St Leonards Primary School

Well here we are for what is the penultimate newsletter for the year. What a year it has been.  We remain proud of our students and the greater school community and their efforts during 2021. 

We have several new staff appointments for 2022 as well as some staff who are moving on. 

We welcome Naomi Martin to our leadership team. Naomi has had experience as Assistant Principal and Deputy Principal at Forbes Primary School. Most recently she has worked with the Department for Education in their Curriculum writing team.  We had previously notified our community about the appointment of Cory Mudie as our other Assistant Principal.

2022 Leadership Team:

 ·        Dave Henty-Smith Principal 

·        Naomi Martin - Assistant Principal Years 3-6 - Whole School Wellbeing and Student Engagement. 

·        Corey Mudie - Assistant Principal Years R-2 - Whole School Literacy.  

Welcomes and Farewells

We welcome Fiona Takos as a Year 2 teacher and Nikol Vidov as a Year 1 teacher. 

We farewell several staff who are leaving us for a variety of reasons, although we hope to have some back in some capacity in the future. 

Jane Brooks, Kathy Baker, Mandy Drinkwater, Kathleen Rollings, Bonnie Tohl, Melissa Barnes, Sharon Hill, Julieanne Whitehead, Jim Goudie, Liv Bradley, Sarah Hartley, Kristen Harris and Jenny Good have all been wonderful contributors to our school and will be deeply missed. 

Class structures and Teachers 2022

This year our 6 and 7 students are heading off to high school. This has been planned by the department for several years and will see us reduce our current numbers of 425 students to 370 students.  In essence, we have dropped two classes from 2021.

Classes and staffing are subject to change as HR are finalising appointments, however, as of Friday 26 November the following is the current structures and teachers:

All of our teachers work in professional teams implementing consistent learning across the year levels.  

 Dave Henty-Smith - Principal

Kathy Baker - Deputy Principal

Heidi Bevan - Wellbeing Leader

Hats on for Term 4

No Hat, Shade Play

Week 8

• Governing Council Meeting 6:30pm - Tuesday 30 November
• Governing Council Dinner, 7:00pm - Tuesday 30 November
• Year 6/7 Chinatown Excursion - Wednesday 1 December
• Celebration Night, 6:00pm - Friday 3 December 

Week 9

• Year 6/7 Graduation - Monday 6 December
• End of year Assembly - Friday 10 December
• Early Dismissal, 2:05pm - Friday 10 December

Dear Families,

It is almost unbelievable that we are at the end of Term 4. A gentle reminder that our Vacation Care bookings are filling up quickly, so if you are needing to book, please ensure to book now to avoid disappointment. The five-weeks’ programme was carefully planned to include wide range of activities to cater for the interest of each child and have had plenty of positive feedback on the variety of activities we have provided, we are very excited.  

Please be aware that our opening hours are as follows:

BEFORE SCHOOL CARE: 7:00AM-8:30AM

AFTER SCHOOL CARE: 3:05PM-6:00PM

VACATION CARE & PUPIL FREE DAYS: 7:30AM-6:00PM

We open from Monday to Friday and closed on Public Holidays and Christmas Break.

OSHC will be closed from the 24th of December 2021 and will re-open on the 10th of January 2022. We thank you for all your ongoing support. 

OSHC Staff

Howdy everyone,

It has been a long time since my last entry in the newsletter. So, I thought I would update you all about some of programs and items I have been working on in the last term.

The Tournament of the Minds (TOMS) club is continuing to pick up steam at St Leonards in preparation for next year. Where we will hopefully be entering a team of 7 into the state-wide competition against other primary and high schools. The competition involves a range of critical thinking, outside of the box problem solving, teamwork, drama skills, and creative arts. I am currently on the lookout for any students in years 4-6 who may be interested in these areas or already excel in them. If you think your child may be interested in doing this next year, we currently have a meeting every Friday in the STEM room at lunch. Students have already completed a range of problems such as detective mysteries, code cracking challenges, creative engineering challenges and mind-bending riddles.

Scavenger Hunts is also a Thursday mini-club/activity that I have started up this term. Every Thursday at lunch there at 12-15 photos of various items, characters or sometimes members of staff hidden around the school for student to find. Along with these photos there is a letter on each of the photos so that students can unscramble a word after finding all of the letters. It has been quite magical and very pleasing to see hundreds of St Leonards students young and old, working together to search for the hidden pictures.

Remembrance Day On the 11th November I was lucky enough to lead a small service for the students at St Leonards who didn’t attend the service down in Glenelg. As someone who has had previous ancestors in the last few major wars this was quite special to me and I was impressed with the level of respect that students also paid to the service. We were also very blessed to receive some authentic Flanders poppies from the Botanic Gardens in the city to accompany the service, along with some magnificent paper poppies put together by the students. We have also received some seeds from Flanders that we can plant in our own garden next year which will be very special for the school.

That’s all for me this week. If you see me in the schoolyard and want to chat, sing out because I would also love to get to know some of you as well

Cheers everyone and hope you get to enjoy the great sunshine (and wet weather if you like that)

Sam Colley – St Leonards PCW