To The School Community,
Since my last Principal’s Bulletin, there has been a great deal happening at school that I am pleased to share with you.
Firstly, the students and staff have been implementing strategies centred around goal setting via conferences in reading and writing. This work is a focus for our school this year and already I can see how it is becoming embedded in the classrooms more deeply as well students being able to articulate their goals during my travels to the classrooms.
The teacher’s role in this is to coordinate conferences with each student in a cycle spanning over roughly 4 weeks. This enables the teacher and student to understand the next level of learning, particularly in reading and writing but also other areas like behaviour and effort and Positive Education. This strategy enables students to have agency in their learning and with the teacher collaborate to set goals that are student specific. These conferences are recorded in templates accessed by all teachers that will eventually be used as part of the reporting process.
Reporting will take on a new look this year at BHPS with the Team Leaders, Robyn Booth, Rachael Curtain ( Learning Specialist) and myself developing the tools and structures to effectively and efficiently share goals and progress that your child experiences in class during a learning cycle. I will update you further in next week’s bulletin.
Sheepwash Classic
We are getting closer to the Sheepwash classic fun run that will be held on the Saturday of the Easter Weekend on April 20th. We are keen to get as many entries from the school community as possible to join the many participants from the broader community. Volunteers are also required on the day to set up, pack up and be marshals. Stay tuned for more info and look out for the link in the coming weeks to sign up!
Assembly
Tomorrow is an assembly week and I appreciate the effort that people go to get there and participate. As the school grows so does the number of attendees at assembly and the students do try their best to be attentive. I would like to ask the parents with toddlers to make an extra effort to support the assembly by taking toddlers who may need some soothing or relief from the formalities of assembly out of assembly to the foyer or outside. I know this is sometimes tricky and trust that you will make the call as parents when this needs to happen.
School Council
We have finalised our School Council membership for 2019 and look forward to the Councillors meeting in March where we will discuss a range of matters including the School Review that will occur in term 3 with opportunities to be part of the self-evaluation phase being offered shortly to the School Community.
If you have any matters that you would like raised at School Council or queries that you have about what is happening at school please contact me I am always more than happy to share things with you.
At our last meeting, we discussed the Canberra camp moving forward making a commitment to the Camp being for year 6’s only despite our year 5/6 arrangement with the year 5’s being participants in a week-long study of the Barwon Estuary while the year 6’s are away. Last week a survey link was sent to our year 5 students to collect data about travel preferences to and from Canberra. I look forward to analysing the data to assist in locking in the arrangements for 2020 camp.
A Councillor also raised queries that he is receiving about the addition of fences at the school. This was communicated in detail last year after a decision at School Council to add the fences after some safety concerns and security breaches occurred at school where staff and students were potentially at risk. One of these instances required lock down procedures and the police to be contacted due to aggressive parent behaviour towards staff and students. This was resolved respectfully following protocols and procedures supported by the legal branch of the DET and would have been avoided if the fences were in place prior.
The fences also support navigating traffic to the office during the school day minimising the risk of the public or parents entering the school grounds unannounced risking unsupervised access to facilities or the risk of not knowing who is in the school in the event of an emergency. If you have any further queries please contact me directly.
Have a great week, remember to check the calendar.
Daniel
Important upcoming dates:
Fri 1/3 – Final Day for online registration for School Sports Victoria (Selected Entry)
Fri 1/3 – Whole School Assembly