Welcome back for Term 3! We seem to have an early Spring occurring this year and our grounds look amazing with the native blossom and early bulbs out and flowering.

The term is certainly well underway and our students have settled into learning extremely well. We have already had our Country Gold selection trials and our Winter Sport roster is underway. Unfortunately we’ve had a washout of the second round but the weather looks brighter for this week. We will also begin our year 6 transition to high school (this year our  year 5’s will also attend some sessions), our grade 5’s will begin their leadership journey to becoming student and sports leaders, as well as some excursions and performances.

Way back in March our students participated in NAPLAN and we have just received our results. The change in time for testing was supposed to give us information about student learning to act upon earlier in the year. Given we only received school results this week (student results were given out last week) I’m unsure if the new system is going to help us the way it is supposed to. We also had two weeks of swimming for our year 3 and 5 students prior to the sitting of the tests and this will have impacted upon our results as there was not the same amount of teaching time available to our students at that point of the year. That being said, our results were very promising, and certainly vindicating our strong literacy focus. Our year 3 students performed at or above like schools in all areas and our year 5 students were significantly above like schools in all areas. Our growth data was also above the Tasmanian data in most areas. Our support structures that we have in place also mirrored our results and all students in the 'support required' criteria receive targeted specific support already.

Beginning next week we will have some work being undertaken on two classrooms at the top end of the primary corridor. This is part of the government funded classroom renewal funding that was announced at the last state election. We have been working with the department and architect to come up with a suitable design for contemporary classrooms since the beginning of the year. This is hopefully the first step in upgrading our entire school; you may be aware that we have been a priority school for redevelopment for around 8 years now. Mrs White is temporarily relocating to the music room and  music to the staff room. The work is scheduled to be finished ready for the start of school next year.

Finally, I would encourage all parents of young children to look at some of the fantastic information about the first 1000 days of a child’s life. This information that is available online gives great advice about how to interact with your baby and toddler to support their optimal development. I listened to a brilliant key note address at the recent Australian Primary Principals Conference from Nathan Wallis from New Zealand. He has a website with information and YouTube clips that are a great watch.