From Our Principal
Published by Bayswater Primary SchoolWelcome back to school for Term 2! We hope everyone had an enjoyable and restful term break and are ready for a busy and action-packed term! Wishing all of our Mothers and Mother type people, a Happy Mother’s Day for last Sunday. Thank you for all that you do for your children and for the support that you show for their education. It is with great delight that we have been able to start the term mask free and with fewer restrictions due to COVID. We can now welcome parents and visitors to our school more freely due to the dropping of requirements around vaccination certificates, although these are still required for volunteers and people engaging in work at our school. Regular hand washing, sanitising of high use areas and other COVID precautions are still in place and students, staff and visitors are still welcome to wear masks if they prefer. Please refer to my parent letter sent out earlier this term for further details.
We have already held a number of events and activities at school and are looking forward to many more before the end of term. Last week we held our annual Mother’s Day stall and Mother’s Day breakfast. Both events were very successful and well attended. Many students were able to buy gifts for their mothers and significant people and we were delighted by the turn out of approximately 150 people to our special breakfast. It was great to see so many of our families come together to enjoy a special breakfast in celebration of our wonderful Mums! A massive thank you to our Fundraising committee for their work in shopping, wrapping, pricing and setting up for the Mother’s Day stall and also a big thank you to our staff for the extra hours you put in to make our breakfast such an amazing experience.
Mrs Slade has also run our whole school cross country trials with 20 of our students being selected to represent our school at last week’s District Cross Country. Our students certainly did us proud and ended up placing 4th out of 10 schools due to their amazing efforts. Five of these students have now qualified to compete at the next level, Division Cross Country. Best of luck to these students. A big thank you to Mrs Slade for all her work in making this happen.
As you may be aware, the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) 2022 for Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 students started yesterday on Tuesday 11th May, and will continue until tomorrow, Thursday 13th May. Our year 3 and 5 students have had a smooth start to the testing period, beginning with a special NAPLAN breakfast on each of the mornings. NAPLAN tests assess student knowledge and skills in Writing, Reading, Language Conventions (spelling, grammar and punctuation) and Numeracy. Tests are conducted in the mornings when students are well rested and most energised. NAPLAN is one measure through which governments, education authorities, schools, teachers and parents can determine whether or not young Australians are meeting important educational outcomes in Literacy and Numeracy. The tests can provide parents and schools with an understanding of how individual students are performing at the time of the tests. They can also provide schools, states and territories with information about how education programs are working and what areas need to be improved.
NAPLAN tests are only one aspect of Bayswater Primary School’s assessment and reporting process; they do not replace the extensive ongoing assessments made by our teachers about each student’s performance. Help your child prepare by reassuring them that the NAPLAN is just one part of their school program, and by reminding them on the day to simply try their best. The teachers will ensure that the children are familiar with the types of questions in the tests and they will provide support and guidance. Individual student results will be provided to parents and students later in the year. Results are expected to be sent home from mid-August to end-September.
Next Wednesday the 18th of May will be our first Pancake Breakfast supplied by Appleby Real Estate in over 2 years! For the previous 2 and a bit years before COVID hit, we have been extremely fortunate to have been able to hold a special pancake breakfast for our students and their families, once a term. This will be held in the breakfast club room from 8:15 until 8:45 and all students are welcome to attend. A massive thank you to the staff from Appleby Real Estate for your continued support and generosity shown to our school. Our regular and weekly breakfast club will be up and running again shortly also. Unfortunately, we have had difficulty staffing this program as Breakthrough Church have struggled to find available volunteers. We will advise you all as soon as we have details confirmed.
Our 2023 Prep Open Morning is this Saturday from 10 am until 12:00 pm and is a great opportunity to come and meet with myself, Mrs Shrimpton (our current Prep teacher) and have a look around our school. We will also be holding a free sausage sizzle for those that attend on the day. So, if you or someone you know, has a child due to begin prep next year, we encourage you to come along.
Education week this year is from Sunday May 22 until Saturday May 28. This year we are celebrating 150 years of public education in Victoria. We will be marking this event with a special Open Night where we will be inviting our current students and their families along to have a look around our school, meet our wonderful staff in person and look at the work being done by your children in each of their classes. There will be displays of work, classes will be open, and we will have activities based around our 4 school values to take part in. The school will be open from 5:00 – 6:30pm on Monday May 23 to hopefully enable everyone to attend. Again, further details will be sent home closer to the date.
Lastly, as you will no doubt be aware, our school will be used a polling place for the upcoming Federal election taking place on Saturday May 21. Our school holds the busiest polling place in the city of Knox and we are anticipating that there will be thousands of voters choosing to cast their vote from our school hall. Our fundraising committee will be running a BBQ on this day to raise funds for us to build a deck on the side of our B Building to enable an outdoor learning space for our students. Unfortunately, we have been unsuccessful in obtaining a grant for these works on two occasions now and desperately need to replace the rapidly deteriorating temporary steps that were placed there when the building was first built. We will be calling for volunteers to help out on the day so if you have a spare couple of hours, we would really appreciate your help as this will be one of our major fundraising opportunities for the year. Please contact Raelene or Kelly Roberts to have your name put on the roster.
Enjoy the rest of you week and we hope to see you up at school for one of our community events, soon.
Brooke Cross