NAPLAN has begun for our year 3 and 5 students and all participating children are taking on the challenge with great commitment. Being online does have its challenges in terms of the organisation and set up behind the scenes but hopefully it is a more accessible way for students to engage. We do use our NAPLAN results as one data set to help us gauge our improvement over time, but we do have many other ways of measuring student progress that are more specific and timely. Our teachers have been learning about “quick checks” for example in our weekly professional learning that we undertake after school every Tuesday.

We are having a spate of incidents where people are driving onto our oval to do burn outs - obviously we are very annoyed! Not only does this ruin the appearance of the oval, it creates a trip hazard  and compromises the safety of our children, as well as  difficult work for our grounds staff to fix. If you see anyone driving onto our oval or have any information in regard to previous incidents please contact the police or the school.

Last week I talked about the hard work our teachers are doing in improving their understanding of the teaching of vocabulary, as well as our focus in classrooms on developing student vocabulary. Our research tells us that the most important thing a student can do at home is to read or be read to. A student who reads for 21 minutes per day outside of school will read almost 2 million more words than someone who does not read outside of school. That’s exposure to a lot more words! So I implore all parents to set aside that 21 minutes per night for your children to read or be read to. It can make all the difference.

Yours in partnership,