Narrabri West Public School

Welcome back to what is set to be a very busy ten weeks, with many exciting learning opportunities. It’s been a busy start as we continue to work with all students on the areas they can improve in to achieve even better results.

We are now midway through our school year. For some students and their families, it signals the approach of their final semester of primary school. Year 6 students may be beginning to experience some amount of anxious anticipation or excitement about High School.

For other students and their families, this time marks the end of their first semester at school. Our Kindergarten students have settled in and formed many new friendships. As a school we continue to work towards achieving excellence through connected, collaborative, critical and creative learning experiences in an exciting learning environment.

One of the highlights of this term is Education Week  2023. We will celebrate with a special assembly and classroom visits on Tuesday 1st August. Full details of these are included later in this newsletter. 

At the end of Term 2 it was very pleasing to read student reports and see the positive comments about how much effort they are putting into reaching their learning goals. The information contained in these reports is a summative account of your child's progress this semester and documents each student’s progress and attitude, so that their achievements and opportunities for improvement are acknowledged, but are also used as a platform to seek further growth and development in the second half of the year through targeted feedback. It is extremely important that you take the time to go through this information with your child and constructively reflect on what the information is saying. 

These reports are not solely intended for parents. They really belong to the students. For parents in supporting their children with their learning, the report aims to provide greater understanding of what additional help you can provide. For the teachers, they encourage them to reflect on the progress of their students, the effectiveness of their own teaching practice and the next steps required to gain further growth from their students. For students, they provide a greater understanding of themselves as a learner and what they can do, and need to do, to enable themselves to ‘be the best they can be’.

Learning can be difficult. It is not always about succeeding the first time. Learning is what comes from reflecting upon our failures and focusing our efforts to do better next time, building resilience along the way so that we are inspired to keep trying.

We are now providing all Preschools in Narrabri with information packages for next year’s Kindergarten students about our school. If you know of families intending to enrol their children at Narrabri West in 2024, please encourage them to call the office, to arrange an information package.

It is also important for our forward planning that you advise the school as soon as possible if your children will not be attending Narrabri West in 2024. This will not only assist us, but more importantly will allow a smooth and structured start to the school year for those students who are attending.

Whilst 2024 is still a long way away, we have to advise the Department of Education of our anticipated student numbers for 2024 in the next few weeks! Our staffing entitlement for next year is based on these numbers; hence the importance for all schools of having accurate information as soon as possible.

This year Narrabri West Public School participated in an external validation process. Once in a four-year cycle schools undergo an external validation of the evidence of their school’s self-assessment of progress by an independent panel. The external validation panel comprises of a Principal Support Leader and a Peer Principal.

As part of this process all staff were involved in evaluating our current practice according to the NSW Schools Excellence Framework (SEF) and collecting evidence to support these judgments. The EV process validates whether the school’s evidence supports their self-assessment using each element of the School Excellence Framework.

On Thursday 22nd June, our external validation team and the external validation panel met to collaboratively discuss the evidence, judgments and next steps. Following the panel meeting, the External Validation panel report was finalised.

Narrabri West Public School staff were very proud and excited when the school’s evidence was validated and the evidence presented indicated that our school is excelling in the elements of wellbeing, assessment, effective classroom practice, learning and development and educational leadership.

The panel congratulated the school for establishing and promoting excellence in Public Education. During the collaborative discussion, they acknowledged that our submission was second to none and authentic. The outstanding work of the whole school community to ensure the best education possible for all students was affirmed by the panel who told us we should be, “loud and proud!”

The school has celebrated these achievements and the leadership team acknowledged the time, effort and dedication of all staff to ensure high quality practice across learning, teaching and leading at Narrabri West Public School.

The validation panel comments and report will be shared with the P&C at our next meeting which will be held on Monday 7th August 6.00pm in the staffroom.

On the last day of Term 2 we held our Award Assembly, awards were presented to students who had reached the next level in our Award system. We also celebrated the end of term with a BBQ lunch.

We have participated in Crazy Hair Day which raises funds for Cystic Fibrosis NSW. Students made a gold coin donation for the privilege to come to school with their craziest hair. $245.00 was raised for this worthy cause. We had some very weird looking hairdos and a lot of effort had obviously been put into joining in the spirit and meaning of the day. 

Welcome back to another busy term at Preschool.

The children are eager to be back and engaging in play based learning in our Preschool.

Children in Red Group have been learning about magnetics and all the different things that attract each other. They have been investigating using magnetic sticks on the furniture, room accessories and Preschool resources.

Children in Blue Group have been learning about different foods and cooking up a storm in the Preschool play kitchen. They have also enjoyed looking for bugs outside and attempting to identify them.

Red and Blue Group are still caring for our veggie patch, waiting and watching for our produce to grow for picking. Children have been weeding and watering the patch to ensure the best chance for our veggies. We have eaten a few of our Preschool grown carrots, they were delicious. We can’t wait for more to be ready!

We are all excited about the Athletics Carnival on Friday, where Preschool get the chance to show off their running skills.

Looking forward to a busy, fulfilled term.

Miss O’Brien & Mrs Watson

Term Three…..half way through Kindergarten!

KG and KW have been preparing for our school athletics carnival which will be held on Friday. We have been practising running and staying in the right lane, working as a team when participating in ball games and having fun with the tabloid activities.

Our library lessons this week was viewing the books at the Book Fair and making a wish list. The school leaders were helpful in guiding the children to choose books that they could read.

During Music lessons we have been practising our item for Education Week. We will be performing ‘This Old Man’ with the percussion instruments.

The children are engaging in combined (KG and KW) reading groups with parent helpers. We continue to encourage the children to read at home every day and talk about what they read.

We are looking forward to another fun term of learning.

Angela Gett and Rebecca Wade

At the end of last term a group of boys and girls from Narrabri West travelled to Tamworth to take part in the Inter-Zone PSSA Trials for softball. Everyone tried their best and showed great sportsmanship. Congratulations to Fletcher Whan, Tyran Lawler and Lachlan Baker, who were selected in the North West team, to take part in the NSWPSSA Boys Softball Championships in later in the term.

Well done boys.