What lovely artwork our Year 2s created to end the week!

We are getting so close to the end of Term 2!

This term is nearly down, and when combined with the increasingly cold and shorter days it makes for one of the longer and tiring ones for everyone. Our final day of this term is next Friday, July 4th with a 2.30pm finish. We will be holding our final assembly for the term in the Hall from 2pm. 

Thank you for the student Disco!

Thank you to members of our Prep parent group for organising last Friday's student Disco in the hall. Running one event is hard enough, but running a junior and senior session back to back is all the more commendable! We heard many good stories and not many issues with the night as students danced away. Our kids love these special occasions and it's great that our wonderful parents are able to make fun events like this possible! Thank you again!

Semester Reports

Semester reports will be posted via Compass on Wednesday, July 2nd form 2pm.  For more info of reports, click here

Staffing news

Miss Simon will be taking long service leave for the first 4 weeks of Term 3. In her place we welcome Miss Aisling Casey who will be taking 3A Mondays to Thursday and our own Emma Parlour who will be taking the class for the Fridays. 

Term 2 Expo

Don't forget the Term 2 on next week - Tuesday 3.30pm to 4pm and Wednesday 8.30am-9am. 

Attendance

A friendly reminder should you have  any 'unexplained' absences for your child please update as soon as possible. Accurate attendance records are important, and we appreciate your support in ensuring all absences are accounted for.

Attendance is a key focus at our school. Regular attendance helps students stay engaged, achieve their best, and build strong learning habits. We also use this data to track attendance trends and provide the best support for our students.

Please check and update any outstanding absences via Compass or call the school Office.

We’re nearly ready to wrap up the term and to show off our hard work at our upcoming expo! In the last fortnight we have been finishing up a few pieces to show our visitors, including our recycled packages for Connected Learning and some published writing pieces. We’ve been reading a summarising stories, writing narratives and practising subtraction skills. We’ve spent time ordering events based on duration and making schedules of familiar events like making breakfast, eating dinner and going to bed. 

It's time for the termly Whole School Expo - a time where we invite family and friends into the school and for students to share their term's learning. We are open for two sessions - one after school and one before 

After school session 

Tuesday 1st July 3.30-4pm

Before school session 

Wednesday 2nd July 8.30am-9am

Expos will be conducted in the classrooms as well as specialist areas too. 

Trialing School Wide Positive Behaviour Support (SWPBS) Practices at Home

Teaching behaviours that we expect to see works best when there is a consistency, including consistency across home and school settings.  A strong partnership between school and family is important because when families are involved, outcomes for students are better. Families can use and reinforce SWPBS strategies at home. One way is to create your own HOME Expected Behaviour Matrix.

Purpose: 

To create a grid of specific positive (desired) behaviours for each behavioural expectation within the context of your home environment, similar to our APS Whole School Expected Behaviour Matrix.

Tips and Guidelines: 

Create a grid, or use this grid template, with expectations down the left side and different contexts or locations within your home across the top (e.g. kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, family room, yard, community)

• Expectations (down the left side) should be broad, positive and applicable in all settings (for e.g. Be Respectful)
• In each box on the grid, put 1-4 short examples of what the expectation ‘looks like’ in that context (e.g. KITCHEN- dishes are rinsed and placed in the dishwasher). Try to state the expectations positively and avoid the words ‘don’t and ‘not’.
• Involve all family members. This creates discussion, collaboration, ownership from everyone involved.
• Display the matrix in each of these locations.

For more information on SWPBS at APS- see SMILE Handbook

Rachel Roberts

Assistant Principal

Donut Fridays!

Next Term the Parents' Association is kicking off Donut Fridays! Similar to Term 1's Icy Pole Fridays, Donut Fridays will see a cinnamon donut delivered to your classroom at lunch eating time. All you will need to do is to order for the Term via Compass (just like icy poles!). 

Look for a Compass event soon to book in!

Semester reports live on Compass the afternoon of Wednesday, July 2nd.

