St Francis of Assisi School Newsletter Term 3 Week 2 31.07.2024

From the Principal

Dear Families,

Term 3 presents us with so many opportunities to come together as a community and Grandparents Day was such a beautiful way to start the Term. We welcomed close to 300 grandparents and special friends to our school. The liturgy was beautiful, and the children sang with gusto and listened attentively.

I mentioned at the liturgy how special the role Grandparents play for many families in our school. I truly believe the role has changed as the world has become more complex over the past couple of decades. Grandparents often play the role of picking up and dropping off at school, attending sports trainings and looking after children in the evenings as parents attend meetings or events with their other children. Some of the grandparents in our community raise their grandchildren full time.

It’s a special connection between grandparent and grandchild and that was clearly on display last Friday.

It’s been affirming to here so many comments from community members about how our children enter and exit spaces, and how attentive they are during gatherings. It’s something we’ve worked hard on with the children, and it allows our liturgies, assemblies, community prayers and other gatherings to be meaningful.

NAPLAN

NAPLAN results will go home this week. For those unaware NAPLAN is several standardised tests that are conducted Australia Wide in Week 6 of Term 1. They measure students Reading Comprehension, Writing, Grammar and Punctuation, Spelling and Numeracy. They are conducted in Years 3,5,7 and 9.

As a school we look at NAPLAN results in many ways:

Our cohort results (to indicate improvement as a school)
Growth measured from Year 3 to 5 (to ensure each individual student is making growth)
Individual Student Results and Specific Questions (to look at exactly what our students know and don’t know)
How the test correlates with other learning data we have measured as a school.

While these tests were only conducted six weeks into my tenure at this school, they are something we will look at thoroughly as a staff and look at where we can make growth going forward both at a cohort and individual level.

Our results as a school are strong, and I’m extremely confident that the significant work we have conducted this year with our teachers on Explicit Teaching, Introducing Initialit into our Reception Program, and conducting further training in our Year 1-6 PLD Reading and Spelling program as a school we will see further growth in 2025 and 26 as a school.

Scott March