Dear Parents and carers,

As we get close to the half way mark for the term it seems the year is just racing by. This makes it all the more important to get what we do with your children absolutely right. To this end, for the last couple of weeks we have been working hard to establish Personalised Learning Plans (PLP’s) for all of our Indigenous students. This program is proving very popular and quite successful with the group we trialled it with last year. As the year goes on we will be establishing these PLP’s with other students with a long‐term aim of having the majority of our students operating under this format. It is very time consuming but it allows for a slightly more individual approach to students, so it is worthwhile. Once they are established it becomes much less time‐consuming to maintain the learning plans.

Also along this line; we sent our Stage 1 teachers to some Best Start training last week. This will also help us understand the progress our students make more deeply and give us clearer directions to extend them. You can certainly rest easy that we are doing the best we can to improve your children’s skills.

Our band program is up and running and it certainly is nice to hear those musical notes wafting through the school again. Mr Mc, Mrs Marshall and Andrew certainly do a great job. All the kids get the opportunity to attend our first disco for the year tonight and band parents are also able to attend the band info night from 6 to 7pm.

Next week we send our best swimmers off to the Far North Coast Zone carnival, our top cricketers will take on Kingscliff in the first round of the state knockout .

Throw‐in our school photo day next Wednesday and you can see what I mean by life being pretty busy.

Just a reminder, that next Thursday March 1st, we have our P & C Association Annual General Meeting at 7pm in the staffroom. This is where all executive positions become vacant and elections take place for the new executive to take on their roles and guide our P&C forward for 2012. A great chance to get involved in the running of your school. Please collect a nomination form from the office to sign and forward to the P&C Secretary. Hope to see many of you there.

Have a great week.

Mick Channells