This semester's report includes

• a description of the areas of the Victorian Curriculum taught, including Specialist areas
• a comment by their classroom teacher on the personal and social capabilities demonstrated by the student 
• for English and Mathematics specifically, student achievement against the Victorian Curriculum. The most recent prior assessment  (from 6 months ago) will be listed, apart from Maths (more information below)
• a 4-point scale assessing Attitudes and Behaviour
• a five-point scale for English, Mathematics, Connected Learning and one Specialist area

The Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA) recently published its revised mathematics curriculum (Mathematics curriculum 2.0). All Victorian government schools will start using the Mathematics curriculum 2.0 in 2024 or 2025. We are using the revised mathematics curriculum for school reporting from the start of this year.. On your child's previous report, the teacher reported against the 3 strands of the achievement standard for mathematics (Number and Algebra, Measurement and Geometry, and Statistics and Probability).
Under the Mathematics curriculum 2.0, your child’s teacher will report against the achievement standard as a whole, providing a single, aggregated score. As the achievement standards reported on have changed, the first time you receive a report under the Mathematics 2.0 curriculum (this semester's report) it will only show achievement and not progress. For all reports after this, progress will be shown against the single achievement standard. This means there is no prior score presented for Maths in this report. 

The subheadings in the five point scale provide more detail from the Victorian Curriculum. So, for instance, rather than just report on Number and Algebra, the five-point scale digs deeper by reporting on Counting and Place Value or Fractions and Decimals  (different year levels will provide different descriptors to match their context). For more detailed explanation of these areas, the Victorian Curriculum website provides a wealth of information. https://victoriancurriculum.vcaa.vic.edu.au/

An important consideration when viewing your child's report is that it is a snapshot of this particular time - the middle of the school year. So, where, in the five-point scale it states Established, this means that your child is where they are expected to be at this mid point of the year. 

In each subject area, your child has been assessed for their behaviour and effort in this the semester.

Behaviour - Adheres to the “Be Respectful” and “Be Safe” sections as per the Expected Behaviours Matrix

Effort - Adheres to the “Be a Learner” section as per the Expected Behaviours Matrix

 
Within these two areas, students are assessed using the following scale -

Attendance data can be found in your child’s Compass portal under the “Attendance” tab. There you will be able to see a summary of the entire year’s attendance and a breakdown of the various reasons. 

On Friday we sent four teams to compete in the Year 5/6 Hoop Time event at the Nunawading Basketball Centre. We'll have a report for next week's newsletter. 

Year 3 students have been on a giant geographical journey this term and are very excited to share our watercycle explanations and dioramas with you all next week. 

Here are some of our highlights from Term 3:

• “Writing was fun because each term we get to learn a few new text types.”
• “I really loved designing our dioramas."
• “I liked learning addition and subtraction strategies like compensation, bridging and place value.”
• “ I loved being challenged in my maths.”
• “This term we all helped each other.”
• “Typing and handwriting is fun.”
• “I learnt how to share Docs, make illustrations, markup, export PDFs and how to be sensible.”
• “I enjoyed learning times tables and division.”
• “I learnt about area and perimeter through gardens and pictures.”
• “I loved making my own maths games and playing everyone’s games.”

Week 10 Term Two

The Prep cohort have been working hard on their Imaginary/Mixed Up animals to share to their family members at next week’s EXPO. They have been drawing detailed pictures, using strong colouring, labels and describing the animal habitat. The kids cannot wait to share these with you. The students are looking forward to next week’s incursion, where they will have a chance to encounter some Australian animals up close! What a great conclusion to a fantastic Connected Learning unit! 

Other learning experiences in Prep over the past two weeks have included:

• Ordering the days of the week and thinking about events that occur on the different days of the week. The students have filled in their own weekly planner of their weekly events. 
• Learning how to visualise during Reading sessions. Visualising means making a movie in your mind so you can understand a story better.  The students have listened to music and read alouds without pictures and have drawn their own visualisations to match these. This will continue to be the focus for next week in Reading, moving onto using words and images from picture story books. 
• Revising over Term Two’s phonemes and graphemes and high frequency words. They have been making great progress in writing down decodable dictation sentences using the sounds/letters they have learnt so far and known high frequency words. 

If you have recently (last 12 months) purchased a school bag and noticed issues with it, we encourage you to take it to our uniform supplier PSW for an assessment. There is a new design due in July which will look to eliminate any issues!