DUFFY PRIMARY SCHOOL

NEWSLETTER 3 - WEEK 6 TERM 1

UP & COMING EVENTS

NAPLAN YRS 3-5 (March 12-17th)
Pump Track Working Bee (March 18th, 3:15-4pm)
Swimming Carnival Awards Presentation (March 19th, 2:30-3pm)
Year 6 Camp (March 26-28th)
Year 4 Excursion to National Museum of Australia (April 2nd)
Year 4 Assembly (April 9th, 2:30-3pm)
School Cross Country (April 10th)

NOTES TO BE RETURNED

Medical Forms - we are still missing quite a few!
Seesaw and ICT Permissions
Kindergarten Health Check

Did you know?

You can find notes on our website.

Click here for school notes!

EXEC TEAM'S MESSAGE

Duffy School Community,

Time really does fly when you're having fun! We hope everyone enjoyed the long weekend and had the chance to participate in some of the wonderful community events Canberra has to offer at this time of year.

There’s been so much happening at Duffy Primary School over the past couple of weeks, including our Annual Swimming Carnival and Junior Water Fun Day, the Year 3 Harmony Day Assembly, the Chief Minister's Reading Challenge, Clean Up Australia Day, the Parent Engagement Session on Literacy (this afternoon), and NAPLAN. As we move toward the latter part of the term, we look forward to Year 6 Camp, the Year 4 Assembly, Pump Track Working Bee and Walk and Ride to School Day, to name just a few.

NAPLAN

We are very proud of our year 3 and 5 students who engaged in NAPLAN testing currently NAPLAN is a snapshot of students’ progress in literacy and numeracy and helps governments, education authorities and schools to see whether young Australians are reaching important literacy and numeracy goals.

P&C

Congratulations to Carol and our new members of the school P&C. Please see more details below. We look forward to continuing to work together to strengthen our school community and look forward to implementing some great new initiatives in 2025.

With every best wish for a wonderful week ahead with your beautiful families.

Katie, Arilia, Sarah, Fiona and Julian

Swimming Carnival and Water Fun Day

On 4 March, our school held its much-anticipated swimming carnival, and what a fantastic day it was! The students dived into the fun, competing in exciting swimming races and taking part in a range of novelty events that had everyone cheering.

It was wonderful to see so much enthusiasm, teamwork, and school spirit on display. Whether racing through the water or enjoying the lively atmosphere, every student contributed to making the day a great success.

A huge thank you to our amazing parent and community volunteers, including students from Mt Stromlo High School who helped make the event run smoothly. Your support and dedication are truly appreciated!

Results from the competitive races can be found here. Presentations of ribbons for 1st, 2nd and 3rd places, as well as age champions will be held on Wednesday 19 March, from 2:30pm in the school hall.

We look forward to making more wonderful memories at next year's carnival!

Clean Up Australia Day 2025

A big thank you to all those who participated in Clean up Australia Day at Duffy last Monday. This is an annual Australia wide event that promotes active participation in ‘doing the right thing’ and putting it in the ‘right bin’. At Duffy, we are actively learning to be more sustainable by making greener choices, such as reduce, reuse and recycle.
We also collect all containers that have the 10c label. If you would like to help us out by collecting these, please ask me for a Container Deposit Scheme collection bag. Our year 4 cohort collected the most amount of rubbish on the day and received not only a certificate, a plant for their classroom as well as a special surprise to celebrate their efforts.

Thank you for your ongoing support.

A MESSAGE FROM DUFFY P&C

Dear DPS families,

The 2025 P&C committee was formed at our recent AGM and we are pleased to report it was a great turn out. We hope to gather more new faces at the next meeting as we start to plan our year events. We have made some exciting advancements in how we plan to communicate with families and are looking forward to connecting families with many events over the year. Cup-A-Yum’s, Colour run, Disco’s and more are on the cards so keep a look out for updates as the year moves along.

2025 P&C Committee

President: Carol Dziouba

Vice-President: Claire Dyer

Secretary: Anna Greenwood

Treasurer: Paul Gardener

Grants: Fran Hadlington

Grade Representatives

Preschool Possums class: TBA

Preschool Wombats class: TBA

Kindergarten: Jocelyn Williams-Flanagan

Year 1: Shannon Frazer

Year 2: Jess Yesberg

Year 3: Lauren Bartsch

Year 4: Cassandra James

Year 5: Michelle McPartland

Year 6: Claire Dyer

If you are interested in learning more about or becoming a preschool representative, please get in touch with the P&C through the DPS WhatsApp community chat.

Communication

We have created a DPS WhatsApp community with year group specific chats within the community. Your children should receive a flyer to take home with a QR code to join your year group chat. We created this space for families to link in with and support each other. The P&C will do our best to share information and updates on upcoming events through the community. Families will be able to share ideas and concerns easily with year group representatives to be passed onto the committee at the next meeting or sooner as needed.

WhatsApp links:

Uniform shop:

Our amazing volunteers Jocelyn, Lucy and Rachel can be found at the uniform shop every Friday morning at 8:30am to 9:00am.

