Newsletter 8 2023
Principal's Report
Hello to Families and all in the St Joseph's School Community,
There have been many reasons for celebration in our school community this week. We enjoyed a very special day on Monday, celebrating the feast of St Joseph, the patron saint of our school. Mr Whatnall prepared a Mass of celebration allowing staff, students, families and parishioners to gather together. During the Mass, and throughout the day, students learnt many facts about St Joseph and his personal characteristics and attributes. After watching a short video about St Joseph, those gathered were put to the test with a short quiz and passed with flying colours! After Mass students worked in multi-aged groups to complete Joseph related activities, such as paper lilies, card games featuring different images of Joseph and a mini shrine to St Joseph. After lunch the fun really escalated, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you heard the banging and clanging from afar! In tribute to Joseph’s carpentry occupation, students hammered, nailed and sawed the afternoon away, to create some string art and funny faces. Please check out the photographs linked in this newsletter.
This week we have also focused our attention on the very important celebration of Harmony Week. As Brody reminded us in the Senior Room –It doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from, everyone belongs together in our world ! Hopefully, our aim can be to remember this each week and every day as we learn and grow together.
Finally, it was special to have Lila and Cooper celebrate St Joseph’s School in their leadership speeches this week. Lila stated – We are a small school and students are close to everyone, and even have connections with their teachers. We are kind, welcoming, respectful and St Joseph’s provides a good education. Cooper felt –St Joseph’s isn’t a big school but it has a big heart and great kids. I feel I’m getting a great education because I’m getting challenged every day.
And in one final celebration, the Grade 3 and 5 students gave their best efforts to complete this year’s NAPLAN assessments. Well done, everyone!
Author Visit
On Friday we are fortunate to have children’s author, Phil Kettle, work with staff and students for the day. Phil will work with junior and senior students in separate groups. Phil is passionate about reading and writing and spends a lot of his time visiting schools and engaging students in literature. Phil’s books cater to all students with their likeable characters and relatable story lines. Phil will work with the students sharing ways to generate ideas for writing stories, developing characters and building plots. By the end of the day students should be well on the way to having their own stories drafted.
Child Safety Policy
On Monday senior students from the Catholic schools of Charlton, Sea Lake, St Arnaud and Donald will gather at St Joseph’s School to work with Mrs Hogan and their teachers to investigate the new child safe standards. The aim of the day is to assist the students in creating a Child Safe Policy that is age appropriate and child friendly. We look forward to being able to share this with you in the future. Grade 6 students from St Joseph’s will attend and morning tea and lunch will be provided for them on Monday.
Office Hours
A reminder that Mrs Olive can be contacted at the School Office from 8 :00am – 3:00pm each day from Monday to Thursday. If you need to make contact outside of these hours, please phone Mrs Hogan on 0419 137 966.
Looking Ahead – Term 2
Term Two for students will commence on WEDNESDAY 26TH APRIL.
ANZAC Day Public Holiday is on Tuesday 25th April and as Charlton College is closed and buses are not running, staff will undertake professional learning on Monday 24th April.
All Grade 6 students are invited to represent St Joseph’s School at the ANZAC Day Service in Charlton on April 25th. The service begins at 8:40am and concludes by 10:30am. The Term Two school leaders, Charlie and Liam, will lay a wreath on the school’s behalf. Students to wear full Winter uniform, please.
Important Dates
Please note the following dates which are on the Term Calendar.
Friday 24th March – Author Visit Phil Kettle
Monday 27th March – Child Safety Session - Senior students
Friday 31st March Hot Shots Tennis in Boort – Grade 5 & 6
Monday 3rd April – Excursion to Swan Hill to see “The Alphabet of Awesome Science” F-6 students
Thursday 6th April – END OF TERM ONE
Monday 24th April – Pupil Free Day
Tuesday 25th April – ANZAC Day
Wednesday 26th April Term Two commences
Please keep on the dates as they continue to populate in each weekly newsletter and aim to avoid appointments on these days so all students can participate.
Permission notes have been sent home for Hot Shots Tennis and the Swan Hill excursion. Please return as soon as possible.
