Little Kids thinking big!
Little Kids thinking big!
Established in 1965, Ringwood Heights Primary School is nestled in a wooded area in the Maroondah district of the Outer Eastern Metropolitan Region. The school is set in extensive grounds that provide a wide variety of active and passive play areas including an oval, shaded hard court areas, playgrounds, extensive native bushland and a central open, astroturfed area. The school takes great pride in being a strong community school with consistent and constructive involvement of parents in all aspects of our school life.
Students are grouped in four areas relating to Levels of Learning:
All class groupings with the exception of Prep are multi-age. The school places emphasis on inquiry and this is interpreted through different programs at each level, including play based learning in the Prep level and Discovery time in Level 2 through to negotiated integrated inquiry learning (iTime) in the senior grades (3 - 6). Specialist instruction is provided in Auslan, Visual Arts, Performing Arts and Physical Education. Student wellbeing is supported through our whole school well-being focus in partnership with the Maroondah Positive Education Network.
Ringwood Heights offers a comprehensive developmental curriculum implemented by a team of dedicated, caring professionals. We are a leading school in the development of integrated units of work, negotiated curriculum through personal inquiry and professional action learning teams. There is a strong emphasis on student voice, action and agency within our units which are delivered over a two year cycle. Our biennial Artist in Schools program is a celebrated community event with opportunities for participation from all our students.
Ringwood Heights Primary School plays key participatory and leadership roles in the Maroondah Network local cluster of schools. The school has developed a strong partnership with Melbourne University with partnerships in academic research, both in Inquiry learning and in the Arts. We have also been involved in the C+AARP (Child and Adult Arts Research Project) for many years where the Learning Team 3 artists at Ringwood Heights have a conversation through the Arts with the teacher candidates at Melbourne University. This has led to Arts workshops and visits to the studios at the Melbourne University Graduate School of Education. We welcome teacher candidates from Melbourne University to complete their Masters of Teaching teacher placements at Ringwood Heights.
We are regularly involved with our neighbourhood kinder, Pinemont with the Learning Team 3 students visiting to share their Auslan skills and the choir to perform their latest repertoire; and the Kinder kids visiting our forest area for Bush Kinder sessions.
Information and Communication Technologies include access to iPads and chromebooks to enhance student learning when required, there are large flat screen televisions in all learning areas. Our stadium is used for whole school assemblies on a Monday morning and physical education/sport for all age groups. It is also used for celebrations such as Arts in Schools, graduation and social events such as trivia nights, bush dances and organised student activities such as tennis and basketball.
Ringwood Heights is a student centred school, which intentionally aligns practice with three key purposes:
Our school values were created after extensive consultation with all students, staff and other community members. They reflect elements of our school that we value highly and strive towards:
Our Junior School comprises our Prep and Learning Team 2 (Years 1 and 2) classes. They are located in the original school building which was refurbished in 2012 to allow for more open classrooms and collaborative learning. There are many learning spaces to allow small group ‘breakout sessions’ and collaboration within and across the classes, which is especially evident in Explorations and Discovery time but occurs in all areas of the curriculum.
In the Junior school our focus is on developing the skills required for our students to become literate and numerate, which is supported by our integrated inquiry learning approach. Through Readers’ and Writers’ Workshops, with the whole-part-whole delivery (whole class introduction; independent and small group learning; whole class summary and reflection) students develop and build on their literacy skills in order to become fluent readers and writers.
Our Junior School Program lays the foundations to promote successful thinking and lifelong learning and encourages students to take ownership of their learning for their future years of schooling. The explorations and Discovery time Inquiry sessions provide a personalised learning environment in which students are encouraged to make sense of their world through rich and meaningful play based experiences. These sessions provide students with the opportunity to practise and further develop concepts and skills they are taught throughout the week in ‘real world’ situations. Students are encouraged to set goals for themselves, plan their sessions, and reflect on their own learning upon the session’s completion.
The senior students (grades 3 - 6) are housed in the Library resource centre. The classrooms are grouped according to Level and the wide open doors enable team teaching and collaborative learning to seamlessly occur.
As the leaders of Ringwood Heights Primary, our senior school students strive to continuously develop their skills as active learners, responsible leaders and successful citizens of their world.
All senior school students are engaged in a variety of leadership programs including the highly successful ‘Buddies’ and ‘Peer Support’ programs. These promote rich, dynamic, relationships across the entire learning community. Senior school students play an active role in breakfast club, lunchtime clubs and in the library, choir and art room. The grade 6 students take ownership of their graduation: they fundraise for the event throughout the year and run the graduation ceremony independently.
Student voice is central to the senior school curriculum. Inquiry units are designed to provoke interest and to empower students to investigate questions they have of their world. Our senior school students are passionate, creative learners who are developing the initiative and confidence to strive to achieve their personal learning goals both today and throughout their lives.
We are very proud of our Library Resource Centre which opened in 2019. The Library Resource Centre is the hub of Ringwood Heights. It has flexible learning spaces with classroom clusters, an Art Studio, gathering places, and an extensive library which is managed by our teacher librarian. The library is stocked with approximately 12,000 fiction, non-fiction and picture-fiction texts catering for all readers, and has an ever-changing display of books curated by our teacher librarian. Within the Library Resource Centre there is flexible seating allowing for whole class, small group and individual learning.
The Art Studio is a lively open and vibrant space where students are encouraged to express themselves creatively. Students participate in Art sessions weekly and use a variety of materials to explore different Art forms and concepts. We have our own kiln for firing clay.
Evidence of our biennial Arts in Schools program where we have invited visiting Artists to join our school community for a term can be found all around our school and there is an ever-changing display of student Artworks in the studio area.
Ringwood Heights Primary School is set in extensive grounds that provide a wide variety of areas for our students to play in and explore. We also have an area of remnant native bushland, the Sanctuary in the North-East corner of the Oval.This area was protected during construction of the school 55 years ago and is the last remnant of locally indigenous bushland on the western side of Loughnan's Hill. In the Maroondah Council's Sites of Biological Significance 1996, this reserve was identified as having 65 indigenous plant species, some of these, including the hop-bitter pea, are rare in the Maroondah region.
While the senior students gravitate towards the basketball court and oval, the junior students play on the taps courts and in the forest area. The ephemeral cubbies that line the Felix Crescent boundary are an important part of play for the junior school students. Walls are built using logs and rocks, floors are swept using the branches of pine trees removed by the visiting black cockatoos, gemstones and crystals found in the school grounds are currency and students learn the skills of negotiation and compromise through play.
The students in Learning Team 3 are the custodians of the kitchen garden: they plant seedlings, weed around them, water them, nurture them and harvest the vegetables they have grown. But the kitchen garden also offers the opportunity for authentic learning, for example in numeracy students calculate the area and perimeter of the garden beds; in Big Question Time students investigated the composting of face masks by burying them in the soil and in literacy students write creatively using the garden as a writing ‘seed’.
Opposite the kitchen garden is the STEAM room, where in addition to storing resources for science investigations, it is a space for science experiments and discoveries - from investigating solutions to problems through innovative design; to building Rube Goldberg machines designed to make a simple task more complicated.
Our Out of School Hours Program operates from the multi-purpose room offering before and after school care, curriculum day care and an exciting holiday program.