I hope everyone has enjoyed or at least survived the late burst of summer weather and are looking forward to the upcoming Easter break.

Recently, I attended Education Leaders Day with Principals and Preschool directors across the state. It was a day of reflecting on the public education strategy and hearing from local and international experts, aligned with the strategy. The Chief Executive has challenged everyone to be “The best at getting better” which really indicates a journey of continuous improvement by knowing your own context and the priorities that are relevant for individual school communities. For us, we will continue embedding our improvement around Literacy, Numeracy and Thinking with a focus on developing Effective Learner capabilities in all our students. 

Kate O’Driscoll, Lauren Langley, Alex Long and I also attended the State Numeracy Summit which was again an opportunity to hear from leading researchers and practitioners in the area of Mathematics. It was a good opportunity to align our school and teacher actions for improvement with current evidence-based practice. 

Our site improvement plan priorities continue into 2024. We have had a large focus in the area of Literacy last year, learning and implementing the Playberry Laser program that develops phonology, reading and spelling. We also implemented the Dibels reading assessment that enables us to track and monitor reading progression throughout the year more effectively.

This year there will be a stronger emphasis on Numeracy, using student data effectively to ascertain where students have strengths and weaknesses to enable teachers to program effective learning opportunities to move all students forward.

Our recent Student Free Day focused on the Big Ideas in Number – Place Value, where Kate O’Driscoll did an excellent job of leading us through the importance and different stages of Place Value, with teaching staff having the opportunity to look at student data from the Trusting the Count (R-2) and PVAT (3-6) assessments that have been undertaken over the first 6 weeks of term. Teachers then had time to program and develop learning tasks to support student growth.

NAPLAN

Congratulations to all our Year 3 and 5 students who have been participating in the National Assessment Program in Literacy and Numeracy or NAPLAN over the last two weeks. NAPLAN is a national assessment program, used to monitor and report on student achievement in critical numeracy and literacy skills. It is a lot of assessments over a short time frame and all the students have done a great job concentrating hard and trying their best.

Sports Day

Preparations for Sports Day are well advanced, and we are very much looking forward to a fun filled day. Fingers crossed for some nice weather and we’re hoping to have lots of families in attendance.

Parent/Teacher Interviews

Parent/Teacher interviews are scheduled to take place over the coming two weeks. Based on parent feedback from last years’ parent perspective survey, the discussion process has changed, from 3-way discussions, to only parents and teachers. There will be opportunities for students to share their progress with families later in the year.

Again, this year we are using an online booking system (School Interviews). Feedback from last year was very positive and made booking a discussion time much more streamlined.

Information about how to book an interview time was sent home on Monday via email.