An Update from Mr Vines

Zones of Regulation

Thank you to everyone who attended the Zones of Regulation information session that we held on Tuesday 30 July. It was a fantastic opportunity to learn more about what is happening in the classroom and the tools and strategies that your child will be learning to regulate their emotions. The ‘Zones’ consist of four zones; the blue zone, which represents being tired or sad, the green zone, which represents happiness and readiness to learn, the yellow zone, corresponding to agitation or excitement, and the red zone, which is anger. There is no such thing as a ‘wrong’ zone, rather the Zones of Regulation provides our students with a vocabulary to describe how they are feeling and why, and this then allows them to control their emotions more effectively. I have added the presentation and some other resources that were requested from the night below.

MSAC

As you may be aware there have been a couple of changes in how MSAC has been organising the logistics of our swimming program. We have been working closely with MSAC to streamline the process and we want to let you know of a few refinements that will be in place from next week. The larger change rooms are now going to be reserved for our students to make sure they have more space and are closer to the pool where their lessons are being held. There will be an extra MSAC staff member that will be monitoring the entrance to support our students in knowing where to go, and to inform the MSAC patrons of where the change rooms are located that they will now be expected to use. We are continuing to work with MSAC to ensure that our students receive the best possible experience that we can provide.

Tree Planting

It was National Tree Planting Day on 26 July and Toyota helped us celebrate this day with a donation that allowed us to purchase some pot plants and bulbs for our students to plant in our upstairs outdoor learning space. The students had a fantastic time planting and we are going to have a bright and colourful addition to the space once the bulbs start to grow. Each prep grade has two pots that they are looking after and watering.

Communication Update

We want to thank everyone who took the time to complete our feedback survey on how we communicate. We really value your input and are always seeking to find ways to streamline and improve communications. To that end we have taken on board much of the advice and have adjusted a few areas that we hope will support you in being aware of what is happening at the school.

We have taken on board feedback about news items expiring and we have contacted Compass to allow expired news items to still be visible – you should now still see them in your feed.
The calendar will now display in the app. Simply click on your child's photo and you will see all the events that are on for any given day.
We have set up an automatic notification system if your child attends sick bay. Whenever they go to sick bay you will receive an email notifying you of their attendance. This is a notification only, we will still call you if there is a need for you to collect your child from school.
Similarly, we have set up an automatic notification system if your child has been marked not present on the roll.
We will be making use of the tag “Community” alongside our current tags of “Information” and “Action” to help you filter any information related to after school care or after school programs and extracurricular activities.
We are going to trial the use of the conference cycles to allow for volunteers to book themselves in – this is the same process that was used for parent teacher interviews and you will see us trialing this with swimming volunteers. You can find this under the ‘Conferences’ section in the app.

We are listening and we love hearing any feedback. While we are still learning how to most effectively make use of the systems, we are working to make our communication channels as clear and efficient for you as possible.

University of New South Wales ICAS Testing

We are offering the University of New South Wales ICAS testing for families that are interested. The ICAS Assessments series is designed to assess your student's ability to apply classroom learning in new contexts, using higher-order thinking and problem-solving skills. This is a voluntary test for students from year 2 to 6. We will be participating in both the Mathematics and the Literacy tests. These tests cost $14.50 each to participate in. If you would like your child to have the opportunity to participate then please complete the form here by Sunday 11 August.

Clubs

The Curious Minds Lego club is going along fantastically. The students have been engaging in some amazing theme-based building, such as creating pot plants for tree planting day. However, it is essential that we have volunteers to ensure that the club runs. Naomi Hobson has been a fantastic driving force in running this club, though unfortunately on the times when she has had to be away we have been unable to have the club run. If you would be able to volunteer some time to support the club, even on one day, please use the ‘Conferences’ section in Compass to book in.

I am very excited to announce two new clubs that we have starting this week. The library will be open on Wednesday lunchtimes for students to read, and we will have Minecraft club on Thursdays which will be run by Ms Brass. She will be running this from the STEM room and it will be a fantastic opportunity for students to collaborate on building worlds.

Communication With School Council – Emails

Our school council sub-committees are responsible for a large amount of the work in improving our school. If you would like to put forward any ideas or have any questions of the sub-committees please contact the relevant person using the details below:

Committee	Convenor/President	Email
School Council	Mark Vassorotti	5562-schoolcouncil@schools.vic.edu.au
Strategic Development	Tania Quick	5562-strategicdev@schools.vic.edu.au
Wellbeing	Matthew Vines	5562-wellbeing@schools.vic.edu.au
Environment and Facilities	Rosemary Cosentino	5562-facilities@schools.vic.edu.au

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