It was obvious to me when students, staff and parents returned to school last week that they had all enjoyed a relaxing holiday and, very importantly, were very excited about returning to their school for a new term of outstanding achievements in:

• Leadership
• Teaching
• School Management and Administration
• Teacher Professional Development
• Student Learning
• Parent Involvement
• School Cohesiveness
• School Performance

As you know, our 2019 school SAYING is:

Our students have not only memorised THEIR 2019 saying have all decided what their school-based dreams are and they are totally committed to:

1. Making those dreams come true; and
2. Always doing their very best in the academic, social, emotional, and technological areas.

It makes me proud to be in a school where all students are determined to always do their very best, and it is a privilege to be a member of a school staff where all leaders, teachers, and members of our school's management and administration team (ie office team) are as inspired as our students to do their very best when completing all their many and varied school roles.

It is also a source of great joy to be the member of a school community where our parents are so positive and supportive, and are so committed to being involved in their school and in their children’s education.

This is going to be a Great term!

Recent Research - Six Common Features in High-Performing Schools

An important piece of research was recently published that concluded that high performing primary schools in Australia had all developed the same six (6) common features.

The six common features were:

1. "School discipline. A safe and orderly learning environment, a clear set of consistently applied classroom rules, and a school behaviour policy."

I believe Auburn North is outstanding in this area.

2. "Direct and explicit teaching. Explicit teaching in sequenced and structured lessons, involving learning goals success criteria, feedback, revision, and strong support for all students."

Our schools Instructional Teaching Model and exemplary teacher professional learning means that Auburn North is outstanding in this area.

3. "Experienced and highly skilled school leadership. Stable long term school leadership by leaders with well-developed leadership and teaching knowledge, skills and abilities."

Our school leadership team ensures we are outstanding in this area.

4. "Data-informed practice. Using data to inform teaching, monitor students’ progress, and intervene to help students."

Our leaders and teachers are highly Skilled in this area.

5. "Teacher collaboration and professional learning. Collaboration among teachers to effectively meet the needs of all students, with a focus on high quality professional development that includes mentoring, literacy and numeracy workshops, and teachers provided with the opportunity to observe one another teach.”

We were selected to receive the 2019 NSW Department of Education Secretary’s Award because we are outstanding in this area.

6. "Comprehensive early reading instruction. We have developed and implemented a range of programs and practises that ensure each student participates in excellent reading programs."

It would be seem that we have developed the features of a high performing school and by working together cohesively we will become an even better school learning community for our students.

Thank You Ms Gerdes - Newsletter Preference Survey Results

Ms Gerdes took the initiative last term to survey parents during the 3-way conferences to find out if they wanted to receive the school newsletter by paper or via the school app.

Ms Gerdes was able to strategically survey nearly all parents who participated in the conferences, which was about 70% of all parents.

From these parents, the vast majority indicated they are happy to use the app to access the  newsletter, with only about 10% wanting to receive the paper copy.

The parents who surveyed but could not make a decision on the day of their conference and the parents who would like a hard copy of the newsletter will continue to receive the paper copy.

I would like to congratulate Ms Gerdes on her initiative.

Mr Mark Harris

Principal

We have had a wonderful first term of learning in KM and really enjoyed our holidays. We are now back into the swing of learning.

In term 2, we are learning how to write a sentence independently by sounding out words, looking for words in our classroom and using our sight words. We also need to make sure our sentences have good space, a capital letter to start and a full stop to end the sentence.

KM really enjoy learning to read. We know that it is so important to practice reading every day and to work really hard to learn all of our sight words. Our goal for this term is to learn as many of the magic 100 words as we can. We do this by practising every day in literacy rotations as well as practising at home. KM is such a great place to learn, laugh and have fun. 

6HI had a fantastic start to the school year. All students came in with a positive and focused approach to their learning and we saw students achieving across all learning areas.

6HI learnt how to write an Information Report during our Literacy sessions. We had to conduct research and use this research to independently write our information reports. We used assessment criteria to self-monitor our writing. Using our individual results from writing in Term 1, we have all set goals for our writing for Term 2. We will reflect on our individual goals throughout the term to ensure we are on track to achieve them.

Term 1 Maths saw us all engaging in a range of mathematical learning. We looked at strategies to solve worded problems, using addition and subtraction. We also measured and compared angles and used protractors to assist us in measuring the angles. 

We are all looking forward to Term 2, as we will participate in so many learning activities. Some of the activities include an Incursion, reading and responding to the text James and the Giant Peach, a new Creative Writing program and developing our leadership skills by participating in Peer Support. These are only a few of the activities we will be doing. We cannot wait to see what we achieve in Term 2!

Thank you to all of the Auburn North families who have already downloaded and are using our new school app - Schoolzine. This will allow us to reduce the amount of paper we send home and keep parents up-to-date with events happening at the school.

If you haven't downloaded the school app, you still can by clicking the links below. Our fortnightly digital newsletter is displayed in full colour and you are able to view additional photos that don't print in the paper version.

Parents can also have the newsletter sent straight to their email inbox by subscribing. 

The advantages of Schoolzine include:

• Schoolzine translates the information into over one hundred different languages
• all the photos are displayed in colour and can be enlarged.
• Schoolzine links to our other online platforms such as Twitter and the school website.
• by subscribing to Schoolzine newsletters you will reduce the amount of paper being printed too.

To subscribe to the Schoolzine digital newsletter, follow this link:

To download the Schoolzine app, follow this link:

For more information or help using Schoolzine, please see Miss Gerdes in the library before school.