Pavers!

We are finally laying our second and last round of 150years commemorative pavers. We are excited to finish off our lovely little community area outside our hall. Thank you to the Dayboro Progress Association for their donation of a table and chairs for this community space. What a great space for parents and community to enjoy our beautiful grounds, reflecting on our history!

P&C AGM and 2025 committee!

Thank you to everyone who attended our P&C AGM on Monday. It was wonderful to see so many attendees both in person and online. 2024 was a huge year for Dayboro State School and a record fundraising year for our P&C! Congratulations to our 2024 dedicated P&C members for all of your hard work and dedication to our school during our 150 year celebration and continual dedication to engaging community!

We are excited to launch into 2025 with a clear community engagement plan and a large goal of replacing our current Lower Playground with a more engaging and practical solution for this Year 2-6 play area. 

Congratulations to our 2025 executive committee:

President – Rhiannon Fealy

Vice President – Emily Brown

Secretary – Stephanie Fink

Treasurer – Katharine Fenwick

And our P&C support roles:

Projects and Activities Team – Andrew Purcell, Laura Jagersma, Victoria Stavar, Nikita Pearson, Tegan Haak and Mark McCrystal.

Technology/Systems – Nathan Oldfield

Social Media coordinator – Johanna Sheehan

Grant Writer – Elise Strange

Tuckshop and Uniform Co-ordinator – Alison Hibbert

Don’t be shy, why not join our P&C by filling in the online membership form: https://forms.office.com/r/DKsrN5SsAY We would love to hear your ideas!

Our 2025 Strategic Planning – The Teaching of Reading

As I have been writing about, we have been steadily working towards our explicit improvement agenda: Precision in the teaching of reading and a focus on positive student engagement.

This week, we sent some of our Reading Working Party members to a Collaborative Learning Community (CLC) professional briefing so that we can work with other schools on our first key priority:

To implement a whole school approach to the teaching of reading through implementation of the Australian Curriculum (V9) in English.

We were able to plan as a team, connect with regional staff to support us and gathered some ideas to bring back to our larger Reading Working Party to continue implementing here at DSS.

This information below could help you to keep updated on the changes we are making to our reading instruction here at Dayboro State School:

With the implementation of version 9 of the Australian Curriculum in schools this year, this has seen a renewed and consistent approach to the teaching of reading using the Simple View of Reading Model and Scarborough’s Reading Rope through an explicit instructional approach.

The Simple View of Reading Model

The Simple View of Reading states that reading comprehension (the ability to understand text) is the product of word reading and language comprehension. Please read Dee’s Curriculum Chat below for further details about the research behind the Teaching of Reading…. especially Scarborough’s Reading Rope which will provide some of the theory behind the Simple View of Reading Model.

Here at Dayboro State School, our Prep-Year 2 teachers have been explicitly teaching Word Reading separately to Language Comprehension with great results. Our Year 3-6 teachers are focussed on teaching Language Comprehension through their English units.

How can you get more information? Below is a link to view a parent information session about reading in our curriculum and how you can support your child to read.

Also, here is a link to a fridge poster to help guide your support of reading at home.

Next week, at our Parent Teacher Conferences, we will be asking parents to complete a short anonymous survey about your preferences for ways to access resources about the Teaching of Reading. This will strengthen our partnerships in your child’s reading journey.

2025 School Review

As I have been discussing in the newsletter and at P&C, we will facilitate a School Led Review at Dayboro State School this year. School-led reviews aim to harness the efforts of schools to use cycles of inquiry to review their performance and progress, and collaboratively identify next steps for improvement. This evidence-based approach empowers school leaders, in partnership with their community, to lead aspects of the review process.

The National School Improvement Tool, outlines the 9 domains that we will be using to review our current practises:

We would like our community to fully engage in this process so we will be using many methods to gather your opinions and suggestions for our school. I look forward to working with our Parent Rep to ensure we are mindful of gathering a wide range of contributions. If there are any other community members who would like to be involved in the planning of this review, please contact me via email gdoug7@eq.edu.au.

Senior Cross Country!

Yesterday we persisted despite the weather and completed our Senior Cross Country Carnival. We modified by having two age groups at a time on the oval. I was impressed with the resilience of our students to participate in the modified way. Dayboro State School students always participate enthusiastically and yesterday was no different. They cheered on others and also ran either in the competitive race or the Fun Run at the end.

Thank you to our community who turned out in the dreary weather to cheer on our runners. We also would like to thank the parents who volunteered for a job to assist our students.

We look forward to the Junior Cross Country Carnival for our Prep-Year 2 students next term, when the weather is a bit cooler.

Staffing

We have had a couple of staffing changes recently, so we thought it would be great to introduce these staff members to our commuity:

My name is Mrs Claire McInerney and I am excited to be working with Mr Benjamin Baade in 4B as their Friday class teacher. I have been teaching in the region for a number of years and am currently working as a year 4 teacher part time at Lawnton SS. In previous schools, I have taught a variety of year levels and been in varying roles throughout my 13 years in the teaching world. I have recently returned from maternity leave in 2025, and I am looking forward to lots of learning and growth with our 4B students. I am a mother to two beautiful children, wife to my amazing husband and dog mum to two cute dogs. I enjoy spending time with my family and friends. We love to go on lots of adventures together. I also love to shop, walk my dogs and go to the park with my children.

Mr Rhys Thompson is currently teaching Drama Prep-Year 2 and Music in Year 3-6 classes:

Hello, my name is Mr Rhys Thompson and I am the new Arts teacher for the rest of term 1. My area of training is primarily in music, consisting of performing, writing and recording guitar and vocals within various original projects - from heavy to jazz, to folk and meditation sounds. I adore creativity and feel extremely honoured to assist the future artists of our world in finding their voices. I am a recent graduate teacher and I am excited to be involved within the Dayboro State School family.

School Calendar

Please find below the last two weeks of our Term 1 Parent Calendar. We are nearly there but have several events still to share with community.

We have also drafted version 1 of our Term 2 Parent Calendar to support you to stay informed about all of our school events. Please see below.

Have a great week!
Gabrielle