Okay, so hopefully your children are keeping you informed about their life at school and what has been happening in their classrooms. So let me catch you up on what has been happening with staff and curriculum as we lead into student holidays and the holiest time of the year.

Firstly, all classrooms are deeply engaged in Lenten /Easter units of work and preparing for our Holy Week liturgies in “not” Holy Week, next week,?  but how else do we assist you in that critical faith development of your child(ren) if we don’t manipulate the timeline a little.  Thanks to Mrs Boudan, we have some poignant liturgies to recall this most holy time of the year.

Throughout the diocese schools are in various stages of their implementation and embedding of “Clarity”.  This body of work by Lyn Sharratt incorporates 14 parameters that should influence best practice in schools.  Next week the Executive and Mrs Stretton ( our GEM, in more ways than one) have 2 days online with Lyn.  Parameters 1 and 14 state that all staff have a shared responsibility and accountability for all of the students.  This is vitally important as what happens in Kindergarten impacts on how students perform in Year 6 and even Year 12 ( and every grade in between as do all grades!). Critical thinking, communication skills, creativity, problem solving, perseverance. collaboration, information literacy, technology skills and digital literacy have to be deeply embedded in every classroom. 

Yesterday, in our PLC (Professional Learning Community) staff were engaged in assessing students writing samples.  Primary and Infant teachers worked together to analyse and evaluate student writing against the National Literacy Progressions.  Students were benchmarked in Creating Texts, Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar.  This was then recorded using Plan 2 – a department online assessment platform to measure student growth in literacy and numeracy.  This collaborative process not only tells us where students are at but assists in student goal setting and planning learning in order to build on students’ writing skills  so as to maximise growth.

I am looking forward to seeing many faces next week at our Easter events.

 God Bless

Kim Hogan

Assistant Principal