Dear Parents,

Next week is the final week of what has been an outstanding term for our students, our leaders, our teachers, and our school. This success has only been possible because of the continued support and cooperation from all of our wonderful parents. Thank you.

Two recent events have helped show what an exceptional school learning community we have developed and continue to develop for our students, leaders, teachers, and parents. The two events were:

1. Department of Education’s ‘2020 Secretary’s Award for an Outstanding School Initiative.’
2. Our school’s participation in the Department's ‘External Validation’ process.

Department of Education’s '2020 Secretary’s Award for an Outstanding School Initiative.'

The leaders of the NSW Department of Education are the Education Minister and Mark Scott, the Department’s Secretary. Each year only a small number of schools are selected to receive the Department’s ‘Secretary’s Award for An Outstanding School Initiative’ and the ‘Secretary’s Award For School Achievement’. Before 2017 – 2019 our school was selected to receive five Secretary’s awards.

Our leaders and teachers are very excited and proud to inform you that this year OUR SCHOOL and its students, staff, and parents have been selected to receive the Department of Education’s prestigious ‘2020 Secretary’s Award for an Outstanding School Initiative’ for its ‘COVID-19 Blended Approach to Flexible Learning Project’.

As you know during the COVID-19 learning from home time earlier this year, our school developed and implemented a perfect blend of printed and app-based learning, and innovative, multi-lingual communication strategies to ensure all students remained connected to their teachers and continued to engage with and succeed in their learning.

Parent feedback demonstrated that the explicit teaching videos enabled them to effectively assist their children’s learning at home.

The key features of this project that assisted students and parents included:

• ‘Fortnightly Learning from Home Booklets’ which included lessons, resources and information about online learning platforms.
• App-based communication between students, teachers and parents that enabled students to share their learning with teachers who provided high quality feedback.
• Learning at home videos produced by Auburn North teachers teaching lessons and important concepts and skills.

During the learning from home time the Department’s Secretary, Mark Scott visited Auburn North to video its strategies and shared the video with other NSW schools, and the project and its artefacts were selected by the Powerhouse Museum to be included in its new exhibition.

Our staff hope you are as excited and as proud as we are because if it wasn’t for your strong support of your children during the learning from home time they would not have continued to learn as effectively and successfully as they did and our school would not have been selected to receive the ‘2020 Secretary’s Award for an Outstanding School Initiative’.

Our School’s Participation in the Department's External Validation Process.

Every five years every NSW public school is required to complete a formal evaluation of its own programs and practices in the three domains of the School Excellence Framework. These three domains are 'Teaching', 'Learning', and 'Leading'. These domains include 14 subsets. The evaluation of the three domains and 14 subsets is called an ‘External Validation’.

Auburn North recently completed this ‘External Validation’ process. We provided the Department with a report and detailed evidence related to our school’s teaching, learning, leadership, and parent engagement programs and practices and our achievements in each domain and each of the 14 subsets.

Schools can be assessed as ‘Developing’, ‘Sustaining and Growing’, or ‘Excelling’ for each subset. ‘Excelling’ is the highest assessment/rating and it is uncommon for schools to be rated as ‘Excelling’ in all 14 areas.  

Our school's report and evidence were reviewed by an external panel and our leadership team participated in a zoom meeting with the panel members to discuss the report and evidence.

We are delighted to inform you that our school was assessed as ‘EXCELLING’ in ALL 14 AREAS. The panel members said they were “Blown away” by the extraordinary work being done by the staff, students, and parents at Auburn North Public School. 

Our school was rated as EXCELLING in these 14 areas:

LEARNING

• Learning Culture
• Student Wellbeing
• Curriculum
• Assessment
• Reporting
• Student Performance Measures

TEACHING

• Effective Classroom Practice
• Data Skills and Use
• Professional Standards
• Learning and Development

LEADING

• Educational leadership
• School Planning, Implementation and Reporting
• Allocation and Use of School Resources
• Management Practices and Processes

John Kennedy, our school’s Director had read and supported our school’s report and all the evidence prior to them being submitted to the panel. Mr Kennedy also attended the zoom meeting.

