Nerae Preece Principal

From the Principal

Have you seen or have you been told about our proactive behaviour chart? Maybe you have heard that your child got to True Leader? These are the words that we use to help support our students to be the best learners they can be.

This week I would like to take a little moment to share with you how we manage behaviour at our school. This might help make some consistent language for you to use at home too.

Everyday, we begin at Ready to Learn at 9 am. It is our job as educators to spot students doing the right thing. When we do we ask them to move their peg along. Students start at brave, then if they are “caught” doing something great they move to risk taker, once they make it to role model they get to pop a chick pea in the class reward jar, and if they reach true leader it’s 2 chick peas in the class reward jar and a green chronicle to let you know that they were a true leader.

This right side of our proactive chart is so important for our students to know that they are trying hard, but also to help the teacher monitor that they are looking for the positive behaviours in the classroom, rather than always the negative. Interestingly if we always focus on the negative in the classroom, behaviour gets worse, if we focus on the positive, students can see and understand from the praise that is being given what the teacher is expecting. Try it at home, it really works, praise the correct behaviour rather than nagging at the incorrect behaviour.

The left side takes a growth mindset approach to making mistakes. If a student does something to interrupt the learning of themselves or others we call it an “oops”, students move their peg to oops and reflect on changing their behaviour. It’s not a big deal, but is a good warning to help the child get back on track. The teacher then really focuses on trying to spot the child doing the right thing so they can get back to Ready to Learn.

If the student continues the behaviour the teacher will move them to “choice” this means that they have made a choice and need to move to another spot in the room away from the distraction. Once again the teacher is looking to find the students doing the right thing so they can be moved back to ready to learn. If the student continues to disrupt the learning of others they move to Fair, this means that they need to go to another classroom and complete a reflection sheet and think about how they are going to get back to ready for learning. This may mean that the student needs to “fix” or “repair” the problem or relationships that they have affected.

The final step is “Strong”. This is deliberate intentional violence. This is where the principal team is called in to support. The student is removed from the situation and is allowed to return when they have calmed and they are ready to “fix or repair” the problem or relationship they have affected. Sometimes students may miss out on the rest of the session, the rest of the day, their break times or the worst case scenario a suspension. You will be notified by the principal team if your child has reached strong behaviours. Once the problems are repaired students always move back to ready to learn. It’s a new start or what Berry Street call “unconditional positive regard” (I always think as the adult in the relationship I understand a new day is a new beginning)

Interestingly, the Department of Education do not promote expulsion from schools, and have many resources available to schools to support students with high behaviour needs. We often have care teams to support students who have difficulty managing their learning behaviours, and of course in these teams are often many external agencies and allied health workers who are helping us support the student. Edwina Whiteside our Inclusion Leader does a lot of work in this space for us.

Hopefully this now provides a little more insight into how we promote positive behaviour. Next week we start our first behaviour campaign for the year. Our students have decided from their classroom meetings that they would like to work on “Safe and respectful communication”. We will be looking out and listening for students using safe and respectful language. If they are swearing or communicating in an offensive way this will be considered a “strong” behaviour, they will miss out on some break time to talk to the Principal Team about their behaviour and we will support them in repairing the relationships they have affected, of course you will be notified if this is your child.

We are so proud of the students for identifying this as an area that they would like to see improved in our school, and we wonder what their next behaviour campaign will be?

Preps start full time

Just a gentle reminder that our preps will start their first full week next week! We know they are ready to go. A big thank you to all of our wonderful prep parents for ensuring that their child attended the assessment days and balancing your schedules so your child could stay home on Wednesdays.

Assembly 9:30-10:00am

Next Thursday the 3^rd of March is our second assembly for the year from 9:30-10:00. This will be held near the basketball courts at the back of the gym. It will be an opportunity for our band to perform, and to celebrate learning success. If your child is receiving a school values award we will let you know so you can try and make arrangements to attend. We can’t wait to see what our school captains have in store for the assembly.