Cup-A-Yum:

We are planning our first Cup of Yum event for the 2025 in Week 9 on Tuesday 1st April 2025. Keep an eye out for more information coming soon!

Election polls BBQ and bake sale:

Once the date of the upcoming election is announced, we will invite you to volunteer to bake delicious treats to sell and/or give some time to help with the BBQ or bake sale on the day.

Meetings:

P&C meetings are held in Weeks 3 and 8 each term on Tuesdays at 7pm. We love to see more and more new faces. If you want to keep up to date as to what is going on behind the scenes in the school, please come along.

Next meeting:

Week 8: Tuesday 25 March at 7pm, Duffy Primary School staff room

We look forward to growing as a school community to provide our kids the best primary school experience possible.

Thank you on behalf of the P&C.

Carol Dziouba

P&C President

HARMONY DAY

On Friday 21st March, Duffy School will come together to celebrate Harmony Day. Students are encouraged to wear orange or dress in their cultural dress. This day was created in 1999 to celebrate unity and diversity. Harmony Day was originally an Australian celebration but is now marked worldwide by conscientious citizens.

SPOTLIGHT ON LEARNING - YEAR 1

Year One has had a great start to the year! We've been diving into wellbeing, working hard as writers, exploring words, and having fun with numeracy. We’re excited to share what we've been up to and hope you enjoy this spotlight on our learning!

We commenced the year by co-constucting an Acknowledgement of Country. We are very proud to say this each week in Year 1.

Word Inquiry

In the first five weeks of Term 1, students have been getting familiar with the tools and strategies they’ll use for phonology and morphology. The first two weeks focused on introducing these tools, along with reviewing their first set of high-frequency words. In Weeks 3 and 4, they started digging into key phonology and morphology concepts that will be built on throughout the year. By Week 5, they were ready to apply what they’d learned by exploring the pack word family, looking at its sounds, spelling patterns, and structure. These first few weeks have been all about setting a strong foundation for the rest of the term.

Writing

In our writing unit, we’ve been focusing on what it means to be a writer and building strong writing routines. We've spent time thinking about the people, places, and objects that matter most to us, using them as inspiration for our writing. Through this, we’ve been learning how to generate ideas, find our writing voices, and develop habits that will help us grow as writers throughout the year. It’s been all about building confidence, getting words on the page, and discovering that we all have stories worth telling.

Numeracy

During numeracy lessons we have been focusing on revising and reviewing what we know about numbers. This has involved lots of partner and group activities using materials such as tens frames, base 10 blocks, dice, number lines and whiteboards. Reviewing previously learnt number topics helps to consolidate student understanding and transfer knowledge into long term memory. We have also started to include larger numbers in our learning to move towards the Year One standard of recognising, representing and ordering numbers to 120. We have been looking at partitioning two digit numerals using hands on materials.

Unit of Inquiry

Throughout the term, Year 1 have been exploring our big question: ‘How do our actions affect our wellbeing?’ and what it means to be healthy. We discovered that healthy is not just about staying fit and eating heathy foods, but also includes taking care of our mental and social health, too. We had so much fun, learning about nutrition and hydration, exercise and sleep and hygiene, Next week, Year 1 will host some special guests, (a nutritionist, a youth counsellor, a dental hygienist and an elite athlete) to speak about their chosen expertise.

SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT

Our School Improvement Plan (2021-2025) remained focused on two main priorities:

Six weeks into the school year we can see improvements in:

Students seeing themselves as writers
Students increased stamina in writing
Student's becoming increasingly independent in their writing
Teachers engaging in professional learning and working with our Writing Consultant to collaboratively plan, model lessons or team teach
Quality literature, writing stations and students using their writer's notebooks on a daily basis

IMP Extension Ensembles

Duffy Primary congratulates the following students for their acceptance into the IMP Extension Ensemble. Undertaking the audition process and successfully gaining a position in an IMP Extension Ensemble is a significant achievement.

A MESSAGE FROM THE BUSINESS MANAGER

We are so happy to share that Alice's surgery has gone well and she is currently on leave as she recuperates. We wish Alice a speedy recovery.

Linda Economopoulos will be our acting Business Manager during Alice's absence.

Linda Economopoulos – Acting BM

E: linda.economopoulos@ed.act.edu.au
Phone: 61 422 528

Parent Portal is now available as a mobile app!

You can now access Parent Portal with the Sentral for Parents app. Download Sentral for Parents for free through the App Store or Google Play Store

Parent Portal is a secure online platform used to share student information between you and your child’s teachers.

If you’ve already registered, you can download the Sentral for Parents app to receive notifications when new information is available.

If you haven’t registered for Parent Portal yet, use this Parent Portal access link to log into or create your ACT Digital Account. To access Parent Portal, you will need your access key, you should have received this by email when we launched

If you can’t find the email with the access key, please contact the front office team for help.

