Dear Families,

I am proud to share with you at our upcoming PandC meeting on Tuesday evening our 2025-2028 School Strategic Plan.

The priorities of Belong Engage Achieve are the summation of the yearlong consultation process over the 2024 year with students, staff and families.

We launched the plan via our open classroom and stay and play afternoon on Friday 14 February as our first opportunity to bring our community together, focussed on the teaching, learning and social cohesion of our children and families.

We understand not all families were able to make the open classrooms and stay and play. With a strategic plan with belonging as the foundation of engagement and achievement, we are committed to a renewed sense of connection with our families through events such as these. This year our parent teacher information night was replaced by this student-centred informal event. Teachers will be sharing the information usually shared at the parent -teacher information night via email with their class families, so please look out for this. Parent-Teacher individual student progress conversations will still take place in week 8 and 9 of this term.

This week on senior assembly I shared with students the AGES model of making learning stick.

AGES is the secret to greater retention for learners of all ages! To summarize:

1. Start by paying attention to attention. Focus and notice. Have an open mindset!
2. Once the learners have had a single focus of attention to a topic, guide them to self-generate connections to their existing knowledge. Ask curious questions!
3. In the realm of emotions and stressors, positively emotionally engage your learners, maximizing positive connections with the class while pushing stressors aside. Encourage positive memory recollection that the new learning reminds you of!
4. Finally, allow for spacing; that is time to sleep in order to refresh, renew, and let the information soak in for long term storage. If possible, revisit content in between learning sessions. Revisit the learning by attending to new vocabulary and noticing the concepts in various contexts!

Enjoy sharing new things you have learned and have the children share their new learnings and wonderings with you.

A huge thankyou to all our classroom parent representatives. Please look out for an introductory email from your class parent rep in the coming week.

Have a great week,

Eunice