Dear Families,

A big hello to all our families and friends. It’s hard to believe but we are already at the halfway mark of Term 3!! Our students, teachers and ES staff continue to work together for the benefit of our students. We held our Validation Day on Thursday August 4th, 2022. The Review was led by Kim Ryan from edValuate, Jonathan Lowe our Senior Education Improvement Leader, Anita Calore, Angie Ireland (challenge partners), and Sean Bassett our School Council President, were all part of the core panel.

The core panel looked at our school’s performance against our School Strategic Plan. This included goals and targets, enablers and barriers to success, key achievements and highlights and key challenges. The core panel spent time in all classrooms across the school to observe the following: students, teachers, the content and central to these, the task. In the observations the key touchpoints included student voice and agency, curriculum and the quality of the tasks and teacher practices.

School Review and Parent Forum UPDATE

Monday 15th and Tuesday 16th August are our two field workdays where our school reviewer, Senior Education Improvement Leader and challenge partners will engage with students, teachers, and parents. They will speak with a representation of students across year levels, our Student Leaders, School Improvement Teams, Year level teams (Professional Learning Teams), Specialist teachers, ES staff, Office staff and our parents/carers. All classrooms will be observed for Literacy and Numeracy learning and teaching practices.

Professional Practice Day (PPD) – Student Free Day Monday 22nd August

Our PPD day will take place on Monday August 22nd - on this day students will NOT be required at school. EXTEND will operate on the day for those families who require care.

Our teachers will work in teams to focus on improving learning and teaching practices. Focusses for the day will include the following:

Literacy Intervention – meeting the needs of struggling readers and writers
Differentiation
Formative Assessment
Circles – From Restorative Practices
Responding to and supporting students with challenging behaviours to engage in learning
Curriculum Planning
Using data to plan for differentiation
Planning Inquiry unit for Term 4
Auditing of maths resources to ensure they are up to date

Professional Learning Communities – UPDATE

Formative Assessment is assessment used by teachers during the learning process to modify learning and teaching to improve student outcomes/learning attainment. The goal of formative assessment is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that can assist students to identify their strengths and weaknesses and target areas that need work.

This past week our teachers engaged in high quality professional learning presented by our Learning Specialist Louisa Beckenham and one of our Professional Learning Team leaders, Brodie Lane. Our teachers engaged in professional readings about formative assessments, were exposed to a tool kit of formative assessment strategies and then were required to commit to 2 formative assessment strategies that they and their teams would trial with students over the coming weeks. Formative assessment is powerful in that it assists teachers to respond in real time to student learning needs. Formative Assessment is one of our goals in our Annual Implementation Plan (AIP).

Prep Enrolment 2023

Thank you to those families who responded to previous messages regarding enrolling siblings who are due to start prep in 2023. Please continue to reach out and enrol your children by contacting our friendly front office staff or you can download the enrolment pack from our website https://www.kismetparkps.vic.edu.au/ . Please remember that if you know of any friends, family who are due to start prep in 2023 please pass on this message to them and ask them to call our school on 9744-4566 to book in a tour with us. We start our Transition Program in November and it would be fantastic for all our 2023 preps to be enrolled and in the program so that the start of school is a positive experience for our new prep students and their families. We have one more prep information session scheduled for Tuesday September 6th at 6:30pm.

3 Way Conferences Parent/Teacher Interviews – Feedback received

Thank-you to those parents/carers who took the time to provide us with feedback after our 3 Way Conferences. We will look over the feedback provided and look towards strengthening the process for the next time. It was great to read how much our parents/carers appreciated the time and how valuable they thought the process was. Thank-you.

OSHC – Out of School Hours Care

Our contract with EXTEND our service providers for OSCH ends at the end of this 2022 school year. Our School Council has gone through a tender process this term with the Expression of Interest due to close on Monday 15th August.

Important Dates re our Tender are as follows:

School site visit dates: 29/7, 5/8
EOI Closing date: 15/8
EOI Proposals shortlisted:26/8
Extraordinary Meeting of School Council for providers to present12/9
Decision made regarding preferred service provider:17/10
Preferred service provider informed of decision and beginning of contract negotiations:19/10
Commencement of service to the school: 1/1/23

Our School Council is committed to ensuring our families can access the highest quality care for their children on our school site, before/after school, vacation care, curriculum days when parents/carers are engaged in work or require care for their children at those times.

Attitudes To School (ATTOS) Preliminary Data

Attitudes to School survey is conducted with all year 4, 5, and 6 students yearly. It measures the following:

-Excellence in Teaching and Learning

-Teacher/Student Relations

-Learner Characteristics and Dispositions

-Positive Climate for Learning

-Student Safety/School Safety

-Experience of Bullying

-Student Online Experiences

-Student Health and Well Being

-Individual Physical and Mental Health

-Emotional and Relational Engagement

I will attach our 2022 Attitudes to School preliminary results in a COMPASS post in the coming days so that our community can view the results. In the coming weeks the Department will release to all schools the complete results of the survey, these results will show how our school compares to other schools in the state as well as our past 4-year results as comparison to the current 2022 year.

Our school environment and taking pride in our school

This term we have refocussed our energies towards ensuring all our students are aware of the negative impact dropping rubbish can have on our environment and are empowered to take the right action to keep our clean and beautiful. To that end it would be greatly appreciated if our parents/carers could please have conversations at home with children regarding taking responsible action after eating and discarding wrappers into the bin.

The last fortnight has been busy for us and next week this will continue with our field workdays. I continue to be very proud of our students, staff, and community for the ways in which we support each other to be the very best versions of ourselves. Thank-you to all in our community for being kind, your kindness and care supports us in providing high quality education and care for all our students.

Girls Netball Team A – Best of Luck

We wish our Kismet Park Girl’s Netball Team all the very best as they prepare to compete in the Grand finals at regional level on Tuesday 16th August at Darebin Community Sports Stadium, Reservoir. We wish the team well and I am sure they will feel all our support as they compete. Go Team A!!!

Best of luck to our fabulous girls Netball Team:

Lucinda Debono – Captain
Matilda Debono
Sophie Merrigan
Keira Janes
Pania Kire
Isla Kerr
Genna Carpenter
Laneah Macasaddu

Go Team A!!!

Warmest Regards,

Kathy Cvitkovic

Principal (Acting)

‘Building the foundations for success and happiness’.

Numeracy

Mathematics around the junior school!