelyn and learnt a lot. 

Teachers have worked together in their Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) to develop morphology instructional routines to support student understanding each day. Your child may be coming home and discussing what they are learning in morphology. 

Last week, we had the pleasure of having Jocelyn back onsite with us.  She was demonstrating some in-class modelling of 'morphology instruction' with classes across the school and having our teachers observe her work in action. We look forward to continuing our work in this area this year, with the support of Jocelyn. 

School Photos

MSP Photography is booked for our annual school photos on Thursday, 30 March. As discussed recently with our Governing Council we will continue with our current format of a class photo and then an individual composite class photo (the same format as 2022). There will be a catch-up photo day on Wednesday, 5 April.

Order forms will be sent home with all students within the next few weeks.

New Play Area

In week 3 we invited all members of our school community to contribute to designing the new play area by viewing the designs available and voting for their favourites. We received a great response and thank everyone who voted for their input. 

The survey has now closed and we have shared a shortlist of the most popular designs with the provider. The next step is for them to visit our school later this week and provide a proposal soon after. We will be sure to keep you updated on this exciting development.

*The images below are shown as a sample only of the most popular designs and may not be selected in the final stage

M&S Fees Due

M&S Fee information and statements were posted home to all families in week 2 this term. If you have not received your statement please contact the Finance team asap on 8289 8100. 

The SA Government has once again provided a rebate of $100 for all students who have their school fees paid in full by the due date. This means your current outstanding amount is reduced from $355.00 per student to $255.00 for 2023.

Fees are due to be paid in full by Friday, 14 April (end of term 1). Please pay via the QKR App.

Part Payments: Please contact Finance if you wish to enter into a part payment agreement. You need to have an agreement in place before the end of term 1 so you don’t receive overdue notifications. All part payment agreements must be paid in full by the end of term 3 2023.

School Card 2023: If you believe you are eligible for School Card please process your application online as soon as possible as School Card Section need time to process the application. 

You must apply for School Card each year as it does not roll over.

If you have any queries please don’t hesitate to contact our Finance team.

Sue McKee

Business Manager

Volunteer Training

We have one more training session scheduled this term at the following time:

Wednesday, 8 March 2023 at 9:00 am

If you are new to volunteering at our school or need to update your training, please register via this link to attend: Volunteer Training Session  

Year 5/6 Camp

The Year 5/6 camp at Wirraway is fast approaching! The camp will be held in week 2 of term 2. This a friendly reminder that the final payment is due by Sunday, 12 March.