Hi all, and welcome back to Term 3. I hope you all had a great holiday period and were able to share some rewarding times with your children during the break. We ended up going to Melrose for the third year in a row. We love being away from the day-to-day distractions and the kids love making new friends and riding their bikes around each day. I was even able to head up the hill a couple of times on my own mountain bike which was nice.

On Monday of week 1 our staff continued their conversations with Matt, our Apple Specialist, on how to best use our Apple products. Our staff have implemented many new initiatives to enhance their own development and the learning in their classrooms over the past two years. Matt has been so impressed he has developed a Professional Development opportunity for fellow educators from around Australia to come and visit our school to see what we’ve been doing. This event is called ‘Apple Bite’ and will occur on Tuesday the 10^th of September. On this day we will have visitors come into classrooms and view some of the exciting things that Matt has been supporting our staff with. These fellow educators may then take some of our ideas back to their schools and implement these strategies with their students.

Over the past 2 weeks we had visits from Jason and Pete who work with schools to develop and design new nature play spaces. As you may have heard we are in the process of updating the playground in the North East corner of our school. This process started with a meeting with staff on Tuesday of Week 1 and discussions with students and parents on Wednesday of Week 2. These meetings were highly successful and highlighted the importance of play and how beneficial this is to children. We are very much looking forward to seeing what they come up with after the consultations. We are hoping to have some kind of concept drawings before the end of the term. We will keep you posted.