THE MESSENGER
Term 3 Week 7 Wednesday 3 September 2025
Term 1 Week 4 Wednesday 18 February 2026
Dear School Community,
I hope the school year has begun well for you and your families and that your children are settling in. Teachers have been busy setting expectations and routines for their classes. In many ways, this is as important as anything else we do, both as a precursor for learning in class and an example of how to approach almost any task or goal that you can imagine.
Progress is created through the performance of a few small daily disciplines that stack up over time to produce achievements far beyond anything you could have ever planned for. Hopelessness, on the other hand, is just as easy to slip into and is nothing more than the inevitable outcome of a few small acts of daily neglect performed consistently over time so that they take you past the point of no return.
At school, and at home, the rhythms and routines we choose to lean into build the foundations of our lives. The small things we routinely do (or don’t do) add up to something significant over time. When we help children master reading, their instrument, a sport or whatever it may be, through creating regular time and space for that thing to occur, they not only have the best chance of becoming good enough at it to begin to really enjoy and understand it, but they live out an experience that they can practice and apply again and again in other contexts.
The trick is being able to bring joy and curiosity to this learning alongside the need for practice, repetition and the willingness to persist when things are hard. To help our children to do this, we
The sun with loving light makes bright for me each day, the soul with spirit power gives strength unto my limbs. In sunlight shining clear I revere, Oh God, the strength of humankind, which thou has planted in my soul, that I may with all my might, may love to work and learn. From thee stream light and strength to thee rise love and thanks.
RUDOLF STEINER
need to be able to honestly ask ourselves the same questions. Whatever the answers are, these are the some of the thoughts and feelings about learning and failure that we will likely hand down to our children.
There are a few different ideas about the length of time it takes to form a lasting habit, but 2 or 3 months is somewhere in the middle. If there is something you would like to change in your child’s or family routine, you’ll be good by sometime in May (probably). Easy!
A huge thank you to Rachel, Skye, Lou, Vanya and Nick for their work to deliver the swim program this year. This will culminate in our Swimming Carnival on Friday next week. As usual, the focus is fun and participation, except in the parents V staff race where, yet again, staff will be showing no mercy.
Glenn Hood | PRINCIPAL
PLAYGROUP Laura Herridge It has been a beautiful start to the year for the families attending Little Robins Playgroup. The cooler mornings have been a lovely opportunity for little hands to warm up by kneading sourdough bread and cutting rainbow fruit. Many tea parties have been enjoyed, towers built and babies tended to and placed snuggly in their beds - there is always much work and play to do here. We have sung songs and heard tales of the ocean, the waves, and little toe-nibbling crabs. The children have enjoyed the warm morning sunshine during outside play in the sandpit, and it is certainly a pleasure getting to know our new families and welcoming them to our beautiful school.
MORNING STAR Sandi Valerio The Morning Star Echidna children are settling into their new home. We are enjoying our Morning circle songs, and the movement it brings to our bodies. The new rhythm of each day is now in us and we look forward to knowing the colours of the days and the activities that come with that. Painting with the colours of Summer and using soft beeswax help nimble little fingers work and explore new things. We all enjoyed sewing a little heart for our families to celebrate Valentines day last week. A special gem was chosen to sit inside the heart and the children filled the gem with Love as they wrapped their gift in an origami box to take home.
ROSA MUNDI Jack Finegan In Rosa Mundi the children have been singing songs of summertime, waves and the ocean. Breathing in and out and focusing on our new rhythm in Prep! We have been retelling and acting out our favourite stories through play and exploring the exciting new equipment and areas that the prep yard holds. Big yellow boy and our climbing tree’s have been the favourites so far, along with our sandpit to escape the heat.
CLASS 1 Kristi Mulvihill Form drawing and Letters
Class 1 has had a strong and delightful start to the year. The children are full of energy and are thoroughly enjoying their time at their desks. While some expectations had to be adjusted, as they didn’t learn to read on day one, they’ve settled wonderfully into daily fairy tales. They’ve also progressed from straight and curved lines to beginning to learn both upperand lower-case letters. As exhausted as they are, they love life in the primary school and all the wonderful people, both staff and students, that they are now learning and growing up with.
CLASS 2 Samantha Charlotte Number Patterns
Class 2 students arrived back to school confident and ready, with hearts and mind ready to learn and play. We followed our friend, Wimbi the Wombat on his adventure down Waring - the river - deepening our understanding of the world around us, and expressing what we learned in form drawing, illustrations and written summaries. This week Class Two met Ida Spider, who will be helping them to rescue the bush fairy princess with clues based on patterns created by the times tables. The class have settled into specialist subjects well: they are busily knitting in craft, learning new songs and games in Spanish, revelling in literature in Library and enjoying the fun brought in their music lessons. Students are enjoying weekly lunches at the kitchen and the walk to the pool for lessons each Friday.
CLASS 3 Liz Morrell Creation Stories
Class 3 has been exploring the story of After the Flood as part of our Creation Stories Main Lessons. The class imagined stepping onto the “new earth” with Noah, built shared pictures of what the world might have looked like, and discussed how they would rebuild a community from the beginning. An interesting discussion ensued around what are our needs as opposed to our wants! Students then wrote about the new world, what they would prioritise in rebuilding, and the rules they believe are needed for a fair and caring community—linking this to our own classroom expectations. We finished by creating our own Class 3 “Rainbow Rules” to guide us across the coming year. In numeracy we have been working into the place value of numbers and have explored numbers up to 999 thousand! The ‘number of the day’ has allowed daily revision of 4 processes; writing a number in words, digits and expanded notation. A great start to the term!
CLASS 4 Clare Bennetts Native American Mythology
It has been lovely to get to know Class 4 and we are off to a productive start with lots of writing about the story of Hiawatha based on the Henry Longfellow poem. Students have been revising punctuation and parts of speech (verbs, adverbs, nouns, adjectives, articles, prepositions and conjunctions). Each week we have a spelling list that the students are tested on. They will bring the list home on Mondays to learn for our Friday test. We are also learning a short performance that tells the story of Hiawatha and will be performed in assembly in Week 6. Lou Jenkins has been teaching research skills on Wednesdays and each student has a native American animal to study, which ties in nicely to the animals that Hiawatha and his people revered in times gone by..
