Dear parents,
Library Learning Hub Construction Update
The Victorian School Building Authority (VSBA) contacted me recently about commencing the Library Learning Hub project that we received a $370 000 grant for in late 2020. The project will be led by the VSBA in collaboration with the school and the VSBA have outlined that the first part of the process will be to appoint a head consultant for the project via a tender process.
Once a head consultant has been appointed we will begin the design and then construction. A timeline for project has not been established yet so I will keep you up to date as we make progress. This is an exciting project for the school and I am looking forward to the opportunities this will provide our students once it is completed.
School Council Elections
The nomination period for our next school council representatives has now closed and an election will be held. The following parents have been nominated for the vacant positions on council. Thank you for your interest in the process.
Sarah Turner
Sam Evans
David Wylie
Ben English
Nina Moncrief
Jessica Ramsden
You will receive ballot papers by the end of this week and the ballot will be open between 8:30am Friday 5 March and 4:30pm on Thursday 11 March. The ballot box will be at the front office, I encourage you to drop your voting slip off once you have filled it in.
Professional Learning Community – Whole School Reading Focus
Seven of our staff are completing the Department of Education, Professional Learning Community (PLC) training at the moment. A large focus of the PLC training is using the results of student assessment and evidence of learning data to identify areas for our improvement. We are early on in this process and we have identified our first narrow focus for our improvement journey. We will be focusing on the teaching practices that will support our students to improve their reading. In the 5/6 area we have identified that some of our students need support with finding the main idea of a text, in the 3/4 area we will be developing teaching strategies that help our students make inferences about the text which is the skill of reading between the lines. In our Year 2 classrooms we will be supporting our students to identify and use common suffixes and our Year 1 students are also learning to identify the main idea of a text. The Foundation students are still settling in and our Foundation teachers will soon have a chance to analyse the entry level assessment data.
One of the research based high impact teaching strategies that we know has an impact in classrooms is giving the students multiple and varying opportunities to interact with new information to form new learning. It takes “three or four experiences involving interaction with the relevant information for a new knowledge construct to be created in working memory and then transferred to long-term memory” (Nuthall, 200, p.93). We will be learning about how to best do this in our classrooms to have a positive impact on our students' learning.
Clean up Australia Day – Friday
Our students will be participating in clean up Australia this Friday. We will be cleaning up Middle Gully, the main school site and some of our older students will be making their way to Ash Wednesday Park and the reservoir to do some cleaning up. I think this is a great way for our students to complete a simple action that will have an impact on our community.
Thanks and have a great week.
Matt Forrest
Principal