Today we farewell our friends from Mikawa. It has been an amazing week for our students. The week began with the Year 7 welcome assembly. We were impressed with the performance of our boys singing the National Anthem, the choir’s performance, our students speaking in Japanese amazingly fluently and the return song and speech from our visitors. This experience began a week of events that gave our Japanese visitors time to appreciate our culture and our students a chance to interact with our Japanese neighbours. Thankyou to Mrs Bishop for all the work you do making this happen for both our schools.

This week the School Squash Team became Region Champions. Congratulations to Zac E, Tim C, Matt R & Jarrah M. Three of these boys have been selected in the Region Team as well. Congratulations Zac, Tim & Matt.

There are lots of stories around about NAPLAN testing – and many of them are not based in fact. NAPLAN testing provides valuable diagnostic tools for teachers to use when planning their lessons. Knowing about the individual strengths and weaknesses of students allows for different activities to be incorporated into the learning that reinforce sound knowledge, develop skill and extend those who are accomplished.

NAPLAN Testing in Years 3, 5 7 and 9 allows parents to track the performances, strengths and weaknesses of their students. This means that they too can provide support and additional focus on areas of concern and extension on those areas a student does well at. How often have you added up the number plate numbers because your child needs Maths practice or talked about the poetry in a song to help with literacy skills?

Since the Federal Government introduced MySchool website there has been an impression that NAPLAN testing is just to make the school look good. If we wanted to do that we would discourage certain students from sitting the test. We don’t do that. The test is too valuable as a diagnostic tool. We have plenty of other ways to judge the performance of our school.