Labour Day and Curriculum Day

Just a little reminder to save the dates. There will be no school running on Monday the 14^th of March or Monday the 28^th of March. Hopefully this gives you a good amount of time to organise alternative care arrangements if you need to work on those days.

School Council Elections.

We are currently looking for people to nominate for school council. Nomination forms can be found at the office. You are able to self-nominate or have someone nominate for you. We have 5 positions up this year, so if you were thinking that you would like to join, this year is the year. School Council provides a great opportunity to be involved in the governance of the school, and in making decisions that make a difference to our school community.

Nominations close on Friday the 4^th of March. If we have more nominations than positions we will go to an election, details will follow if this situation occurs.

3 way interviews

Thank you to all of the families and the teachers for creating time and space to do interviews this week. In these meetings your child’s teacher would have mentioned if they required an IEP. This is for students who are 12 months behind or ahead. You can expect to receive those IEP’s by the end of March. They will be reviewed midway through the year. You may also have been told that your child is participating in a support or intervention program. We are offering these programs to students who are around 6 months behind from their learning targets, we are working hard to help those students catch up to their learning standard.

Please remember you can always reach out at different times through the year to your classroom teacher, and you are more than welcome to drop in for a chat or arrange a time that suits.

Camps

Just a little update on camps. We were successful in moving both of our camps this year. Our 5/6 camp will be in the second last week of school in December, and our ¾ Sunnystones camp has moved to Wednesday the 30^th of March to Friday the 1^st of April. More details will be coming out very shortly in regards to this camp.

balit space

“balit” means strong in woiwurrung, and it is the name for our new learning space in the gym. We are only a few weeks away from being able to take over the space again and set it up for learning. Our ½ team have ordered some beautiful new furniture and they are so excited about joining together to help everyone in ½ be amazing learners. To celebrate the opening of the balit space we will be organising a very special event for the ½’s. Stay tuned for updates coming soon.

Well it has been a LOOOOOOONG article today. Thank you for reading. I hope you have a really relaxing weekend.

Stay curious,

Nerae Preece

Principal

IMPORTANT SCHOOL DATES

Important school dates to remember:

1/3 – Prep Body safety incursion

3/3 – 9.30am – Assembly

14/3 – Labour Day public holiday

24/3 – 9.30am – Assembly

28/3 – School curriculum Day

8/4 – 1.30pm – Assembly

8/4 – Last day of term 1 – School concludes at 2.30pm

AROUND THE GROUNDS

MUSIC

Dear families and friends,

We are very excited in music as we will be having our first choir and band performance in a whole school assembly next Thursday, 3^rd March at 9.30am. Our school choir will be singing one of our favourite songs, Cover Me in Sunshine. The band, after only a couple of rehearsals, will be playing the National Anthem. All families are welcome to join us, outside the music room on the basketball courts.

I have included a video of the Scottish song, Marie’s Wedding, which our grade 1/2 students are loving dancing to in music.

Thank You to the Get Well Clinic.

We would like to say a big thank you to the Get well Clinic in Healesville for their very generous donation of tickets to see The Australian Contemporary Opera Company’s production of The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland at Allowyn Gardens on Sunday, 27^th at 5pm. This donation of 10 adult and 10 student tickets, worth over $1,000, offered to our choir and band members on a first come, first serve basis and were eagerly received.

We do live in a lovely community!

Have a good week,

Jenny Legg

Music teacher

This week in Prep…

Is it really the end of week 4 already? Time flies when you are having fun!

Across Literacy, we have been busy focusing on our recall of stories, with a specific focus on the beginning of texts. We have continued to stomp and clap out the beats in words as well as listening and having a go at identifying beginning and end sounds. We are so proud of how amazing the Preps are at identifying sounds in words, which has led to them becoming more confident in using the sound charts to support their writing. Which reminds us, when dropping off your child in the morning, feel free to pop in and check out their wonderful work on our ‘Writing wall’. The children are so proud to share their work with their peers through regular gallery walks and we too, love sharing their successes!

