Welcome to our final newsletter for Term 3. Our Pupil Free day last Friday gave staff the opportunity to continue our discussions about creativity and how we can celebrate the year though end of year events. With the changes to social gatherings that are still imposed, we want to create opportunities for you to see and enjoy the year. After quite a lot of time and many ideas and discussions we have landed on some ways to celebrate 2020. The two big ideas are that we want to ensure that firstly we provide the opportunity for our parents and the school community to celebrate and secondly we want the students to celebrate their year.

To ensure that families are included and that we follow the social distancing requirements, we are planning on replacing our Exhibition, Junior Primary Concert and ELC Concert with a website called ‘Grateful’. This will be presented in a similar way to our Flexible Online Learning platform that was set up in April. It will include a place for each year level from ELC to Year 6 to include videos, photographs, reflections, art work, other images and can be presented with the creativity of teachers and students working together. We have discussed including things like songs, dance, performances, student video reflections, photographs and many other ways of sharing with you the highlights of 2020 with a focus on gratefulness. This website will be available via a login and you and your children will be able to enjoy interacting with the content together. It will have a launch date and will be open for a number of days to allow you to enjoy and celebrate with your family, the year that was. It will also give you the opportunity to look at other year levels and enjoy the work of the whole school.

The other event will be created by students, for students. It will be a celebration experience created by each year level for the rest of the school. These experiences will be held over Week 8 of Term 4 and our classes have begun brainstorming and ideating together to see what they would like to create. Although they are in the planning stages there could be experiences like performances, treasure hunts, art and craft workshops or a carnival style experience. Both of these events will ensure that 2020 is fun and significant and that regardless of any future restrictions, we are able to share this year with you and that your children will also enjoy their celebrations together. This opportunity is another space where students can develop agency as they co-create with their teachers.

The other event that has required a great deal of thought and planning is our Year 6 graduation. There have been a number of iterations of this event and we were thinking that we may need to live stream for parents to be involved, however, with a reasonable degree of confidence, we are now moving forward with a ceremony that will allow for 2 guests to attend for each Year 6 student. There will be a range of strategies that will be put in place to enable us to do this safely and we will give more specific information to our Year 6 families in the coming days regarding this. We are hopeful that this celebration will be able to be held in this way and will give the opportunity for our Year 6 students and families to participate in this important event. This information is in the beginning stages and we will continue to give you more detail next term. 

Our Year 5 students have been running businesses throughout this week and there has been an excited buzz each lunch time. I have really enjoyed speaking with our Year 5 students as they have reflected on how they improve their products each day. It is an excellent opportunity to experience what it means to fail safely and to keep trying and improving. This growth mindset is so important in learning and will be a wonderful tool for their future. 

Friday we have our Jump Rope for Heart day and our students have done really well in terms of building their skills as well as raising money for the Heart Foundation. Friday will be a lot of fun and I look forward to seeing the special tricks some students will share with us. A big thank you goes to all of those who have organised this event, especially Mrs Boxall and the team who have worked with her. 

Our final day of Term 3 is Friday 25^th September at 3:10pm. We then have a two week school break. OSHC will be open with Vacation Care during these two weeks if your child requires care in this time. Please follow the link on our website if you would like to book in for any of this time.

I pray that you enjoy a restful weekend.

Wendy Matear
Principal

Memory Verse

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

Matthew 5: 6