Dear families, 

There is a lot to celebrate in our busy school this fortnight! Firstly, congratulations to the Year 3 and 5 students that engaged in NAPLAN last week, they all showed courage and resilience when either having a go at something new and/or when trying their best as the assessment became challenging.  They all successfully completed four assessments during this testing cycle. We look forward to analysing the results to help us learn more about the strengths and areas for improvement of individual students, cohorts and/ or indicators for the whole school.

We hope that your child’s Primary Progress Report (PPR) found its way home to you on Friday and it was informative and helpful in gaining a picture of how your child is settling into school so far this year. As previously offered, you are welcome to make a time to have a follow up conversation with your child’s teacher. We are very proud of the way students are engaged in learning, following new routines and PURRing. It has been a calm and enjoyable start to the year. Teachers are available anytime you’d like an update on your child’s progress. We look forward to working in close partnership with you throughout the year!

Our Evandale Primary School Improvement plan (SIP) for 2024 is complete and ready to guide and focus all of our work. We aim to maintain and embed previous years' work and continue to make improvements in the following areas:

• Reading with a multi-tiered system of support (MTSS) framework and Structure Literacy Approach (Big 6 of Reading/ Science of Reading)
• Numeracy with a throughline of problem solving and place value and high quality universal/ tier 1 teaching and learning (Big ideas in Number and Peter Sullivan)
• Attendance
• Safeguarding children and young people

I will share the full version with the School Association in Term 2 and if anyone would like to discuss our targets and actions, I am more than happy to make a time to do so.

School Association (SA)

We had a great turn out at our School Association AGM and first 2024 SA meeting. We have an excellent range of endorsed representatives from across our school and community. We thank them for their time and look forward to working closely with this motivated group throughout the year! The parent representatives on the SA are particularly passionate about finding innovative ways to support our students use and community connection with the orchard and currently neglected veggie patches. They also requested access to online learning platforms such as Reading Eggs and Mathletics for practise at home. Please ask your child’s teacher if you need their username and password for such platforms. The group also said that a hardcopy of the newsletter would help them keep up to date with information and events, so please feel free to request a hard copy from the office as needed. Please be mindful that the Schoolzine platform is intended to be used in its electronic form and therefore some photos and links won’t be available when printed.

Elected representatives:               Chairperson – Donna Butt

                                                  Treasurer – to be confirmed

                                                  Secretary – Andrea Harlow

Community representatives: Jarrad Ripp and Shannon Towns

Parent representatives: Cherie Smith, Edwina Caswell, Amanda Smith and Gemma Whiting

SA sub-committee update:

We know that there are parents/ carers that are keen to become actively involved in supporting the school. This active parent group will technically be a sub-committee of the School Association. They can decide on their name once the group is formed (previously often known as a P&F), and chair and vice chair are appointed. Cherie Smith will be a key person is leading this group as endorsed through her position on the SA and Cassie Spurway-Smith will work closely to activate and organise our parent group.

The school and Cherie Smith (SA parent rep) will lead an initial meeting to outline the purpose, responsibilities and possible actions of this group on Tuesday 9^th April – Week 10 at 2:00pm in the Staff Room (entering and exiting via the office entry). Please sign in at the office, RWVP and SG is not required for this meeting but will be a point for discussion! We will then support the group to actively work in partnership with the school, be reciprocal with feedback, requests and information as needed. If you can’t meet face-to-face at this time, please try joining us online via Microsoft Teams Meeting ID: 497 027 692 683 Passcode: c5fpkj

BRIXHIBITION

Brixhibition was again a great success and we had amazing and detailed builds displayed from all grade categories. Some of the votes were very close and I am super excited to announce the following winners and runner-up from each grade group:

K-P: Lennox H

Runner-up Mason 

1-2: Thomas 

Runner-up Eve 

3-4: Seb Y

Runner-up David 

5-6 and OVERALL WINNER: Charlotte 

Runner-up Tyrrian 

I’m proud of the courgeous entrants and thank them for taking the time to plan and create brilliant Brixhibition entries, we look forward to participating in our school comp next year!

