Dear Families,

I hope you all have a wonderful holiday break!

As Luke mentioned in the previous edition of The Bell, I am very fortunate and grateful to have been invited to travel overseas with colleagues from The Learning Future, Louka Parry and Dr Anne Knock, for a study tour throughout Europe during the school holiday break.

We have a full and exciting agenda, visiting world-leading schools, universities, libraries, museums and learning hubs, collaborating with school leaders from South Australia and New South Wales. I look forward to bringing my learnings back to St Andrew’s School and sharing with staff and families as we strive to provide the most outstanding learning environment for your wonderful children.

On the first two days of Term 4 our staff will be engaging in further professional learning with Jocelyn Seamer, our resident expert in the Science of Reading and evidence-informed teaching of Literacy.

On Monday, our teaching staff will be deep diving into the complexities of our English language and learn about the origins and make-up of the words in our language. This is a hands-on and interactive workshop, followed by our Junior Primary team reflecting on the implementation of our whole-school approach to Structured Literacy in Term 3.

On Tuesday, our Middle and Upper Primary teachers will have Jocelyn model evidence-informed lessons on language features, to develop student’s spelling, vocabulary and comprehension. If you have any questions for Jocelyn, please send them to dhodges@standrews.sa.edu.au and we will prepare a Q&A of responses for families.

On Friday of Week 3, November 3^rd at 8:45am in the School Hall, Mary-Anne and I will be running our 3^rd Parent Learning Workshop, this time focusing on Literacy and sharing our learning this year and the research into our instructional practice. We would love to see you there, please register on the link below：

https://events.humanitix.com/parent-learning-workshop-term-4-2023

Thank you to all families for your wonderful support of the many and varied events we have enjoyed this term.

Personally, I have thoroughly enjoyed experiencing：

• Year 6 camp to Canberra
• Year 3 camp to Nunyara
• SAPSASA Athletics
• Bands Cabaret Night
• Year 6 Bike Hike
• Quiz Night
• Grandparents and Special Friends Day
• Heroes Breakfast
• And Founders Day Assembly.

It’s been huge, but awesome!

David Hodges

Deputy Principal