The day after the meeting with the panel, Mr Kennedy wrote an email to our school congratulating our school.  His email comments included:

“I wanted to take this opportunity to congratulate the Auburn North team on your very successful External Validation yesterday.”

“I have valued greatly the opportunity to see how your validation has evolved into a true reflective tool.”

‘Yesterday was nothing short of outstanding.”

Parents, we hope you are as proud as our students and staff are of this incredible achievement, which reflects the wonderful way in which our dynamic and harmonious school learning community is working together to become Australia's most outstanding future-focused learning community.

Happy Holidays Staff and Families

It has been a very busy and successful term for all members of the Auburn North FAMILY and it is just about time for a well-deserved holiday. I would like to congratulate all students on their efforts and achievements this term and thank all members of staff for their continued hard work and great teamwork to assist our students become the best young people they can become.

The last day of this term is next Friday 25^th September and the first day of term for BOTH students and teachers is Monday 12^th October. There is no pupil-free day in term 4.

On behalf of the Auburn North staff I would like to wish our families a happy and relaxing holiday and we will see you back on Monday 12^th October.

Class Reports – KSV, 4A, 6B and Year 1 -Year 3 New Arrivals Program (NAP) Group

Please find attached to this newsletter class reports from KSV, 4A, 6B and Year 1 – Year 3 NAP group. I would like to thank the students in these classes and their teachers Ms Saidi, Mrs Van Vuuren, Ms Angury, Ms Bazzi and Mrs Khalil.

Mark Harris

Principal

Years 1 – 3 New Arrivals

It has been a very busy BUT fun term so far! We have been learning lots of new concepts and we are definitely loving it! During the term we have been reading a variety of fun narratives such as Jack and the beanstalk, Goldilocks and the three bears and so on. After reading each story students have been retelling, role playing and then re-writing the narrative in their own words.  

Here are just a few of pieces of our amazing narrative writing, we hope you enjoy reading them.

Every Monday students in the new arrivals group write a recount about what they did on the weekend. The new arrival students are becoming very confident in writing recounts, below are some weekend recounts which students have written independently.

Every morning in our New Arrival group we engage in a variety of literacy-based experiences. These highly engaging experiences focus on enhancing our reading, writing, speaking and listening skills. Below are just some literacy activities which all NAP students engage in daily.

• Reading and writing sentences                  
• Creating funny sentence beginnings and endings.              
• Sentence writing with spelling words.
• Increasing our vocabulary.                    
• CVC games with a focus on our vowel letters.               
• Playing barrier games to further develop oral language              

Students love engaging in our weekly speaking and listening games these games are so much fun and focus on further developing student’s oral and receptive language skills. We play games like 'celebrity heads' with the use of various characters and we enjoy chatting to George about our weekend.

6B has had a very exciting and successful term. In literacy, students have been working very hard to plan, write, edit, review and publish their very creative narratives. They shared their writing with their peers and there were proud faces all around.

In science, students have been learning about the ‘living world’ and investigating the inquiry question ‘How do physical conditions affect the survival of living things?’. Students planted their own corn seeds and have been taking great care of them, they have been true scientists and throughout the term have documented and journaled their plants growth and change.

6B have worked collaboratively and cohesively to achieve great success in their learning and wellbeing.

The students in KSV have made excellent progress in their writing this term. All students have been working very hard to write interesting sentences using a range of pronouns and conjunctions. Last week we learnt about volcanoes and made our very own class volcano. We had so much fun making our volcano and absolutely loved watching the blazing red lava bubble and erupt out of our volcano. We were able to successfully write about volcanoes. Have a look at some of our work!

In maths we have been learning how to share objects. When sharing objects, we had to remember to share one at a time, check if we had shared equally and record our work with written numbers. We had so much fun sharing using engaging hands-on resources. All students in KSV were able to successfully share objects and record their work. Well done KSV!