This week AFL wrapped UP after a 5 week program. Matt's vist was a great success and it was amazing to see all the students and parents sharing in a game together on the Oval on Wednesday afternoon.

Semester One Report Cards.

In preparation of school report cards being released at the end of this Term, please see the attached instructions on how to access the Parent Portal. To access your child's report card you need to have logged in and set up your login and password. Please contact the office on 4069 9500 if you have any queries.

Wednesday was a special day for us to celebrate the wonderful work of our School Officers. These ladies always put in 100% and go above and beyond for our teachers and students. A special morning tea was prepared by the teachers to show their appreciation for all they do in and around our school.

Today we said farewell and thank you to some very special members of our school who will be leaving us this term - Mrs Mellner and Mrs Smith. It was a sad but also a happy one as we wished them farewell and blessed them for them for the new and exciting chapters they are about to embark upon. 

Welcome to week 8 of Term 2.

English:

We are continuing to practice reading simple text using the sounding out strategy for decoding unfamiliar words and recognising the learnt tricky words. The story for the week is The Cat in the Hat. The students identify their favourite part, get introduced to new vocabulary and express their opinions about the text. They are starting to make personal connections to the text. Students are also starting to write simple sentences using the sounding out strategy, demonstrating beginning writing behaviors such as writing left to right, finger spaces between words and ending a sentence in a full stop. The students are being exposed to question marks and exclamation marks and identifying their purpose.

During guided reading students are asked comprehension questions such as: What do you think the story is going to be about? What are the characters feeling? Why do they feel like that? Where is the story taking place?   

Mathematics:

The students are introduced to measurement, where they are completing informal measuring to identify which object weighs more or less. They will use the strategy hefting to distinguish between heavier and lighter objects.  Students are ordering the days of the week sequentially and recognising the days of the week.

Miss Knight

This week we celebrated School Officer Day.  To say thank you for the wonderful support Miss Chrissy gives us every day, the students created acrostic poems.  We enjoyed selecting adjectives to describe Miss Chrissy and decorating our work on thank you cards. The students were very enthusiastic about learning the bossy “e” rule: the bossy “e” makes a vowel say its long sound.  We will be practising our short and long vowel sounds next week. Thank you to those parents who have taken the time to fill in the Reading Diary each night.

In Maths, we are learning about different ways to record data.  The students are practising creating relevant survey questions, gathering data, recording data using tally marks and graphing information.  We are consolidating our addition and subtraction strategies such as counting on, rearranging parts and partitioning.

In Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), we are building Resilience by learning that it takes great strength to be sensible.  We are focussing on: listening to the teacher, asking questions when I’m not sure, not being distracted by others, and resisting the temptation to give up.

The students had their last AFL lesson for the season and played a full game against each other.Thank you to Matt for all his work in teaching us the skills needed for AFL.

Mrs Bienvenu

We have been having lots of fun learning about characters and events in Narrative texts. The class has enjoyed hearing about each other’s favourite book during Show and Tell. Over the next week every student will deliver a short presentation on their chosen book to develop speaking skills, while the audience practices listening to the ideas of others. The timetable has been attached below for your reference.

Please ensure your child is also practicing their sight words and ready for a test each week. We do our best to get through them. If for any reason your child has missed testing please let me know and I will make sure it is done!

Our attendance data shows a drop for the Year Two class this fortnight with lots of our families away. 36% of the class has reached our attendance goal this fortnight. A huge farewell to two of our lovely students moving over the next week. We will miss Frankie and Ruby so very much and wish them and their families a safe and happy relocation.

Miss Holly

The end is in sight with students consolidating their learning by completing assessments and projects.

The Sacraments have been a wonderful learning experience for the students and we hope to visit the church within the next week to link our knowledge and understanding.

We have started looking at Poetry this week and will continue for the remainder of the term. There were many laughs when we were creating our acrostic poems. Our describing words were varied and definitely entertaining. I can’t wait to see what the next couple of weeks bring.

Our 3D shape investigations are allowing us to learn about corners, edges and faces. When we were making our nets we needed to make sure we accurately folded the lines so that we could create the 3D shape and not a ball of paper.

Thank you to those of you have been assisting your children with completing homework and home reading.

