Junior School Highlights

Junior School enrichment: Lunchtime opportunities and after school clubs

At lunchtimes, students are able to participate in a range of popular activities, including the Year 6 Knitting, Sewing and Craft Club with Mrs Adlard and Mrs Gemmell; Year 4-Year 6 Debating Club with Mrs Warner and Ms Henry; Prep-Year 6 Lego Club with Ms Wilson; Prep-Year 6 Heart to Head with the school chaplain, and Prep-Year 6 tennis sessions with Futures Tennis coaches.

After school enrichment programs have included Prep-Year 6 Creative Movement Club (Term 1) and Prep-Year 6 Skipping Club (Terms 2 and 3) which have seen the students taking part in joyful movement in alignment with their wellbeing Body Bright body positivity learning.

New Staff

Although the Junior School only welcomed Ms Shauna Wilson (Year 3) and Ms Lisa O’Connor (Year 4) onto the teaching staff in January, it feels as though they have been at Shelford for much longer, so seamlessly have they become established members of the Junior School staff team. We are delighted to have them as part of the staff and appreciate the valuable contributions they make to the Junior School.

NAPLAN Results

Living up to Shelford’s reputation as one of the top performing girls’ schools in Victoria, the Junior School celebrated outstanding 2022 NAPLAN results, placing us as the leading Bayside school, in the top 12 in the Victoria, and top 3 in the Southern Region. This is a credit to our exceptional educators and their students.

Playground progress

It has been with great excitement that the community has watched with interest the day-byday progress of the much-anticipated Junior School playground. They have witnessed its emergence from piles of concrete and dirt into enticing pathways, garden beds and towers.

It’s going to be the fanciest playground yet!

– Piper M, Year 6

Phonics

Around one third of children will have difficulty learning to read without systematic teaching in how to ‘crack the code’ of written English, and another third will not learn to read at all without it. The exceptional success of early literacy learning in the Junior Discovery Centre lies in the teachers’ implementation of a thorough phonics program whereby the journey to reading begins with the explicit teaching of phonemic awareness. This is the ability to understand that spoken words are made up of individual sounds called phonemes.

Students work with individual speech sounds and identify, produce, blend, segment and manipulate these sounds in words. Decades of evidence shows that all children benefit from explicit and early teaching of the correspondences between letters and speech sounds, and the ability to use phonics to crack the reading code is one of the best early predictors for reading success.

Year 6 induction and JS Leadership

The 2023 Year 6s were inducted as leaders of the Junior School at a ceremony at the beginning of the semester. In addition to the school captain roles, Year 6s have the opportunity to contribute to the leadership of the Junior School in a myriad of ways, including standing for class Parliamentarian or participating in the Principal’s Consultancy Group, which meets regularly to discuss Junior School issues.

Year 1-Year 6 Chess Club has become a Shelford favourite. So much so that the club is quickly fully subscribed when registrations open each term. The chess players have spread their wings and begun competing against other schools, with an inaugural event at Presbyterian Ladies’ College in May.

Year 5 & 6 Camp at Anglesea Valley Lodge

At the beginning of Term 2, the Year 5s and 6s spent three nights at Anglesea Valley Lodge where they were challenged to step outside of their comfort zones by testing their resilience and trying new things in the development of important independence and cooperation skills.

The camp’s adventure activities included bush walking and kangaroo-spotting; mountain biking through puddles in the forest; canoeing in the rain; donning very tight wetsuits to body board in the freezing surf; a sandcastle-building competition; games on the beach; target practice on the archery field; and – when the rainfall was too heavy for even full-body wet gear to withstand - indoor teambuilding games.

Here are some student responses to camp:

I was petrified … every part of my body was trembling in fear. As my canoe was pushed into the water, I thought about my 11 years and 1 month of living. I had a good life, but was thinking the worst.

– Arin J

We rode mountain bikes for two hours. It was exhausting. I didn’t think my legs would work any more.

– Meleri L

I never imagined we would see our teachers boogie-boarding. We were boogie-boarding in a thunderstorm. The bright side was that we got to see eight rainbows that day.

– Sylvie M