It has been wonderful to welcome our school community back to school this week. It seems that many families were actually able to enjoy a much needed break at some point during the holidays with many getting away. I think this is also the first lot of school holidays where our staff feel that they have genuinely enjoyed a break too.

Covid update

Things are looking more promising moving forward throughout this term for us to actually be able to include some parent involvement in school activities. At this stage we would be happy to see parents of the class presenting assembly each week to attend. Your class teachers will keep you informed about when your class is on. Unfortunately not all classes have another assembly rostered this term with only 9 weeks in this term. We won’t have parents attend our Mission Markets or our Book Fair in Week 3 but Mrs Whalley is already well placed with setting up an online version of what is on offer so you will know what the children are talking about with their Wish lists. At this stage we believe we will be able to have limited parents attend the swimming carnival- one per family as we need to have a restriction of 500 people including students and staff. We are very excited though that it looks like we may be able to have our full scale O’Holy Night in the last week of school with all families coming to our Christmas Carols night as it is after the 1st of December. We are already thinking about plans to make this an extra special night since it will be the main event of our year where we can have our whole school community present.

2021 classes

Plans are well underway with staffing allocations for 2021 with all our classroom teachers confirmed and appointed. We will communicate with parents about teachers for each year level in Week 8 with specific class groups being available on our Step Up Day in the last week of school. Our current class teachers are working together to draft class lists over the next few weeks. If you would like us to consider something specific about your child’s learning or social groups for their class placement please email me directly. Please note that these are only considerations and we cannot guarantee every request. I will not consider requests for specific teachers. Please note that we also have limited spaces for enrolment available in each year level if you are aware of any families wanting to join our wonderful school. Please encourage them to get their applications in ASAP.

As always we grow in class numbers next year from 14 classes to 17 classes. We will be offering 4 x Prep classes (Blue Block), 3 x Year 1 classes (Green Block), 3 x Year 2  classes (Yellow Block), 3 x Year 3 classes (Red Block) and 4 x 4/5/6 classes (Teal Block).

We are very excited about our plans for Prep and for the 4/5/6 classes as we are moving to a highly regarded teaching and learning model called Co-Teaching. As we will have 4 classes each of Prep and 4 classes of 4/5/6 groups, it is an opportune time to implement this approach. Students will have their main class teacher but will have many opportunities throughout each day to work with the teachers of the other 3 classes in their block. Classrooms will be open spaces that build on the small group approaches within the flexible environment that we already have. We expect that the learning opportunities will be enriched by the level of collaboration and differentiation that can occur more fluidly within this structure. 

The multi-age 4/5/6 cohort will especially feel the benefits of the model, giving them opportunities to work as a year level at times when the curriculum requires it and being able to work across year levels when it enhances the curriculum. This model is already known to have very positive benefits for students’ learning and for their relationships with the peers. Many children are in a position to work or at least be exposed to learning either side of the year level and this model of teaching and learning allows the support level and the challenge for students to be deepened. All students have areas of learning that are strengths and areas that are a challenge and Co-teaching works smoothly (with considerable planning and expertise in curriculum design) to help our students achieve success. 

The added bonus for our 4/5/6 students is that this class structure creates an opportunity to mix up our class groups and to get a more successful gender balance in each class group. If you have any questions about this approach to teaching and learning, please email me as I am very happy to discuss it further.

Cheers

Penny Collins

Principal

Welcome back to Term 4!  This term is sure to fly by, with many exciting events due to take place throughout the term.  I’ve placed some flyers below my article which outline some of these events.

We started our Term off today with a Whole School Meditation.  It was wonderful to see our 300 students enter so calmly and reflectively and participate in the meditation session so reverently.  It was clear that this concept of simplicity, stillness and silence is not a foreign one for our students.

On assemblies, I am excited to announce that starting next week, we are going to welcome parents of the class presenting to our Friday morning assemblies.  I have put a timetable below of when classes will be presenting.  We look forward to having some of our community back at school! 

Pax,

Nick 

This week, Kookaburras have enjoyed using our whole body to understand some maths concepts. We completed both inside and outside activities where we identified and described coordinates on a map.