Principal's News
School Review – Have your say to help our school understand their next steps!
This term we will commence our four yearly School Review process. As explained in previous newsletters and emails, we will be working across term 2 to gather feedback from all of our clientele including students, parents, staff and community. Our school team and some of our colleagues from neighbouring schools will be out and about in our community to gather your insights. Please consider sharing these to help our school grow and consider our next steps to improve.
What do we do well? It has been wonderful to see some of our community’s responses to what they think our school does well on our initial simple survey….here are some highlights:
- Encouraging kind and respectful behaviour among students.
- Wearing of correct school uniform.
- Having a dedicated P and C putting in a wonderful effort to support the school.
- Welcoming the preppies and integrating them across subjects within the school, outside the Prep rooms. Also having seniors come down and show leadership and mentor in of our young minds.
- Acknowledging students and their achievements.
- Teacher feedback to parents via email and teacher engagement with parents face to face.
- Making new families feel welcome and a great culture.
- For being such an inclusive, kind and caring community.
- Teacher/student relationships and communication with parents.
- Was a big term! Cross country in the rain, tuckshop upgrade, the feat that is swimming, NAPLAN, cyclone interruptions, incursions. There was lots for everyone to do across all grades.
We also asked for feedback about what parents would like us to consider moving forward and have really appreciated hearing your views.
Please consider joining any forums or formal discussions this term. Thanks again for being partners. We look forward to working with you!
Parent Partnerships!
It was wonderful to see how many parents we had engaging in Parent Teacher conferences last term! We acknowledge that you know your children the best and so these meetings really also help our teachers to learn more about our students. The teachers carefully plan to discuss how your child is progressing academically and also socially and emotionally at school. Please consider making contact with your child’s teacher if you haven’t yet had a chance to engage in a conference.
This week, teachers are sharing the Curriculum Overviews for the Term 2 learning. This is a great way to engage with your child about their learning but using the information on the overview to talk about their daily learning or by enhancing their learning with other at home discussions. This can help your child to also get excited about their schoolwork.
Thanks for being great partners!!!
Interschool Moderation – continuing to enhance our support for students
We are committed to building an expert teaching staff at Dayboro State School and one of the ways we ensure that our staff have a deep knowledge of the Australian Curriculum, so that they can ensure our students have access to and are extended in their learning is by using the moderation process to check in on the standards. At the end of term 1, our school hosted over 80 teachers from across 3 schools – Mt Samson SS, Petrie SS and Dayboro SS for our Cross School Moderation. This was a fabulous way to continue nurturing our partnerships within our cluster.
A whole school approach to moderation processes underpins systematic curriculum delivery and supports teachers to align curriculum, pedagogy, assessment and reporting; and ensures consistency of teacher judgments and accuracy of reporting against the Australian Curriculum achievement standards. At this professional learning afternoon, our classroom teachers moderated the first term’s speaking and listening English task. Our specialist teachers moderated a sample from their learning area. This cross moderation allows the teachers to professionally discuss the new version 9.0 Australian Curriculum achievement standards and reinforces a consistency of teacher judgement.
Our Dayboro State school teachers were super impressive with their knowledge and usage of these new curriculum units and clearly had ensured that they worked hard to provide the opportunity for every student in their class to have access to the learning and the assessment. Well done DSS teachers, you should be so proud.
ANZAC Day commemoration Service and March
Today we commemorated ANZAC Day with our students. We were so fortunate to have special guests from our community, Mr Richard Hawkins, from the Dayboro War Memorial Society and Mr Glen Friedrich from our Dayboro RSL subbranch. The students really enjoyed listening to the firsthand experience that Mr Glenn Wright and Mr Christian Macdougall shared from their former defence force experience in the Australian Army Corps. As our school captains communicated today - “It is our responsibility to carry on the ANZAC traditions.”
On ANZAC Day, Friday 25 April, we will of course also participate in the community march and service. Please consider supporting our march, it is a great way for our students to continue to understand why and how we commemorate this occasion. All students can meet myself, Mrs Ryan and other staff members, in full school uniform (formal for our Year 1-6), at the Dayboro Pub at 9:15am for a 9:30am start. Please ensure that your child has a hat for the march. Parents and friends are welcome to march with us on the day. We encourage the adults to walk at the back of our section. Once we reach the school, we will keep the children in our bus zone until you collect them.
The community ceremony commences at 10am. Our School Captains will be a part of this ceremony. We would love to see lots of our DSS students supporting this service. A reminder also that the community does have a dawn service as an alternative to the 10am service.
Student Success!
Last term we sent two teams to the Bray Park State High School STEM challenge. We are super excited to announce that our Year 6 team won the challenge for the day!!!! Congratulations to both teams for your teamwork and persistence!
School Calendar
We aim to keep you fully informed of our events, excursions and school processes. Please find attached our Term 2 Parent Calendar. We can’t wait to see you involved with these events this term.
Checking in on our Student Wellbeing
We are committed to assisting our students to be engaged and looking after their wellbeing. For the last two years, we have used the Queensland Engagement and Wellbeing Survey to understand from our Year 4-6 cohorts what might be their strengths in this area and also the components of wellbeing that we could focus on at our school.
Once again, we have the opportunity to participate in the survey. I attach the Information for Parents and Carers to consider. We will complete the surveys over the next couple of weeks. Please have a read and if you have any questions, please contact your child’s class teacher. Similarly, if you would like your child to opt out, please contact their class teacher by the end of the week.
Have a great week!
Gabrielle