2024 Term Dates

2024 Upcoming Events & Public Holidays

What a busy time we have had at East Devonport over the last several weeks. Our teachers are busy at the moment finalising reports to go home this week. Reports are such an important way for you to support your child’s learning and a great opportunity to check in with your child’s teacher. Our reports are supported by our parent teacher interviews that again this year will be held over 4 nights across 2 different weeks to help parents find a time to meet with classroom teachers. We strongly encourage to make the most of this opportunity. You can book on the following link or contact the office. https://eastdevonportps.schoolzineplus.com/view-session/13

On Friday last week our staff were involved in moderation with the other schools in the Devonport cluster, it was a great chance to share learning from our school with others and make sure we are supporting our students in the best way possible. In the afternoon we were lucky to have the Australian Childhood Foundation spend time with us exploring the concept of making “SPACE” for learning. This was an incredibly valuable session on the power of creating safe learning spaces for students and how to build the opportunity for all students to thrive at school.

Our assembly program moved to mornings this term and we believe it was a great success with fantastic audience behaviour and a truly great way to celebrate our students awesome achievements. As part of our assembly Ken from Brixhibition came and presented about this year’s competition. Any students still looking to enter this year’s Brixibition can get an entry form from Mr Jago.

Over the next few weeks, we will be making Seesaw available to all classes in the school as an aid to support communication between, teachers, the school and parents. Seesaw is an APP that is easy to use, and we believe will be beneficial in supporting everybody in our community. Please look out for more information in the coming weeks.

Our school continues to grow. Already this year we have had over 15 learners join us here at EDPS, this creates some great opportunities for our students but also some challenges. We continue to look at creative ways to support all students to be challenged and grow to the their full potential.

It is wonderful to see our signs around the school updated to reflect our values, Connectedion added to our established values of Growth, Courage, Respect.

• Connection – building positive relationships and a sense of belonging.
• Courage – accepting challenges and embracing opportunities.
• Growth – aspiring to learn, and improving, even when it’s hard.
• Respect – caring for ourselves, each other, and our environment.
• Responsibility – stepping up and doing what’s right.

Next week we have school photo day on Thursday 20 June. This year we have MSP taking our photos. Family photos will start at 8.30am in the GP Hall. We will update families via our school Facebook page if this changes. Please ensure students are in full school uniform for this day.

To aid our Year 6 Big Day Out fundraising our students will be selling warm milo at lunch time for $2.00 on Friday 22 June, Friday 29 June and Friday 5 July.

In the last week of term we are holding our end of term bbq hosted by Rotary Club of Devonport South. There will be no hot lunch option on this day.

It has been an incredibly busy time focussing on the new expansion of the garden this past summer and autumn. We are thrilled to have this amazing space at our school. The outdoor classroom is the highlight for me. To have a space to gather the students to experience outdoor learning is fantastic. Most of the woodchipped areas around the classroom and calming corner are about to be planted. We have been working hard to design the space and source the plants. We are having an upcoming planting day soon. The media team from the Materials Institute/24 carrot garden program are coming up to film and photograph some of the students planting out the space. The highlight for everyone else is, of course, the pizza oven! Getting the pizza oven ready for use took quite a bit of time but I am happy to report that it has cooked its first pizzas on a training day on the 28th of May. I am looking forward to using it with the students in the coming weeks.

Other recent garden projects have included: 

• Redesigning and installing a new irrigation system in all the older existing raised beds.
• Setting up new beds and irrigation for the greenhouse
• Building new beds where the old gravel circle/gathering space used to be

All of this while also hosting garden club at recess time and classes in the afternoon. We also squeezed in a CFLC playgroup session and a visit from our beloved chicken friends. The students have been an amazing help in maintaining the garden and growing food for the lunch program and helping with many aspects of new development. It’s a remarkable team effort! We still have a few more projects to complete in this phase of the build, but we are getting close to wrapping it up. If you haven’t already, please come over and have a look at what we have been up to in the garden.