Dear Families,
I hope you have had a wonderful week and enjoyed the long weekend. All of our staff attended professional development at Uraidla Primary on Tuesday and attended a program designed to assist us all in creating safe and secure learning environments with a focus on care and welfare of our students. The focus for the day was on developing psychological and physiological responses to behavior and how to develop supportive relationships and establish therapeutic rapport. Developing responsive relationships is key to our work as teachers and parents in supporting our children to understand emotions and how they influence behavior. I am sure staff found this a useful professional experience and we valued the time to come together collegially with the staff from Uraidla, to explore another central aspect of developing social and emotional wellbeing in our children.
This week has also been very productive and you should have received a link to the new Skoolbag platform. This will enable communications to be streamlined from school and for families to subscribe to the year levels of their students. Our School Newsletter will be published from this platform and you will receive push notifications to your phone or device when there are new notifications. Thank you to Laren for helping to set this up and send out the invites to families. We are also looking at redeveloping a new school website using Squarespace so please be advised that the link to our current website is currently unavailable. Ali Geers has kindly offered to set up the template for this new initiative and we thank her for her design skills and related creative expertise in this area. As part of the new communications platform we will also be adding a calendar of events in the coming weeks and use this to sign eforms leading to a reduction in paper and working in a more sustainable way.
Next week is shaping up to be busy with all Year 6/7 students attending the Halogen Young Leaders Conference at the Adelaide Entertainment Centre. Fortunately we were successful in obtaining a grant which we are using to subsidise the cost for each student. Student Voice in learning is important to us as a school and through our exploration of character strengths and values this term students will relate this learning to a range of presenters including Lachie Smart the youngest ever solo pilot to fly around the world at 18. Lachie completed the 54 day journey which took 2 years to plan and has inspired others and challenged them to dream bigger and redefine their capabilities. I am really looking forward to sharing this event with the students next week and look forward to them setting their own long term goals.
We also have Janice Rigney coming in on Tuesday to work with the whole school on Basket Weaving using traditional indigenous techniques. This is going to be an amazing experience that ties in with our Reconciliation Action Plan and for us as a school to develop ongoing local connections with indigenous community members.
Have a wonderful weekend everyone. Kind Regards Sybila
