Primary News

This year has seen so many exciting developments crystallise across our primary school. From having three new classrooms available to spread into, a new science laboratory nearly finished, new teachers onboard and many new students, 2025 has certainly started with change.

It's always wonderful to welcome our new Prep cohort to their first experiences of real school! It's a credit to our sixteen Prep students and their teacher, Miss Roe, that they have transitioned so quickly into their new classroom and routines. I've heard and seen the evidence of their enthusiastic learning with letters, representing sounds, drawn with chalk on our pavements, small guided reading groups taking place in class already and so many students eagerly swapping over readers regularly. Our grade 5 students are longing to start the Prep-Year 5 Buddy Reading Program and fortunately, there's only a few more sleeps for all to wait!

Along with their own new classroom, grade 3/4 have relished meeting and getting to know their new teacher, Mrs Minter, who has now joined us permanently. Our grade 3 students, along with our grade 5 primary students, have also been participating in NAPLAN, the National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy. For our grade 3 students this is the first time they are experiencing a standardised test that is administered across the country, though many of them hardly seem to notice except when it interferes with loved curriculum areas such as sport or music!

Grades 1/2 have also been enjoying a new and much more spacious classroom, alongside different specialised programs for learning, guided reading groups and more recently, a pile of new nonfiction books that have been delivered for them all to explore. Under the guidance of their teacher, Mrs Kannemeyer, they've been visiting our school library and already have significant amounts of art work on display in the foyer!

In 5/6 our students have impressed our language teachers by how much conversational German they can already recite and understand. Students are busy working on projects; writing persuasively to abolish school uniforms, (which resulted in some deciding they would write to keep school uniforms afterall); programming a robot; and realising that what order you complete the maths operations in, (addition, subtraction, division and multiplication), makes a world of difference to your answer! Our grade 6 House Captains are becoming more confident in their roles and responsibilities within this leadership opportunity, whilst all of our senior primary students are being encouraged to lead by example across the school.

It was encouraging to see parent teacher meetings well attended. This provided an early opportunity for parents to touch base with their child's teachers. Individual Learning Plans provide a further opportunity for parents and teachers to meet and discuss a child's individual progress and special needs. To ensure we cater effectively to the diverse needs of our students across the primary school, ACC Benalla has recently invested in significant additional resources and staff training for the benefit of our students. It's very exciting to be able to now deliver specialised and targeted small group literacy intervention, in addition to the one-on-one intervention already being implemented.

Finally, we would like to extend a warm invitation to all of our families to attend our Easter Service on the last day of term. We would love you to join us in the Performing Arts Centre at 1.10pm on 4th April. Students will be dismissed after the service for their travel home.

We look forward to building our partnership together as we educate our students.

Nicola Bussell

Head of Primary