By Renee Wood
Starting school for the first time can be a nervous experience for students and parents but Healesville Primary School found this year’s preps were eager to enter the class room.
Prinicipal Tracey Robertson-Smith said there was a lot of excitement but no tears for the young students starting on Thursday 3 January.
“I just couldn’t get over the fact that they were just sitting so beautifully listening and focused – it was just gorgeous,” she said.
Some 40 preps have enrolled for the year, and surprisingly not one but three sets of twins are starting their schooling together.
When speaking with Bryce and Logan and Piper and Tia, they all said they were excited to start school and they liked playing on the playground on their first day.
Prep Teacher Sharyn Borg said transition sessions that were held for the preps has helped to introduce them to school life.
“We had a transition day where we put them into their two grades and they found out who they were with, so we had some time together in the lead up and I think that made a world of difference,” Ms Borg said.
The preps, grade ones and twos are also in a new area of the school to allow for a collaborative teaching space between the grades if students need more support in some areas after losing in class learning over the past two years.
“We thought having this big communal space, we can break off with groups of kids – it might be some preps, ones and twos doing something that they’re all lacking or some of the grade ones coming back to do some of the prep work that they might not have gotten.”
Purifiers from the State Government have also been installed and teachers and parents have been provided with rapid antigen tests to conduct at home screening for Covid-19.
“I think they [parents] see the benefit of doing the RAT tests and then keeping their kids at home.
It’s hoped the rapid testing will provide stability and see remote learning kept in the past.
“We don’t know what it’s going to be like, there might be kids who have weeks off here and there and then just catching up on things but it will be so much better than having the whole grade taken out.”
