Term 4 Issue 1 - 2025
Principals Report
Welcome to Term 4, and over the first 3 weeks we have been very busy already. Term 4 is the busiest term of the school year with lots of events on across our school, culminating in the celebration of our Year 6 Leavers.
As always please keep an eye on our School Calendar, Seesaw and Facebook for dates and information about events coming up this term. A reminder that all excursion letters are sent home via Seesaw and can also be accessed via the school calendar.
If you need any further information, please contact your child’s teacher or our office.
Swimming Carnival – Year 3 to Year 6
I would like to say congratulations to all our students from Year 3 to Year 6 who attended our swimming carnival on Tuesday 21st October at Oatlands Pool. I was unable to attend; however, all our staff have said it was a fun and smoothly run event with all students giving their best throughout the whole day.
Our kids demonstrated all their School Values, which was evident by the participation level and encouragement they gave each other, as they always do!
We all should be very proud of our students at our school; they are an amazing bunch of kids!
Celebration Assembly – Tuesday 9th December
Our final assembly will be held on Tuesday 9th December at the Brighton Football Club Function Room. This is a formal assembly and focuses on awards and celebrating our Year 6 students.
Parents whose children are receiving an award will be notified by our office and our Year 6 parents will of course receive an invitation to attend very soon.
All other parents are welcome to attend if they choose to, however a reminder that there are no classes sharing at this assembly, apart from our Year 6s.
Class Structures 2026
Below are our class structures for 2026, you will notice that there are a few changes in terms of what year levels teachers will be taking. All our classes in 2026 are all composite classes, which is the nature of a small school:
- Kinder (Monday Tuesday and Wednesday) – Chelsea Matthews
- Prep/Year 1 A - Amrita Sarker
- Prep/Year 1 B - Frazer Wood & Lleander Creese
- Year 2/Year 3 - Oliver Balzer
- Year 3/Year 4 - Sarah Pennicott
- Year 5/Year 6 A - Phoebe Williams
- Year 5/Year 6 B - Laura Stokes
Class Placements
We have recently finished our class placements and aim to get these out to students and families by mid-November. This is extremely early compared to other schools as we believe as a school that our kids deserve a decent transition time to get to know their new teachers. This time also allows our teachers to get to know the kids a bit before we start the new school year and ensure any nerves are calmed.
Salvation Army Christmas Appeal
As with previous years we will be collecting gifts for the Salvation Army Christmas Appeal. We are asking for support from our families with the following:
- Gifts for children including toys, clothes and other relevant items.
- New items, no second-hand or reused items.
- Do not wrap the gifts as the Salvation Army needs to know what they are giving to people.
Gifts can be brought into our office, once we have a tree up the gifts can go directly under there.
End of Year Assessments
Throughout each school year we do a range of screening tests to see where our kids are up to with their learning and what their next steps are. Term 4 is a bit different as we do some other tests to see how much growth our students have had in their learning and to give us a starting point for 2026.
Testing goes for about 4-week period for all our kids from Kinder to Year 6. During this time, we test and benchmark the following:
- PAT Testing – Prep to Year 6 - Reading and Mathematics
- MAZE benchmarking – Year 2 to Year 6 – Reading Comprehension
- ORF benchmark – Year 1 to Year 6 – Reading Fluency
- Preps to year 3's complete a range of letter naming, high frequency word, phonemic segmentation and nonsense word fluency benchmarking.
- Kinder Development Check 2 (KDC) – Kinder
End of Year Reporting (Ratings and Evidence of Learning)
Our end of year reports will be going home to families on Wednesday 10th December for our students in Kinder to Year 6.
The end of year reports will include:
- Ratings for English and Mathematics - Prep to Year 6
- Rating for Science and HASS (History and Study of Society) – Prep to Year 6
- Rating against criteria for STEM, PE, Music and Art – Prep to Year 6
- Kinder Development Check 2 (KDC) results - Kinder
Our teachers will send evidence of learning home via Seesaw the week beginning Monday 8th December. If you would like a hard copy of the evidence of learning please speak to your child’s teacher.
- Evidence of Learning for Writing and Maths – Prep to Year 6
- Evidence of Learning for STEM, PE, Music and Art – Prep to Year 6
Our Kinder students will receive their portfolio of learning against the Early Years Learning Framework. This will be sent home to parents in the week beginning Monday 8th December.
Kind Regards,
Phil Novak
Principal
3/4 Williams
This term in 3/4 Williams, we are combining our English focus about persuasive texts and our HASS focus about rules and laws in our Readers Workshop lessons. By the end of term we will use our skills from both subject areas to have a persuasive debate about possible new rules or laws about school. Here we are matching rules to their consequences which we will use to form an opinion about whether we agree or disagree with them.
5/6 Stokes
5/6 have had a great start to term 4! We are straight into learning and having fun! We have been having fun researching information for our information reports, creating posters and focusing on our number skills
Music with Mr Wood
In music this term students will be focusing on learning how to play independently; we have done lots of work on group pieces and now is the students time to shine. You can expect to see some evidence of this towards the end of the term when evidence of learning goes out on Seesaw. I am looking forward to hearing how they have grown this year!
Aussie of the Month
Congratulations to Jac for being our Aussie of the Month for the month of October. Jac always shows responsibility in all aspects of school. Jac is respectful, helpful and always shows his Bagdad Best. Well done Jac!