Introducing Chloe Fahey

Hello! My name is Chloe and I am so excited to be joining Boneo Primary School!

I have grown up on the Mornington Peninsula and am very grateful to call this beautiful place home.

I have worked with children for five years in both kinder and primary school settings and absolutely love it. I am extremely passionate about children’s mental health and wellbeing and ensuring that each child reaches their fullest potential.

In my spare time, I love to read and spend time with friends and family. I am lucky enough to have a big back yard at home and have lots of pets like goats, geese, ducks, and chickens which I absolutely love. I also love to travel and recently spent a month backpacking around Europe, exploring places like London, Italy, Greece, and France.

I look forward to joining the Boneo community! 

Introducing Zoe Newman

My name is Zoe, and I am excited to become a part of the Boneo Primary School community. I am currently pursuing my Bachelor’s degree in Early Childhood and Primary Education, which I believe will equip me with the necessary knowledge and skills to help students succeed.

I have lived on the Mornington Peninsula my whole life and live in Mount Martha. I love netball and have been playing netball with Crib Point Football and Netball Club for four years. I enjoy the sense of community it brings, and my warm and bubbly personality adds to the team dynamic.

Throughout the past five years, I have worked in various positions in the education industry. This has allowed me to gain a broad understanding of the different challenges that children may face and has made me more knowledge of their individual needs.

Working with children has always been my passion, and I am thrilled to have been given the opportunity to help them achieve their full potential. In particular, I am excited about the prospect of working in a primary school setting, where I can help students develop a strong foundation for their future education.

Introducing Vanessa Farrell

I am thrilled to be joining Boneo Primary School’s Education Support team.

Originally from WA, I worked for our family concrete business before moving to the Mornington Peninsula six years ago. While my children were attending school, I found myself to be volunteering for everything from canteen to book club, banking, and school excursions because I loved helping and giving back to the school community. I did make the change late in life to start a career in Education Support, but it has been so rewarding and the connections I have made will stay with me.

In addition to this love of learning, I do love old cars, (I have a ’64 VW Beetle), Keith Urban and coffee. I am looking forward to meeting the students, families and teachers that make up this wonderful school.

An Instructional What?

As teachers, we are constantly striving to ensure that our students achieve their best both in and out of the classroom. As professionals, we are endlessly reflecting on our own practice and tweaking things as we go, making sure that the learning is really working for every student. This year, we are continuing our efforts by embedding a school wide instructional model for every teacher, and every classroom.

Our Boneo Primary School instructional model was developed collectively at the end of 2023, and our first two curriculum days involved unpacking what it will look like for every year level across the school – consistency and collaboration will be our driving forces this year. Teachers used different ways to learn and practice the model and in our first two weeks of school, our students have done the same. Read how our Year 3 students understand our instructional model below.

‘The warm up is like the sun, it gives you energy’.

The warm up part of our instructional model is short and sharp. It’s where students make connections to prior learning or a quick revision of a skill. It’s usually only around 5 minutes long.

‘The launch is launching a rocket and a cannonball’ ‘3,2,1 blast off’

The launch is where a teacher is explicitly teaching a skill or new concept. During this part, we are modelling something; sometimes we use a great book, sometimes we use student work samples, and sometimes we work with students to develop a learning chart that is used to support the students’ time in the classroom. We change this up depending on what the skill or concept is, what our students need and how we know our students learn best.

Now our independent work is truly a little bit like magic. This is where we empower our students to make learning choices; to use tools that help them achieve their own personal goals. During this time, the teacher works with students in a few different ways. Here’s what our students said about the Independent Work time:

Conferences: ‘It’s like a meeting. It’s a teacher and student working together. ‘Like a handshake’

Assessments: ‘doing it by yourself’ ‘students not looking at other student’s answers’

Focus Groups: ‘teamwork’ ‘focus on the teacher’ ‘working together quietly’

Workshop: ‘kids talking in your groups’ ‘going to a workshop’

Next comes the feedback. From student to student, student to teacher or teacher to student – feedback is a critical part of the process to ensure students know what they did well, what comes next and how to improve.

‘Say to someone you did great or you can improve’ ‘feed forward’ ‘say nice stuff to people when they are hard on themselves’.

The final piece of the puzzle is reflection. Our students know reflection as:

‘Go back to your work and see what you can improve’ ‘Can I do this better?’ ‘If you did it wrong, go back and try to improve it’

Researchers have found that consistency of instructional quality is what distinguishes higher- from lower-performing school systems (Barber & Mourshed, 2007; Chenoweth, 2007, 2009; Hattie, 2011;Jackson & Makarin, 2018; Kulik, Kulik, Bangert-Drowns, & Slavin, 1990; Pianta, Belsky, Houts, & Morrison, 2007; Reynolds, Stringfield, & Schaffer, 2001).

So with that, we are so excited to be sharing the learning of our students this year using the Instructional Model. We would love your partnership at home – ask your child/children what they did during the Independent Work time in Maths, Reading or Writing today!

Chloe & Tom

Mr Sumner and The Killer Spider

As he appeared around the corner of the year 3 portable, Mr. Sumner was red faced and sweaty, not a normal look for the usually cruisy, easy-going teacher. The class stopped in their tracks; something was up! In his hand, was a red book box, normally located on a student’s table. It wasn’t until the sun casted a light across the box that we saw the shadow of a hairy leg reaching for the edge of the box, everything suddenly made sense. It was a hideous spider, being relocated from Ms. Demaj’s room. We gasped, was Mr. Sumner brave or just silly? Why would you get involved, it was such a fiasco! Ms. Brown was up to her old tricks again and saw an opportunity. If only she had her phone to catch the moment. She waited until the beads of sweat turned into a river. “Mr. Sumner!”, She Joked, “It’s on your hand!” In a panic of fear, Mr. Sumner jumped, resulting in scaring the spider which then crawled out of the box and onto his hand. Goosebumps covered his arm as the creepy softness of the spider’s legs extended across the length of his palm, creating a wave of fear. Our class froze in anticipation, what would mr. Sumner’s next move be? Everything went awkwardly silent. He looked like he was trying to restrain from screaming. In disbelief we turned to see ms. Brown breakout in a loud giggle. Mr. Sumner directed his angry gaze Towards her. His frustration he felt broke his fear.

Shaking his hand, the killer spider fell onto the grass, racing towards the oval of freedom. The rest of us were left behind to deal with the outcome of the event that had unfolded before us, what a way to begin recess!