Tuesday 3rd May 2022
Hello everyone,
The first week of term was settled and happy. It was lovely to have everyone back. As you are now aware, COVID rules have relaxed and you are now, all welcome in the school. Masks are no longer required, unless you are a household contact of someone who has tested positive. If you are visiting or dropping students off, you do not need to show any vaccination status. If you are working in the school you will need to show vaccination status, which we will keep on record with your Working with Children Checks.
I’m really happy to welcome you back inside the building. Please come on in. In a few weeks (at the start of June) we will be holding an Open Day to invite you in to watch the children working on their IB Primary Years Programme units of work.
Swimming lessons started yesterday. We had a couple of hiccups with class sizes and children not in the correct group, but I have spoken to the Aquatic Centre Manager, and it should all be sorted out quickly. Sadly, as with many workplaces, they are struggling with staff numbers due to illness and so some of the groups are larger than the expected 1:6 ratio that we had contracted for.
We know from experience that over the next two weeks, the children will get tired. We also know that a sustained, every day approach to swimming produces better results that one day per week for 10 weeks. Given that many students have missed lessons for the past two years, it is important that we work to catch them up in this area too. Please let us know if you have any concerns.
Next week our Grade 3 and 5 students will be starting their NAPLAN testing. They will do four different tests – Reading, Writing, Numeracy and Language Conventions (spelling, grammar, and punctuation). This year, our Grade 5 students will undertake the testing online for all subjects and Grade 3 students will handwrite for the Writing component and use computer for the rest. This is a change from all paper and pencil in the past, so it will be interesting to see our results.
Thanks so much to the energetic and committed Quinn family who have been working hard on developing our new vegetable garden area down near the playground. It is going to be fantastic. The planter boxes were made by Andrew and I’m very grateful for the time the family has given to the school.
We currently have a whiteboard out the front of the school with some Working Bee jobs on it. If you have a spare hour, any time, it would be wonderful if you could do one of the tasks, as we need to tidy up the school before it becomes a polling place on May 21st. The whole community will be visiting our school to vote, and I would love to show off what a gorgeous spot it is. Any help is gratefully received. On the day, FOS will be holding the usual Election BBQ and are after some helpers to give them an hour on the sausage sizzle. Please let us know if you can commit an hour on the day, as we usually raise quite a bit of money for the school at this event.
A quick congratulations to the Woods family who welcomed their fourth child over the holidays. Welcome to the world George!
The Mother’s Day function is on this Friday night 6th May at the Wine Collective. I hope that if you are attending, you all have a wonderful night celebrating YOU! To our mothers, and women of influence in a child’s life (grandmothers, aunties etc) I will be celebrating you all on Sunday. They are roles that often mean the most in a child’s life. We all know the dream of parenting does not often match the reality of the day-to-day ups and downs, but from the perspective of a Mum whose children are now grown, it is the best gig I have ever had. HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY to you all.
Have a lovely week everyone.
Kind regards
Trish