From the Principal

Well that wasn’t the week we were expecting! I am so impressed with our community, for making it through. Our teachers are starting to get prepared for more of these “circuit breakers” over the year. We hope we don’t have to do them too often, but we know we are prepared if we have to. If you’re feeling a bit flat, it is understandable. The news was something we weren’t really expecting, and for some of us we may have jumped into our fight, flight or freeze mode. If you’re worried about your child’s response, make sure you come and chat to your child’s teacher. They will support and listen where they can or help refer you to the best person to help. I want to say a big thank you to all families for doing what they could for learning through the circuit breaker and a MASSIVE thank you to our team for putting learning packs and the blog together so quickly. You are all a joy to work with.

School Council nominations

Nominations to join School Council will be extended to Monday 4pm. If you would like the form emailed to you let Brogan know. We still have a number of positions to fill, so if you have been thinking about it, let us know. It is a commitment of one Wednesday evening a month.

Days to remember

Labour Day (Public Holiday)- that’s on the 8^th of March.

3 way interview Day- Thursday 18^th of March. Students will be dismissed from school at 12:30. Need help with supervision in the afternoon? Get in touch with Tristan (Tristanrogers@cire.org.au) or Amanda (amandaquilty@cire.org.au) from CIRE who will be able to help you out.

Curriculum Day- Friday March 26^th, there will be no school for students as we are going to learn how to help our kids become better writers.  Let CIRE know if you need your child to be cared for by March 1^st. For the program to go ahead CIRE need at least 10 children (Capacity is 24). You can email Tristen and Amanda to let them know you are interested.

Tutor program

Over the coming weeks some families will be notified of their child participating in our tutor program. As you may know the Department of Education has funded for tutoring to occur in all Victorian Government Schools.

At the moment we are identifying students that are between 1-9 months behind in their learning based on school reports from last year. These students will then participate in short but regular catch up learning sessions based on what learning gaps are appearing. Each student that is offered this support will be on an Individual Education Plan (IEP)

Our school has opted to have an extra set of hands working within out classrooms. Research suggests that intervention is best supported within the classroom and connected to what students already know Belinda O’dea who has already jumped right in and started helping the prep and 1/2 ‘s.

We welcome Sarah Hartshorn on Monday to help us work with our 3-6 students. Sarah is coming from Launching Place and has been working with grade 5/6 students.

Next week we will give you some more information on other interventions we are starting, including extension.

Whole school assembly

Remember that our Whole School Assembly will be on Friday the 5^th of March from 2:30-3:30. Jenny Legg is building together a great performance collection for the day. Stay tuned to hear what the performances will be. We are also hoping to do our grade 6 Leadership presentation on that day. We hope you can stay afterwards for a social get together, there will be some sort of snacky food available to purchase, our lovely friends at the PFA are working that out at the moment.

Parent helper session

A big thank you to the families that came along to our Thursday Classroom Helper training session. We had a lovely time. We have another one coming up on Tuesday 9-10am, this will be held in the library. We hope you can make it.

Once you have been to the training we ask that you bring your working with Children’s check into Brogan at the office, and we will take a copy and then we can connect you to the area of the school that you are interested in helping.

A special message from the Smiths…

The other day I received an email from Kristie Smith (mum of Ellie and Lucca). I really wanted to share this as I think it is a great example of families learning together…

In light of seeing a program recently about button batteries and the sadness that follows when these batteries are ingested.
We took the time to talk about this topic, and how sad it is they are used and why. We talked about if we have any older type toys containing these types of batteries.
We have tried to provide our four children with wooden, felt and natural open-ended play toys however Lucca went through all our older toys and sadly found 2 toys containing these tiny button batteries. I was horrified!!
Lucca took to them with a screw driver. We did some research to find out how we could dispose of all our unwanted batteries and we learnt we could dispose of them safely at our local Aldi store.
We will now keep a jar to collect all of our unwanted batteries and dispose of them the right way.
I thought I would share this with you so perhaps others in our community can learn where we can all place our unwanted batteries.

I had no idea that Aldi offer safe disposal of unwanted batteries. Thank you to the Smith Family for discovering this. If you have anything interesting to share. Email me. I love to know what you are learning at home.

Well that’s it for this week. Have a restful weekend!

Nerae