We acknowledge the First Nations peoples of Australia, the traditional custodians of the land, seas, skies and waterways on which we reside, work, travel and meet. We pay our respect to the Alngith elders and all elders, past and present, and support the Uluru Statement From The Heart. We cherish the continued deep spiritual attachment and relationship between our people and commit ourselves to the ongoing journey of Reconciliation. 

We have come to the end of our third term; our students have hopefully presented their work to parents at the student-led conferences a few weeks ago and are taking ownership of their own learning journeys. Term 4 is only 8 weeks and will fly by very quickly, we will be busy with end of year preparations and report cards.

Our staffing process has begun in preparation for next year; we are arranging for any new teachers to fly up and visit us before the year ends at our Bump Up Day on 11^th November. Prep transitions from Kindy to Prep will begin next term in weeks 2, 4 and 6, for those joining us in Prep in 2026. Please notify the school if you are not returning in 2026 so we have accurate class numbers as spaces are limited for new families arriving in Weipa for 2026.

Unfortunately, we are finding it difficult to recruit staff in some positions and have been unsuccessful in recruiting someone for our Tuckshop. We thank Miss Jess for feeding us this term, but we need her back helping in the classrooms. Next term, we have made the difficult decision to close the tuckshop for the term. If you know anyone interested, please contact the school as it is a valuable part of our school and this is a difficult decision that we have had to make.

A reminder about students bringing phones to school or smart watches. While I understand parental concerns about your child’s safety walking home and being able to contact someone in an emergency, it is a statewide directive in Queensland primary schools to have the devices always switched off at school. It is disruptive for learning and in extreme cases can be used to covertly bully other students. Students who come to school next term with a phone or smart watch will be asked to hand in the devices to the office immediately on arrival at school and to collect them at the end of the day. Could you notify Kathy in the office next term if you are sending your child to school with a phone or smart watch so we can keep a record and ensure they hand them in. I will be raising this at our next Board Meeting to create an updated school policy on newer smart watches with sim cards on the school premises. If your child walks home with a device remind them of the appropriate usage when unsupervised by an adult.

Enjoy your holiday and travel safely.

Kath Porter

News from the APRE

Year 6 Leaders at the ACEC

Our Year 6 Leaders represented St Joeys recently at the Australian Catholic Education Conference (ACEC) in Cairns. Rowan read beautifully during the Mass and all leaders participated in the activities on offer. Their trip included the following experiences:

Working with other Year 6 Students at St Gerard Majella School

Ten Pin Bowling (a first for some)

ACEC Student Formation that included songs with Andrew Chinn, John Burland & Gen Bryant

ACEC Mass with Bishop Joe & 1000+ students from Waiben to Tully

Sushi & Yo My Goodness (a first for some)

Lots of fun swimming, playing & eating

NAIDOC Celebrations Continue

On Monday 1^st September our Year 6 students were invited to the WCC NAIDOC Opening Ceremony. We were treated to a beautiful traditional song sung by local elders and the WCC choir. Then on Thursday 4^th September we were invited back for their NAIDOC Closing Ceremony. We watched many different talented First Nations dancers dressed in traditional clothing, from the local area and the Torres Strait. The students also enjoyed watching the Rugby League match against the senior students.

We acknowledge the First Nations peoples of Australia, the traditional custodians of the land, seas, skies and waterways on which we reside, work, travel and meet. We pay our respect to the Alngith elders and all elders, past and present, and support the Uluru Statement From The Heart. We cherish the continued deep spiritual attachment and relationship between our people and commit ourselves to the ongoing journey of Reconciliation. 

Indigenous Literacy Day

This year, Indigenous Literacy Day celebrated with the theme ‘Strength In Our Stories: For Now & Future Generations’. This is an annual celebration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ Stories, Cultures, and Languages. Indigenous Literacy Day is held on the first Wednesday of September ‑ this year it was on Wednesday 3^rd September. The day is about sharing the diversity of First Nations languages and cultures with audiences across Australia and some of the deep and diverse ways children, Elders and families connect with Country; and the significance of Country in Aboriginal Communities. Students viewed a short film that journeyed through three remote Aboriginal Communities to learn about the diverse ways storytelling makes their Communities strong.

In this film the students travelled to:

1. Ceduna & Koonibba in South Australia to learn from young author Mia Speed, celebrate Wirangu language, and make Bush Medicine on Country.
2. Katherine & Binjari in the Northern Territory to meet student authors of Grinch det K’Taun Krok!, hear from Elders, and learn the creational Dreaming story of Katherine Gorge.
3. Warakurna Community in Western Australia to go out on Country, learn about the Ngaanyatjarra seasons, and how Miss Daisy’s knowledge and stories are keeping Warakurna kids strong.

Father’s Day Liturgy

We celebrated all our St Joey’s father figures with a Father’s Day liturgy, smoko and play on Thursday 4^th September. It was heartwarming to see our church packed full of love on this morning. The students gave our visitors a blessing and loved having them join us for the morning. St Joseph, a wonderful father figure to Jesus, would be pleased that a church in his name was so full of fatherly love.