Mary Hogan
Principal
Prayer for Harmony
God of all people, God of love,
Just as the colours of a rainbow
blend and merge to form one rainbow,
So too may the colours of our different cultures and beliefs,
blend and merge in our families,
our communities and throughout our world,
through mutual respect and acceptance,
so that we may come together in true harmony. Amen
Foundation/1/2 Class Report
It’s been another productive week in the junior classroom. With only a few weeks left of term we’ve been powering ahead with completing tasks, building on prior learning and making connections across learning areas. It’s been particularly rewarding to see the students progressing with their reading goals; with all our hard work that has gone into learning new phonemes and digraphs, it’s positive to see the students being able to identify these in their readers when decoding unfamiliar words. With the developing readers, we teach strategies such as ‘look at the picture’, ‘get your mouth ready to make the sounds’, ‘think about what the word could be – does it make sense, look and sound right?’. Our more proficient readers are also encouraged to look for their digraphs (two letter sounds) and trigraphs (three letter sounds) when reading and to ‘scoop’ those sounds rather than sounding them out individually, e.g. ‘er’ makes its own sound rather than isolating each letter sound ‘e-r’. If you see your child isolating individual letters that should be ‘scooped’ together, try to remind and encourage them about the different sounds just as we do in the classroom. The English language is a complex but wonderful thing and it’s such a joy to see the students really starting to come along and begin to develop as new readers in their first few years of school. Well done everyone!
The students have also been working hard on developing their handwriting skills, using the ‘Victorian Modern Cursive font’. We teach this explicitly, so that the students learn where to start and finish their letters and so that they learn where to position their letters on the dotted thirds. We use language to remind students where the letters belong on the line such as ‘small letters’ – a, s, x, c, v, n, m, w, e, r, u, o, i, t, ‘tall letters’ – d, h, k, l, b, and ‘falling letters’ – f, g, j, q, y, p. An alternative to this is: underground, grass, sky – where coloured sections are used to help support this learning visually. It’s a tricky practice when learning to write your letters and learning all the schematics that make a fluid writer master their skill, takes time and practice, so we try to incorporate handwriting practice into the student’s routine on a daily basis. On another note; although we teach the students how to write using the ‘Victorian Modern Cursive font’, we understand that the print filled world we live in often doesn’t use the written letters we teach for p, b and sometimes even k, however this is the font we use in Australia, and it leads to how we teach ‘joined writing’ in later grades. We understand the importance of exposing the students to all fonts and this is why we do teach students how to recognise and write these such letters in their other formats as well.
On a final note, I’d like to thank everyone who helped make the ‘St. Joseph’s Feast Day celebrations a big success this Monday. The Mass was well received and the students who brought symbols forward to the altar, who read and to everyone else for their wonderful singing - everyone did an excellent job. Mrs Hogan, Mrs Armstrong, Mrs Lanyon and myself all ran rotation activities which focused on our patron saint, St. Joseph. The activities included a craft experience of making one of St. Joseph’s symbols ‘the white lily’, a prayer experience which involved constructing a prayer altar and writing a prayer to St. Joseph and a game of snap with traditional images of St. Joseph throughout moments in his life and a follow-up activity sheet. The students really enjoyed the activities and learnt a lot about the saint who their school is named after, St. Joseph. In the afternoon we treated the students to something hands on and different – a woodworking workshop, in honour of St. Joseph’s trade – carpentry. The junior students used mixed materials and hammers, nails and glue to attach pieces to their wood to create a ‘funny face’ character. The senior students had to measure out the shape of a cross onto their wood, mark nail points, hammer their nails in and then use coloured string to creatively make their cross shape come to life on the wood. The students did an amazing job with what they created and the teachers were very impressed with how responsible everyone was whilst really enjoying the experience and being able to take something home that they’d hammered into themselves. We might have some budding carpenters on our hands, so be prepared for this enthusiasm to spill into home life. Thanks to Mrs Fitzpatrick for organising the wood from our local timber yard and for the Men’s Shed for providing some materials for us to use on the day.
Grade 3/4 Class Report
This week we have started off with a lot of celebrations.
We had St Joseph’s Feast Day on Monday and students participated in a variety of activities to help them understand more about the patron saint of our school. Students were able to display their carpentry skills through hammering and nailing items to pieces of wood to create funny faces or use nails and wool to weave a cross in representation of the faith that Joseph had. The day was thoroughly enjoyed by all students.
On Tuesday students celebrated Harmony Day through in class activities and discussions. Year 3 and 4 students wrote short pieces of writing exploring their understanding of Harmony Day and what it meant to them. The whole school were involved in a competition to create a logo for Harmony Day and there were some amazing designs and messages within these. Well done to all students involved.
