Dear Craigslea Community,                                                                                        

Welcome to the 2025 school year. It was wonderful to welcome our students and families back to school on Tuesday. We have had a very positive and settled start with our students expressing excitement at being back at school amongst their friends and with their teachers.   Thank you to our wonderful staff and families for their support in ensuring a successful start to our year.

I would like to extend a very warm welcome to our new students and their families, you have joined an amazing school community and we are looking forward to getting to know you.  Thank you for choosing our school.

I also welcome our new and returning to Craigslea staff who join us this year.  It was great to build connections and ways of working between our new and not so new staff as we worked together last week.

Our teachers spent three days together engaged in learning to continue our work in realising our vision.

This year our priorities to achieve this vision are:

Exciting Changes for 2025

Assembly:  We will come together as a whole school community for assembly on a Monday morning at 9am.  This will replace the Thursday junior and senior assemblies.  We are prioritising coming together each week, establishing our school wide expectations, setting our focus for learning and celebrating our amazing students.  Student achievement will continue to be acknowledged with the LIFE awards at this assembly.  Our first assembly will be on Monday 3 February. 

Japanese: Students in year 1 to year 6 will participate in Japanese lessons.  Many students had their first experience of Japanese this week.

Arts: All students will experience a semester of the Arts (Dance and Drama) with Mrs Doyle as we expand opportunities for our students to engage in learning within the Arts curriculum.  Prep to year 3 are participating in Arts in semester 1.

STEM:  All students will experience a semester of STEM inquiry based learning with Ms Jacob as we develop our students critical and creative thinking and problem solving skills.  STEM will enrich and extend learning for all our students.

Meet the Teacher Evenings
Our teachers are looking forward to connecting with parents and carers in Week 3.  Meet the teacher evenings are important in building the partnership between home and school.  I encourage all prents to attend the evenings for their classes. The sessions will be held in classrooms.

Student Leaders’ Induction Assembly
Our student leader induction assembly will be held on Monday 10 February at 9am.  Our student leaders will be presented their badges in front of their families and their peers.  This is a very special time for our leaders and our school community.

As we come to the end of our first week, I would like to leave you with a thought from Carol Dweck:

“If we want to give children a gift, the best thing we can do is to teach children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, and keep on learning.”

Yours in Learning,

Melanie Rehm