Attendance

If your child continues to have regular, ongoing or prolonged absences, please expect us to be in contact with you in the form of a letter or phone call. We wish to work with families to ensure that students are safe, known, well and learning. If your child misses a school day, they are missing out on quality teaching instruction, and they may fall behind academically and socially. If you require support in this area please reach out to your child’s teacher, our Learning support teacher- Mrs Andrea Harlow; there may be a reason behind your child’s disengagement that needs investigating.

Choir

Two Evandale locals, Valerie and Chris, are kindly volunteering to lead a choir with our students at Evandale Primary on Fridays at 2:00-2:45. Mrs Anita Stephens will kindly be supporting the choir during these sessions. The choir will be performing in our Week 6 assembly next term!

ATHLETIC CARNIVAL HOUSE WINNER

Just a quick update to let you know the winning house of our school athletic carnival this year was LOGAN!! Well done to all who participated. Logan - 315 - Barclay - 271

Kind regards,

Bella Mitchell

ACTING PRINCIPAL

GLOVER EXCURSION

On Friday 15th March, Gr 3-4 & 4-5-6 went to The John Glover Art Exhibition. We had to walk because it was a short distance away. When we arrived the staff gave us all some books about what the paintings were. There was a voting slip at the start of the book, for the painting you liked most. All the paintings were really detailed and really clever. Most of the paintings looked like they took about a year to do. Voting for the paintings was pretty hard, but fun! After we voted we walked batck to school to settle back to learning. 

By Mirabelle

KINDERGARTEN FUN

Our kinder day in Term 1

Our day begins with our visual board with our daily jobs, breathing technique for calm minds and then environmental sounds! We are learning how to listen for different sounds in the environment. 

In the morning we look at our names and letters followed by finger gym which is a finger muscle development exercise ready for letter formation in later stages. We then do exercises to help with different skills in particular scissor skills and co-ordination in rotations. 

We then have our indoor and outdoor play followed by maths where we are learning about numbers in our world and recognising numbers. 

Our afternoons are music and movement with Mrs Massey and developing vocabulary through oral language walks! Our walks are all about describing objects and extending our language.

Kindergarten is a special year full of learning, progress and development!

We look forward to sharing more with you!

YOGA with Nurse Kylie

Nurse Kylie has been helping the kindergarten class with developing techniques through a yoga series. Yoga was a wonderful time for busy minds to unwind, stretch growing legs and learn how to breathe using movements. Kinders loved the breathing exercises. This wonderful tool links with our morning breathing exercises which we do every morning ready to start our day feeling calm before our day begins!

 

HARMONY DAY - Gr 1-2

In Grade 1-2 last week we spent some time thinking about what Harmony Day means, sharing and discussing the picture books ‘Whoever you are’ and ‘I am Australian too’ by Mem Fox. We then did a picture of ourself and wrote a special message about what Harmony Day means to us.

These pictures were created by: Juliet, Indy, Jasper, James H, Preston and Noah.

SUPER SCIENCE CIRCUS

On Wednesday we had a visit from the Super Science Circus and there were lots of tricks.

We think the Super Science Circus show was good and exciting to watch. There were many tricks to watch and it was amazing. It was really nice to have the kinders join us on Wednesday. They thought it was amazing to watch. Everyone loved the show, and they were talking  about it in their classrooms. The Super Science Circus show is totally hilarious, and the costumes were colourful. The performer Heidi was amazing, and she was magical. She was mostly talking about gravity and it was awesome. She had spectacular skills, she also somehow pulled off many other characters all by herself with absolutely no help. We enjoyed having fun watching Heidi use hoops and pull off some spectacular moves.

Thanks for coming to Evandale primary school and showing off some magic and teaching us about gravity in a fun way.

 By Rivah and Zayne.