Issue 1 / 07 February 2014
From the Head of Junior School Welcome back to school for 2014 and a very special welcome to our newest members of the St Andrews family. The students all appear to have settled in to their new classes and are getting on with the job. I know that not all students got exactly what they wanted, but they have shown a very positive mindset and taken the opportunity to make new friends. There appears to be a really positive atmosphere around the school and I look forward to some amazing results achieved this year.
From the Deputy Head of Junior School & PYP Coordinator Welcome to a brand new academic year! It is wonderful to see our students well rested and ready for the new challenges that lay ahead. I have particularly enjoyed visiting classes on the first few days of school as I have been met with happy, smiling faces. Thanks to all of you, our wonderful parents, for preparing your child/ren so well for the learning journey ahead this year!
It was great to see a number of you at our first Parent Information Night on Wednesday. Just a reminder that the Year 2/3 information night on Tuesday the 11th February and the 4/5/6 information night on Wednesday the 13th of February. It’s a great way to meet the teacher and the other families within your year level. This year we have introduced a new data base system called TASS. The most important thing that you can do is sign into the Parent Lounge. The Parent Lounge login details were posted to you earlier. If you have not received your login details, please email:tassadmin@salc.qld.edu.au From the parent lounge you can see your child’s deatils, give permission for excursions and find parent information. I am looking forward to a fantastic year ahead. There are going to be some bumps along the away, which is OK, for if we have a positive mindset we will be able to deal with those bumps in a constructive way that helps us to grow. Please feel free to contact me or your child’s teacher at any time throughout the year with your questions. We want to make this year a great year of learning for your child where they able to do their very best and fulfill their potential. Darrin Schumacher Deputy Principal/Head of Junior School
As an IB World School we continue to strive to make our IB PYP classrooms lively places where there is collaborative and purposeful activity. We seek to create reflective environments where thoughtful consideration of issues, problems and successes is highly valued. We want our students to feel that their classroom is an environment in which learning knows no limits! To assist our teachers in achieving this goal, our staff have engaged in a professional development workshop led by Kathleen Kyrza. Kathleen is a well sought after international speaker who is a huge advocate for differentiation in the classroom. She provided staff with a variety of strategies/ideas to adopt to support the learning of every student. Kathleen also challenged us to continue to allow our classrooms to be “Risk-Taking, Mistake-Making” environments so that we can establish a ‘growth mindset’ for our learners. She shared the work of Carol Dweck who has identified that students who have a growth mindset understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. As opposed to students that have a fixed mindset where they believe their basic