On Tuesday morning, we were shocked to enter the classroom to see that something or someone had turned over tables, tipped up chairs and left footprints, EVERYWHERE! “It was a nocturnal lizard”, “It was an Ibis!”, “It was my Mum!” were just some of the theories first thought. However, after a lengthy investigation and many conversations, we concluded that it was in fact a d..d..dinosaur! Which was perfect timing since we were learning about the letter /d/.

In Smart Spelling, our word of the week was tin. We practised learning this word within the sentence, It is in the big tin.

In Maths, with the help of our friends Pevan and Sarah, we have been practising counting backwards and connecting numerals to quantities. Through our rotation groups, the students were involved in games of memory and dice bingo as well as being introduced to tens frames. Who said Maths can’t be fun!?

It was wonderful to catch up with so many families during our 3-way conferences to celebrate the successes and foster the partnership between school and home. We absolutely loved hearing about all the learning that the children are sharing at home!

Have a wonderful weekend,

the Prep team 😊

A few reminders from us:

Next week, the Preps will be attending 5 days a week.
Just a friendly reminder, children need a hat in order to play outside.
The school nurse will begin visiting as of the 28^th of February. We kindly ask that all forms are returned before this date.
Prep Body Safe Program will take place in school on Tuesday 1^st March.

This week in Grade 1 / 2…

It was wonderful to chat with so many of you at our 3-way conferences on Monday evening. It was a great chance to talk about how the year is going so far and get to know more about our students and their grown-ups. We are all feeling excited about our year ahead together.

In literacy this week we have been focusing on a few strategies from our CAFE menu. We continue to work on selecting ‘good fit’ book using the IPICK strategy. We also introduced some exciting new strategies, ‘tune into interesting’ words and ‘back up and reread’. The 1/2 students have been loving having their own good fit book boxes that they can fill with books of their choice.

In writing, we continue to utilise our writer’s notebook. This week’s topic was ‘our favourite animals’. Students drew pictures of their animals in the planning phase before using adjectives to write exciting sentences.

In maths, we’ve had a strong focus on building our counting and number fluency skills. We’ve been doing lots of hands on activities, counting different collection and figuring out the most efficient ways to count large groups.

Our inquire continues to focus on the fascinating Corranderk which led us this week to thinking about famous and influential First Nations people.

Each class continues to build a strong class community with our daily circle time and wellbeing conversations.

This week in Grade 3 / 4…

We have been so amazed by our 3/4 students in the first 4 weeks of school. You have all dived straight into learning, and we couldn’t be prouder.

Last week we met our amazing new Auslan Teacher Michelle who taught us all about the colours in Auslan. She even took us through a paint by colour sign worksheet, it was fascinating to hear a classroom completely silent but students following signed instruction!

In numeracy this week we have been exploring addition and practising our vertical addition skills, learning a number of different strategies to help us mentally calculate maths. These include the split strategy, the jump strategy and more to come!

In writing this week we have been delving into our ideas trait, soon starting in conventions. We hope to have some amazing pieces of writing edited for meaning and spelling in the next few weeks.

In reading this week we have had our eyes focused on ourselves, connecting our schema with the text we are reading!

3/4s keep up the amazing work you are doing!

This week in Grade 5 / 6…

This week in 5/6 learning:

For Inquiry, we started creating a rubric for our Australian history timeline project that will feature the significant events that we have and will be covering across the unit.

We have been using our prior knowledge and Inquiry topics to make personal connections in Reading. It has been wonderful to see and hear all the interesting connections our students have made to our texts.

In Writing, we have explored the importance of planning our writing, through the RAFTS process when creating texts. This will allow us to create more detailed and interesting texts with less hesitation during our writing time.

A large proportion of the 5/6’s enjoyed a fun day kayaking out at Lilydale Lake in what was a fantastic day. Many thanks to the Parents and Mr Pitts for the hard work that was put into making the day happen.

We continued to focus on our emotional literacy for Personal Development and how to support ourselves and those around us.

Thank you for an amazing week!