There are many students receiving Joey Tokens with some even reaching wristband status.

Our attendance this week is sitting at 40% of the Year 3 students attending 95% or more of the time. Hopefully this week and the last two will allow our percentage to increase.

Miss Edmonds.

Firstly, thank you to all the families that came along last Friday and watched the year four assembly. It was great to see so many faces supporting our students, especially coming into a long weekend. Once again, I was proud of the students resilience and maturity. It is not an easy thing to get up in front of the whole community and not only talk but sing. The students once again stepped up to the challenge.

Secondly, there has been a change to the homework expectations in grade 4. This is aligned with one of the St Joseph’s goals of improving reading. I have increased opportunities for reading at school with reading rotations, silent reading daily after lunch and also reading a novel to the students. The home reading expectations have increased to get students to practise reading behaviours taught at home to help all students see improvement in reading this year. Please make sure you are completing the home reading form otherwise I’ll assume no reading has been completed at home.

Thirdly, it has been a big fortnight for myself and the students as the end of term  approaches with the reports going home in that last week of term. The students have been applying themselves to all the tasks I have set and have been demonstrating their knowledge very well. Attendance during this time is even more important than usual as students can miss important tasks that will affect their grades on reports. Where possible, inform myself and/or the office of any absences. That way, we can be prepared and come up with alternatives for your child to do while they are absent.

Currently our attendance is that 42% of students attend 95% of the time or more. This percentage has once again decreased from last week and we all need to be working together to improve this figure.

Lastly, we have finished studying procedures and are starting a new unit on poetry this week. The students will be examining different poems and constructing their own poem. If you or the students have any favourite poems, feel free to send them to school to share.

Miss Briody

What a great long weekend!  Well done to any fishing people and volunteers, it was great to see so many families at the Fishing Classic, such an amazing community event.

I am extremely proud of how the Yr 5 students delivered their Persuasive speeches.  They decided individually if it was to be presented to me, to their peers as a class, a small group or to younger grades.  They were prepared with palm cards, practised their speech and were familiar with the content of their speech. We talked about what made an effective speech to an audience (confidence, clarity, posture, body language, voice projection) and after each student gave their speech they received some positive and constructive feedback from their peers, along with my feedback.  This was a really positive experience as most students agreed with the feedback and will take it on for the next oral presentation. Not everyone enjoys speaking in front of a group and it was challenging for some students, but everyone gave it a go and this showed resilience! There are a few students still to do their speech.

In other learning areas we have continued to look at the “Gifts of the Holy Spirit “ in Religion and how this can impact on how we make a difference to others in our daily lives. These gifts give us strength to empower positive choices and draw on mindfulness and reflection about our actions and how they can affect others.  This week we are focusing on choosing one gift; and using references, images and other sources to complete a task. I hope that this will give students the opportunity to show understanding of how we can share different Gifts of the Holy Spirit with others, and to help them follow the actions of Charity and Love that Jesus displayed.

STEM has been exciting as the students have learnt to code using the Binary System.  We have had several opportunities to practise this and now put this into action using coding and applying this to different situations.  We have been practising our Auslan signing and getting better every session.

We read the book and viewed the video of “The Lost Thing” by Shaun Tan last week.  This book is quite challenging, but has inspired many artistic thoughts for our art task. Each student has mapped out and planned their multi-media art piece for next week.  It is also aligned with English concepts about inferred and literal thinking and has been a great topic for discussion. Look forward to seeing these artworks.

Miss Libby

Week 8

In year 6 we have been completing assessment tasks and demonstrating what we have learned in the first semester.

For English we have been experimenting with reading and writing different types of poems, and in Religion we have been learning about the Ascension and Pentecost.

This term we have been learning Auslan as our language other than English, and some of us are becoming quite proficient at introducing ourselves and identifying a range of objects. We also say the Hail Mary prayer in Auslan most mornings to start our day.

In a combined Maths and Creative Arts project we have been designing and assembling shipping containers (cuboid shapes), so if anyone has a container they need decorating we have some great designs ready to go.

With the help of Mrs Edmonds we have been learning the basics of binary code in our technology classes.

The year 6 shirt is now available to order, and we are hoping that they will be delivered in time for the beginning of term 3.

Mr Mitchell

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