In our Literacy class we are continuing to explore 'My Dog Bigsy' by Alison Lester in our shared reading. Students are continuing with their OLSEL strategies daily and are beginning to use these more frequently in their group and independent work which is wonderful to see. We are continuing to have a focus on diagraphs and single phoneme revision. Our focus for this week has been F sound represented through f, ff, ph and gh.
We are continuing with our narrative writing with a specific focus on narrative structure and the aspects of creative writing, such as introduction, characters, setting, complication and resolution. Students are working well on this and are sequencing their writing well.
In Maths students have worked on addition and subtraction. They are looking at mental strategies to complete 2-4 digit sums, such as split strategy, jump strategy and building to ten. Students are revising the concept of carrying over and explaining their thinking. Students are using concrete materials such as MAB blocks to show the concept of ‘borrowing’ in subtraction and showing this in their working and group discussions. Students are practicing their counting daily using a number chart, counting 2 digit numbers and 3 digit numbers. During this, students are skip counting from zero and nonzero starting points. Students are also practicing their multiplication facts daily in the classroom.
In Science, students are continuing to explore their understanding of heat. They have looked at the concepts of conductors and insulators and completed an experiment that explored the conductive properties of different materials, such as metal, wood and plastic.
In Art students have learnt about the abstract art and applied design of 20th century artist Sonia Delaunay. Students incorporated their understanding of colours to create an abstract piece in Sonia’s style.
Homework contract 8 and spelling words are due this Friday. Thank you.
Grade 5/6 Class Report
Grade 5 & 6
During the last week Grade 5 students have completed their NAPLAN Assessments for 2023. This has allowed some time for me to work with just the Grade 6 group, which has been fantastic. As part of this time the Grade 6 students have all written a leadership speech containing their ideas about what it means to be a Grade 6 student at St Joseph’s School. You will hear these speeches during their term as official school leader. Well done to Lila and Cooper who presented their speeches at our Feast Day Mass on Monday. This was the perfect follow on from the Leadership Day the Grade 5 & 6 Class had on Tuesday. This week we have also celebrated our School Feast Day and increased our understanding of Harmony Week; its origin and purpose.
ENGLISH
Many students are becoming more fluent and automatic in their letter formation and general handwriting. This has the positive spin-off, of increased writing stamina, which is to be celebrated! Keep up the great work everyone! This week students have worked to edit and review completed writing pieces in preparation for publishing. At a more detailed level, we have explored sentence structure and sentence types which involves such words as; clauses, independent clause, dependent clause, subject, object, simple, compound and complex! We still have a way to go with our sentence work and this is fundamental to getting the basics of writing in place. In reading we have been trying some books by author, Phil Kettle, who is to visit us on Friday! We are looking at two different series, one about extreme sports and another about a boy named Clancy -fancy that! Other reading tasks this week focused on the concept of Harmony Week. Ask your child if they can tell you anything they learnt about Harmony Week.
MATHEMATICS
In Mathematics this week we have continued to work on subtraction, with particular focus on subtracting with renaming and involving zeroes. Students are developing their understanding of subtraction with decimals and the role the zero plays in holding place value. We have also worked on solving worded problems, carefully looking to identify the key words within the question which tell us-
- What is the question asking me to find out?
- How many steps will this take?
- What operation/s do I need to use?
- Which key words tell me what operations I will need to use?
A reminder that students need their satchel, reader, diary and Homework Book at school each day, please. Reader diaries are to be filled in each day with the number of pages read and signed, please.
We have enjoyed another busy and enjoyable week in the Senior Room this week. We have just two more weeks until the end of term so keep up the momentum, as we are on the home stretch to the Easter holidays!
Hockey Roadshow
St Joseph's Feast Day
Community News
The official starter program for kids aged 5-10, a chance to learn Netty basics, gain confidence, get active & make friends in a safe & inclusive environment.
Come and join coach Rachael Smyth for the beginning of Term 2, Thursday 27th of April @ 3.45pm, this is an 8 -week program located at Charlton Park.
For any questions please contact Rachael on 0400 042885.
Register your child by clicking on the following link: NetSetGo Fees Apply. Get Active Kids Vouchers available, check for eligibility.
https://www.getactive.vic.gov.au/vouchers/
Active Registration Link: NetballConnect - Competition Management System (squadi.com)
https://registration-netball.squadi.com/userRegistration?organisationId=1f1570e5-0788-45b5-b9ce[1]27742fcd0927&competitionId=62468c4d-ed40-450c-9a92-44997b81e99b
We look forward to seeing you there!
