2 April 2020

Newsletter Articles

Principal’s Report

Well it’s certainly been an industrious week for all our Manly Vale families. Students seem to be adjusting to their new online learning environments and parents to their new occupations as teachers. We have had a very busy couple of weeks here at school preparing lessons, giving feedback, planning for next term and teaching some of our students face to face.

Thank you to all the students who shared their photos of their “Working from Home” experiences. Entries to this week’s photo competition are displayed below It was great to see the Sengchanh family on their excursion to Manly Dam, the Murtgatroyd family participating in some creative arts activities including painting the balcony railing and the Van Vuuren family making a volcano in their back garden.

Some students from 2C shared their work on designing a brochure to their island paradise and Arianna Beninati Lo showed us how to apply mathematical concepts to cooking and mixing in some physical activity for lesson breaks. Ariel De Souza loved the home tutoring from her younger sibling and Harley Wells wanted to share his “Contraction caterpillar”. Thank you to all the entries for this week. Next week’s competition closes at 10am on Tuesday 7 April.

Our competition winner for this week is Max Mako from Year 6 dressed in full school uniform completing a pencil drawing and some digital art work.

Holiday Care supervision

This week an email was sent home to all families from the Department of Education’s Before and After School Care (BASC) team to collect vital information regarding vacation care for these April holidays. Please complete the inline survey using the link below:

Hard copies of the survey are available from the front office and are to be returned to bascreform@det.nsw.edu.au.

Week 11

Next week we are prepared for online learning. Packs will be available for pick up from Monday of next week. Some grades and stages have already prepared enough work to last for the holidays so you may not be required to pick up anything next week. A lot of work still remains to be picked up from the office. Please be sure to pop in and collect textbooks and workbooks from the last 2 weeks if you haven’t already done so. Spare workbooks are also available from the front office.

Online Chat spaces – ZOOM

Our main priority at this stage is to support families to get laptops and equitable internet access for all members of the household. At this stage Manly Vale Public School will not be using the Zoom platform for our online learning until next term. We ask that parents and students refrain from setting up meetings using the Google Classroom space until we are able to support all students in a class attending these chat rooms. Students are able to connect with friends outside of the Google classroom space and that will need to be supervised by parents.

Online Communication Student Etiquette:

Online learning through platforms like Google Classroom and Padlet are an exciting way for students to learn and interact. They also provide opportunities for students to learn online chat etiquette in a safe, controlled environment. At this age, students are still learning about the correct use of salutations and manners when interacting online and some are requiring assistance from teachers to distinguish the difference between spoken/gaming language and written language. As we know, lack of face-to-face contact can at times create misunderstanding in conveying a written message and teachers are continuously monitoring students' online chat.

In light of this, if students are posting inappropriate/unrelated comments they will be muted from commenting on Google Classroom and the teachers will be in touch with parents and caregivers. In such an event, a student can and should continue to submit their work but won't be able to post or comment in the classroom stream for a day.

Thank you! Class Coordinators and Teachers

Thank you to all our Class Coordinators for delivering the work materials to every student this week. Your communication and support of this online learning has been very much appreciated. Thank you also to the teachers who have worked very long hours to prepare and plan lessons, teach students through the day and give feedback to students who are learning from home. It has been an amazing effort by the students, teachers and parents to make this “Learning from Home” strategy achievable. You have all done an amazing job!

The staff at Manly Vale are certainly missing all of our students and parents. We thought we’d send you some photos of our beautiful school to hang in your working spaces at home. Our building works are coming to an end and this week we are having fans, a stage curtain and all of the sound system installed into our new hall. The grass on our oval is growing extremely well and benefitting from the rain. We are all excited to have all the works completed and a handover from our builder ADCO at the end of the April holidays. It will be great to welcome you all back with all the construction completed.

Thank you P&C

Thank you to our school Parents and Citizens Association (P&C) for the delivery of Mrs Jones the Baker cupcakes to all the staff last week. It was truly appreciated and a real lift for all the teachers with what was a very difficult week.

ICAS Cancelled 2020

Due to the current climate and additional costs associated with the running of the University of NSW ICAS competitions this year, Manly Vale Public School will not be offering these after school competitions for 2020. This year we will focus on school- based assessments for all our data collections in regards to the Opportunity Class and Selective High School assessments and ranking.

Tina Lee – Principal

School Banking – suspension of service

Notice from CommBank School Banking

The health, safety and wellbeing of our communities and our people is our first priority. Due to the rapidly developing situation with coronavirus, School Banking has been temporarily paused from 20 March 2020 until the start of Term 2. Please don’t bring your deposit book with your weekly banking into school and we will notify you when banking will recommence.

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