Home-School Partnerships

At Morang South, we believe children learn best when we work together to develop strong, productive home-school partnerships. Parent engagement with the school, teachers and staff enhances their child’s learning and helps to ensure that the child feels connected, motivated and gets actively involved in their learning. Strong partnerships between home and school supports our children to feel safe and happy. At Morang South, we encourage parents to get involved and take an active role in building strong connections between home and school, reinforcing the value of education’s importance with your child.

At Morang South, home-school partnerships are promoted and developed in many ways. These include regular communication between school and home via:

  • A communication ap
  • Webpage for parents and community members
  • Fortnightly School Newsletters (via email)
  • Year Level termly newsletters
  • Assemblies held in the gymnasium which parents are welcome to attend
  • Information sessions held about transitions into school, curriculum and classroom practice, and helping your child at home
  • Expos, showcases and special days where parents are invited to attend and celebrate the learning with their child

Reporting

Formal meetings (3 way conferences) between teachers, students and parents are held twice a year in Term 1 and Term 3. These meetings present the opportunity for teachers to support parents in understanding their child’s progress, successes and future areas for improvement. These scheduled meetings are a highly valuable opportunity to understand where your child is at and what they still need to work upon, however parents are welcome to request a time with teachers to discuss concerns if they arise at any stage throughout the school year.

Formal written reports are provided to parents twice a year, in Term 2 and Term 4. These identify to parent how your child has progressed in key areas of study and whether they are achieving the expected level. Our reports have been designed with feedback from our community to ensure they are easy to understand and provide the information that parents/carers are seeking.

Morang South Primary School utilises an online portal (Seesaw) to support parents/carers with insight into their child’s progression throughout the year. We encourage parents/carers to view these ‘snapshots’ of learning in conjunction with their child’s Formal Report. These ‘snapshots’ provide parents with samples of students work with feedback on learning from their teachers. This online portal also provide families with a clearer understanding of the content and topics that students have been covering throughout the school year.

Home Learning

Home learning supports children to develop self management skills. Students build organisational and time-management skills, self-discipline, skills in using out-of-school resources and the ability to take personal responsibility. Home learning is an opportunity for parents and children to work together to foster lifelong learning habits and to reinforce classroom learning.

Parents, in partnership with the school, can encourage their children to establish good Home Learning patterns from early primary school. With this in mind, it is a good idea to provide a quiet space for children to complete their home learning tasks, with limited distractions.

Reading is the highest priority activity for Home Learning at Morang South Primary School. Home Reading provides children with the opportunity to choose a home reading book to read at home with the family. It develops a love of literature, stimulates an interest in understanding their world and helps children see reading as a leisure time activity. Read with and to your child

and follow up with a discussion. Spend some time with your child to browse through the text, discuss the pictures, difficult words and characters, to give your child an idea of what it is about before you share the reading experience. Making this a much loved time spent with your child not only builds their literacy skills but also connected relationships. An exciting time for everyone!

General Home Learning will depends on the age of the child, as well as the learning needs of each individual child, class and year level. Teacher teams determine how Home Learning material will relate to learning in class, so that parents can support making definite links with their child’s learning journey throughout a school year. There may be a variety of different learning opportunities when it comes to Home Learning, ranging from reading with your child for enjoyment in the younger years, completing revision tasks on digital programs, to completing research and inquiry projects in the senior years. Each year level outlines home learning expectations at the start of the year and we regularly monitor our approach based on feedback from teachers, students and our parents and carers.

Support Services

At Morang South Primary School, we recognise that in order for students to be happy, healthy and to achieve their potential that various needs must be met. Student support services assist children facing a range of barriers to wellbeing and learning to achieve their educational and developmental potential by providing a range of strategies and specialised support at the individual, group, school and area levels.

Morang South Primary School partners with a number of external agencies in order to provide for the needs of our students. These include:

  • on-site psychology and counselling services
  • on-site speech pathologist services
  • Department of Education and Training Student Support Services
  • visiting teachers specialising in support of students with specific needs (e.g. Visual or Hearing Impairment)
  • liaising with alternate or additional school-settings

We encourage parents to share information related to their child’s wellbeing or learning.  It is supportive for schools to know how families are meeting the needs to their child through the personal engagement of support services or professionals, and we view positive, professional partnerships as key to supporting many of our students.