20 October 2017

Newsletter Articles

Principal’s Message

Welcome back. Term 4 is here and the year seems to have flown by. The students certainly hit the ground running with swimming lessons on the first day back. As always, they took this break with routine in their stride and embraced the challenge of improving their swimming skills. This has been evident over the past fortnight from many conversations I have had with students outlining targets for improvement in swimming. Some have already set their sights on success at the next swimming carnival and see these lessons as perfect preparation. It is lovely to hear of their successes and the way in which they take pride in their achievements. Swimming is an aspect of our wider curriculum and gives students who are less academic an opportunity to shine. Of course, all of our students were praised for their excellent manners and behaviour by staff at Craigie Leisure Centre and the bus drivers taking them to swimming lessons. Of course, this isn’t a surprise to us as we see this positive attitude and consideration for others on a daily bias. However, it’s nice to hear this being acknowledged by the general public.

Our teachers started the term in their usual hard working way on the Staff Development Day. We spent part of the day evaluating our success in achieving the targets on our current school business plan in preparation for our school review later this term. As an Independent Public School, we undergo a school review every 3 years; this is our first and its purpose is to verify our commitment to school improvement and evaluate the measures we have in place to achieve this. At Mullaloo Heights, ongoing critical self-review is a key feature of our school and guides the setting of our targets and planning for improvement. One of our current school targets is to raise standards in student achievement in literacy. As a result, over the past 2 years we have spent much time reviewing and refining our approach to teaching literacy and the new approaches employed in classrooms are already having an impact. You will have seen evidence for this by viewing your own child’s work, in addition to Facebook posts and samples of work in the newsletter. This success has also been illustrated in our recent NAPLAN results. The graphs below show progress made by our current Year 5 students since they were tested in Year 3.

The graphs show that our student progress is better than students in similar schools to Mullaloo Heights (like schools), as well as the being better than the state and national average in most case. This is reflection of the effective teaching provided as at our school. Open night is planned for Thursday 16th November and this will be a great opportunity for you to look at your child’s work in general and view the improvements that have been made.

Please note that the stable cohort refers to the children who have attended, Mullaloo Heights since Pre-Primary. The graph labelled as cohort refers to the current Year 5 cohort in entirety.

Our current Business Plan can be accessed on our school website. A more thorough analysis of our NAPLAN results for 2017 will be available in our Annual Report which will be published on our website early next year.

Caroline Booth
Principal

Dates to remember

French News

Woolworths Earn & Learn

Thank you to all the parents, students and family members who shopped at Woolworths during this program and collected the stickers! We managed to collect 19020 stickers in total, which enabled the school to purchase $1050.00 worth of products from Modern Teaching Aids.

Parent Information

City of Joondalup - Road Safety Reminder

Parking and overall traffic congestion around schools is an ongoing issue and is further exacerbated with vehicles parking in contradiction to parking signs, on footpaths or in dangerous locations such as on bends at intersections. So to minimise this issue below are a few suggestions to ease stress during these periods:

• Organise with your child to meet in a pre-arranged location away from the busier areas after school.
• Tell your child/ren that you will arrive a little bit later after the final bell and advise them to wait within the school grounds until you get there.
• Use the Kiss and Drive if there is one at the school and ensure you use it appropriately. This means if your child is not there, drive around until you see your child waiting.
• Park further away and walk to meet your child.

P& C News

Community News