St Joseph’s Primary School Charlton eNewsletter

Principal's Report

The new outdoor learning area shed will be arriving on a truck tomorrow. We are just waiting on a building permit and then we will be right to go. Garnet Rodda will be here on Thursday and for the next four weeks to help prepare the children for the athletic sports which will be held on Thursday 25th August.

Kim Hawkes, the new Religious Education Consultant, will be coming soon to work with Jason on the RE curriulum.

The badminton tournament is on the 18th August in Shepparton. Cate and Naomi will be taking the 8 students. If any other parents want to come they would be more than welcome. Just let Cate know and we can organise accommodation. We will leave school at 3:00p.m. on Wednesday 17/08/2021. The children will be staying at the Shepparton Holiday Village Caravan Park overnight in a cabin. The cost will be $70 per student. This will cover their accommodation and tea on Wednesday night plus lunch on Thursday. They might need some spending money for any extras from the kiosk and the trip home. We usually get home about 6:00pm on the Thursday. Permission notes will be sent home in the next few weeks.

There are new Government recommendations on the wearing of masks. Masks are available at school. If you want your child to wear one, please let us know so we can ensure it happens.

Information

School Facebook Page/Social Media

We are in the process of setting up a school facebook page/ Instagram account. All parents sign a permission form on enrolment and then tick the box on the Annual Parental Consent Form giving the school permission to have your childs photo taken for school publications/newspapers etc. I now need to know if you are against having your children on social media. I understand a few people would prefer not to have their children on social media and this is fine, but can you please email or text Cate so she can make a list. In the past it was taboo to have a school social media page but DOBCEL's train of thought has now changed. Social media is the way of the future, so we need to get on board.

Covid Guidelines for a positive case or household contact

1. Parents/carers should inform the school by phone or written notification. Principals should
then follow the process put in place by their diocesan education office.
2. Students who report a positive result must isolate for seven days and not attend school
during that period.
3. Where a student is a household contact of a positive case (that is, they have spent more
than four hours with someone who has COVID-19 inside a house, accommodation, or
care facility) they must inform the school. Household and household-like contacts are no
longer required to quarantine as long as they take additional safety measures in the 7
days that would have been their quarantine period. If household contacts
do not undertake the safety measures they are required to isolate and test on Day one
and Day 6 of isolation. Household contacts are required to inform the school that they
are attending during the 7 day period.
4. Parents/carers are able to leave isolation if other arrangements cannot be made to
transport their non-infectious child via private vehicle to and/or from school. The person
leaving self-isolation must travel directly to and from the location, making no stops, unless
there is an emergency or as required by law. They must remain in the vehicle at all times,
unless it is reasonably necessary to leave the vehicle to deliver the person to and from
school, and must wear a face covering whilst outside the place of self-isolation.

Prep/1/2 Class News

It’s been another good week in the junior classroom as the students have continued working hard on their learning goals. This week the students have been exploring another non-fiction text, ‘Dinosaurs’. We’ve enjoyed learning about when dinosaurs lived, how they behaved, what they ate and what might have happened to them. The students have been practising their rhyming words, counting phonemes in words from the text and checking how many syllables different words have – all strategies which support the children with decoding and reading more confidently. The great thing about our OLSEL sessions is that the information learnt can be transferred between reading, writing and speaking, helping the students develop a better overall understanding of letter sounds and spelling rules being explored.

In Maths this last week we’ve begun to explore concepts of division and multiplication with the idea of ‘sharing’ and ‘equal groups’. The students have been practising sharing different collections into groups and have learnt about the terms ‘equal’ and ‘unequal’ and have had a go at identifying such groups. We’ve also been working on skip counting by 2’s, 5’s and 10’s both forwards and backwards which the students are getting really good at by now. Well done everyone!

During a few of our extracurricular activities in the last week, the students have begun to work on creating a selection of different art pieces of which they will be able to submit one piece into the local Art Show. We’re looking at the colour palette and considering colours that complement one another and contrast one another and the students have been experimenting with using different combinations of colour. It will be great to see what they come up with! We've also been working on popsicle stick boxes which the students have enjoyed making and will decorate once they are finished. In P.E on Friday, we began practising the different Athletics events that the students will participate in August. We started with a warm-up game and then split into three groups to work on 100 metre Sprints, Long Jump and Shot Put. The students were guided on how to hold the equipment, use their bodies in the most efficient ways and lots of encouragement was given to try their very best! Great sportsmanship taking place! We were also lucky enough to have two special visitors this week from the Wright household as Mia's guinea pigs Poppy and Amali popped in to see the students. Mia loved sharing her pets with the class and telling us all about what it's like to care for and look after guinea pigs.

Students are continuing to identify components of farm safety, identify potential hazards and discuss implications of farm safety in their shared reading this week. They are consolidating their reading aloud skills through identifying where to use emphasis and fluency in reading and how to read to a larger group through voice projection. Students are revising their understanding of homophones, including identifying common homophones and using these in their correct context. Students are continuing their work on narrative writing, focusing this week on identifying and using narrative structure correctly.

In Maths, students are continuing to work on their understanding of fractions and decimals, including proper and improper fractions, mixed numbers, equivalent fractions and fractions of a quantity. Students are also working on their understanding of division. Year 3 are working on division facts and using arrays to help them work out ‘groups of’ and ‘number of groups’. Year 4 are working on recalling known division facts and using these to solve and create their own word problems. Year 5 are revising multiplication and division strategies and solving word problems. Year 6 students are revising multiplication facts through multiplying two and three digit numbers together.

In Religion we are continuing our work on hospitality. We are revising our understanding of the seven Sacraments of the church and linking these with our understanding of being hospitable and welcoming to all.

Contract 20 homework and spelling words are due this week.