Dear Families,
WELCOME
Welcome to term two. We hope everyone had a wonderful Easter break and enjoyed some extended quality time together. This Easter was definitely a special one for our family as we celebrated it as Grandparents for the first time. As our Grandson is still far too young to eat chocolate, guess who had to help out?
It is difficult to know exactly what Term two will look like at this stage, but we are beginning to see some restrictions change which is pleasing to note. We will keep you posted on any updates but in the meantime, masks are to be worn for the first 4 weeks of school for all staff and entry into the office.
We hope our community enjoyed the photos and videos that we shared from Sports Day as we wanted to involve our community as much as we could under the circumstances. The children had a great time and the weather was perfect! Again, we would like to thank and acknowledge our families for their support. We received an enormous amount of gratitude for the time and effort staff put into taking plenty of photos and videos, which was much appreciated. We look forward to being able to have our parents back involved and taking part in such events.
MOTHER’S DAY
Happy Mother’s Day also to all the mums, step mums, aunties, grandmothers out there. As we know, it takes a village to raise a child so hope Sunday was a lovely day for all.
We would like to thank everyone who supported our Mother’s Day Stall as this is part of our school’s fundraising. We hope you enjoyed your little goodies.
PUPIL FREE DAY
Term two started off with a Pupil Free Day where VPS staff were involved in a full day’s worth of Math's professional learning with Tierney. This involved a great deal of thinking, reflecting, learning, and collaboration. Tierney is the founder of Kennedy Press and works as an independent mathematics consultant, helping to improve student results on a large scale. She is the author of over 50 books for teachers, 24 of which have been highly commended or shortlisted in the EPA awards. Tierney Kennedy has also published multiple research papers on problem-based teaching and addressing student conceptions, including presenting them at international conferences. We are fortunate to be given the opportunity to work with Tierney and have her support and guide us along our mathematical journey of improvement.
As a school, we are always looking at ways to further improve to ensure we help our students reach their full potential. We have delved into Mathematics and as result, classes have had a deeper focus on Interleaving and problem solving. Interleaving involves giving students problems that contain questions of a variety of different Mathematical topics or forms of practice, in order to facilitate learning. Tierney’s focus is on catching students up, improving retention and building conceptual understanding and reasoning.
Our students are enjoying the challenge of interleaved problems. Many of our classes have morning math's tasks as part of their morning routine that are designed to continually expose children to concepts through regular practice, thereby consolidating understanding and retrieval. This helps them to further develop procedural fluency, reinforce mathematical concepts, select and apply efficient written and mental strategies and helps to develop mathematical reasoning.
Similar to our Literacy Reading journey, we want to ensure that our approach is narrow and deep and whilst we are at the beginning stage of our SIP, we have already seen positive growth.
NAPLAN
We would like to wish our year 3 and 5 students who will be undertaking NAPLAN this week all the very best. Our experience is that our students undertake the test conditions, which are quite different from their daily schooling, very well. A few students get nervous; however, we are clear with the students that this can be a natural response to test conditions and work with parents to support children in not becoming overly worried. It is important for you and your child to know that NAPLAN is not a pass/fail test. It simply looks at what level students are achieving in literacy and numeracy against National Standards and compared with student peers throughout Australia at a particular point in time. All we ask is for students to do their best.
Later in the year, we will send parents an individual student NAPLAN report that you can use to view and monitor how your child is progressing.
If you have any concerns, please contact your child’s teacher or a member of leadership, Thuy Tran (Deputy) and Voula Pounendis (Principal).
STAFFING UPDATE
There have been some staffing changes since term 1.
We would like to wish Jessica Luckman all the very best with the upcoming birth of her first child and thank her for all her work. We are extremely happy and excited for Jess and Preston and look forward to hearing all about the exciting news. I know that you will also join us in welcoming Morgan Curtis who will be in room 6. Morgan has worked at our school from the beginning of the year and has formed many positive relationships with students resulting in a seamless transition. Morgan comes to us with a high level of passion and dedication, and we are pleased to have her as part of our staff.
Georgina Kosteriadis has had to reduce her time due to unforeseen personal/family circumstances, however, we are pleased to announce that Georgina will remain with us in a part-time capacity sharing the room 9 with Rachele Bexis who will be returning from maternity leave. Both Georgina and Rachele met throughout the holidays to ensure a smooth transition.
Welcome and congratulations to Deanna Dimasi who will be working here at VPS on Mondays and Fridays. Deanna will be supporting in classes and joins our VPS SSO team with a high level of enthusiasm and passion.
Looking forward to sharing more successes with you throughout the term. As always, please don’t hesitate to contact Thuy or myself if you would like to provide any feedback or discuss any concerns. As a school we welcome any feedback moving forward as we are committed to continuous improvement. Wishing everyone a successful term two.
Learning Together, Learning For Our Future.
Warmest Regards,
Voula Pounendis