Some reminders about what you can do with Parent Portal:

notify us if your child is sick or explain an absence
book parent-teacher interviews
receive academic reports
receive our school newsletter
receive messages from your child’s teachers
make payments
access the school calendar and your child’s student timetable.

Head to our website for all the details: Parent Portal - Duffy Primary School (duffyps.act.edu.au)

FRONT OFFICE REQUIREMENTS

Picking up Students During the Day

Parents collecting children for appointments or dropping children into school later than 9:00am are required to inform the Front Office. This Directorate requirement is a safety procedure in the school. Students who are late need to obtain a late slip from the Front Office

Medications

We are still missing a number of medical forms. Without updated medical forms we are unable to provide medication - if required - to students. Please provide medical forms ASAP so we can ensure students health is kept up to date.

SCHOOL SAFETY

We would like to remind parents about School drop-off/pick-up zones and how to ensure students stay safe on their way to and from school.

Find the Duffy Primary Parents and Citizens Association on

Facebook!

@duffypandc

Don’t forget to connect with your Year level parent community on Facebook and Whatsapp – this is a great way to stay connected, get year/school specific information and even organise gatherings.

Just search “DPS Year” on google and the groups will pop up, or head to the Duffy Primary Parents and Citizens Facebook page for more info.

School Uniform

The School Board endorses the wearing of uniform as it is part of the school ethos of helping to create a sense of belonging and pride in the school and so engender a positive school spirit. Students at Duffy Primary School are encouraged to wear their school uniform or school colours each day.

Students must be in uniform when attending excursions or outside events; this is to ensure their safety. When parents complete permission notes for excursions or school events, they are acknowledging this requirement.

CHIEF MINISTERS READING CHALLENGE

You may have noticed an Individual Student Reading Record coming home this week.

That’s because the Chief Minister’s Reading Challenge began on Monday 10th February.

The challenge is for students to read 30 books between the 10th February and the 12th September 2025.

Books recorded as read can include:

-Novels and Novellas

-Non-Fiction Texts

-Graphic Novels

-Books of Poetry

-Audiobooks

-Picture Books

-Books read to students by someone else

-Books read aloud to a younger sibling/cousin

The Chief Minister’s Reading Challenge is turning 21 in 2025! For 21 years, the challenge has been encouraging students all over the ACT to spend more time reading.

Last year, Duffy Primary School Students read over 11,000 Books, beating our 2023 total by over 1000 books! At Duffy Primary, teachers will be recording all books read to students in class, and students are encouraged to record their reading at home on the Individual Student Reading Record, to be returned to school by the 12th September.

SCHOOL LEADERS

Prime Minister

Reed C

Deputy Prime Minister

Jessie T

Opposition Leader

Olivia M

Deputy Opposition Leader

Matthias C

Speaker

Faith B

MESSAGE FROM ACT DIRECTORATE

Join the Online Safety Education team for practical advice on keeping children and young people safe online at our live webinars in term 1. With new insights into how artificial intelligence is changing the online safety landscape, these sessions are not to be missed!

Webinar Schedule:

Tuesday, 18 March: 6:00 pm - 6:45 pm
Thursday, 20 March: 12:15 pm - 1:00 pm

In addition to the live webinars, you can access recorded sessions from previous webinars and a series of short videos on emerging online safety issues and resources to support your family year-round.

Check out the recorded videos and online resources: https://bit.ly/ACTEDU_Online_Safety_Videos

COMMUNITY ANNOUNCEMENTS

Perks

FREE Parent workshops term 1 and 2: Southside Initiative is partnering again with local schools and community services to offer Parent workshops in 2025. Term 1 and 2 workshops include: Early Childhood Development, Adolescents, Anxiety and School, Managing Conflict in the Home and much more. For more information and to register, visit PERKS Parent Workshops - Healthy Schools Network ACT.

2025 School Year Equity Fund Now Open

To ease the pressure of back-to-school costs, eligible Canberra families can apply now for 2025 Future of Education Equity Fund payments.

The Equity Fund supports eligible low-income families and independent students from preschool through year 12 with a one-off, annual payment to help cover the costs associated with schooling such as uniforms, sport equipment and activities, tuition and music lessons.

The 2025 school year payments for eligible families are $400 (preschool), $500 (primary school), and $750 (high school and college).

Payments of completed applications will begin earlier than previous years, with the first payments to families expected from 6 January 2025.

Families will have until the end of November 2025 to apply for the Fund. Check your eligibility and find more information about supporting documents on the Equity Fund webpage.

Parentline ACT

Parentline ACT offers free and confidential telephone counselling for parents and carers in the Australian Capital Territory. This service provides guidance and assistance on various parenting issues, ensuring you have the support you need with no appointment necessary. Parentline ACT is open on Monday to Friday from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm. For support, call (02) 6287 3833.

Learning For Life

The flyer below shares information about an opportunity that has been made available to families at our school called the Learning for Life Scholarship Program. It’s run by the Smith Family organisation. They provide financial support to families who are eligible to help with costs related to education, such as book packs, uniforms and excursions. They also provide access to education programs that can further support your child.

To be eligible, you must;