Pupil Free Day

While the students had a day off on Friday 5^th September, our staff were busy participating in Professional Development at school. The focus of the day was First Nations Education and we had guest speakers Ernest Madua Jnr, a local traditional owner, and Carmel Debel, a First Nations consultant from Catholic Education Diocese of Cairns presenting. Both Ernest and Carmel had very useful knowledge to share with the staff to improve their work with the students and the local community. Ernest spoke about Cultural Capabilities based on his local Indigenous knowledge and Carmel showed us how we can use the ‘8 Ways of Learning’ pedagogy in our classrooms to not only help our Indigenous students but all students.

 

R U OK? Day

We recognised R U OK? Day on Friday last week with Year 5 leading us in prayer and students participating in some wellbeing activities.

Ask R U OK? Any Day because life happens every day.  A lot can happen in a year, a month, a week.  Whether it’s your friend, family member, colleague, partner, or teammate, the people you care about go through life’s ups and downs every day. By having regular, meaningful conversations, you build trust and normalise talking about what’s really going on, so when the people in your world find themselves struggling, they know you’re someone they can talk to.

So whilst R U OK? Day only has one National Day of Action, we encourage you to Ask R U OK? Any Day of the year because a conversation could change a life. You don't need to be an expert to reach out - just a good friend and a great listener. Use these four steps and have a conversation that could change a life:

1. Ask R U OK?
2. Listen
3. Encourage action
4. Check in

Thank you for all your support this term. Happy holidays!

Mrs Julie Dore

Assistant Principal Religious Education (Acting)

Dear Parents and Guardians, 

Welcome to Week 10. It is hard to believe that we are at the end of Term Three and what a busy time it has been – Assessment, Parent/ Student/ Teacher Interviews, Weipa Rodeo, Book Week, Father’s Day celebrations and finishing off the Term with the Prep  - Year 2 Wet/ Play Day and the Year 3 – Year 6 Swimming Carnival on Friday the 19^th of September, 2025

Personalised Learning Plans (PLPs)   

 This Term the teachers are currently in the process of writing Personalised Learning Plans (PLPs). Personalised learning is a process that supports a wide range of students with additional learning and support needs. This includes students who may require support in one or more of the following areas: learning (including high potential learners), behaviour, social/emotional, cultural/language (including international students, boarders and learners of English as an Additional Language or Dialect) and those who have educational support needs arising from disability.   

Teachers, with the support of the Leader of Diversity, and in consultation with parents, collaboratively decide which adjustments and/or goals are to be targeted and determine appropriate strategies and supports to be implemented. It is the teacher’s responsibility to implement these planned strategies in order to support students to meet their goals.   

Teachers will direct School Officer support and plan for adjustments on a weekly basis. Teachers communicate weekly with School Officers regarding student progress and make adjustments as needed.   

Evidence is collected regularly and uploaded to ENGAGE. PLP meetings are set 6 monthly and will determine if current goals have been achieved before setting further goals. The teachers are currently meeting with Parents of PLP students this Term.   

I would like to take this time to wish you all a very relaxing holiday and I hope you enjoy some quality time with your family. I look forward to seeing you all in Term 4.

Kind Regards,  

Melanie Turner.  

Dear Parents and Carers in Prep,

Welcome to the end of Term 3. As always, it has been a busy term and extremely hard to believe we only have one more term (8 weeks) left together! We have been working hard in each learning area and complete assessments as the term comes to an end and show what we have learnt. This term we welcomed our new amazing school officer Miss Madi and she has slotted in beautifully into our classroom.

In English we began our speaking and listening unit and introduced News. Students were on a weekly roster and chose to share about a favourite toy or adventure. As the term progressed it was wonderful to see the Preps speaking and listening skills of eye contact, tone, volume, body gestures and questioning improve. We are continuing to work through our explicit Initial Lit lessons and now know many digraphs and tricky words. Students are also beginning to use these words in their independent writing, which is amazing to see! Students are still enjoying rotation stations and each week their reading continues to improve as they are starting to recognise when and how to use expression.

In Maths we continued to collect and display data. We found out about pictographs, bar graphs and tally marks and learnt how to interpret most and least in the information. Students are also still working on their number sense and recognising and ordering numbers to and beyond 20.

In Religion students are learning about Old Testament stories including Gods promise to Abraham and Sarah. We are also enjoying participating in our daily prayer songs every day.

In HASS students discussed their favourite celebration and who was present, in Science we spoke about the diverse types of clothing to wear and why and in Technology students really enjoyed coding with the BeeBots.

This term we celebrated many fun days including Book Week, student led conferences, Rodeo Day dress up and NAIDOC week. We are looking forward to a final and busy term in Prep next term.

As always, please feel free to co tact me via Seesaw or at ttapper@cns.catholic.edu.au

Kind Regards,

Mrs Tash Tapper

Prep Teacher.

Dear Year 1 Families,

What a wonderful and action-packed Term 3 we’ve had! It’s hard to believe we’re already heading into the final term of the year. Our Year 1 students have been busy learning, growing, and celebrating together, and we couldn’t be prouder of their achievements.

English Adventures
This term, our budding writers explored persuasive texts. Each student crafted a heartfelt and convincing piece to persuade their parents to let them have a pet of their choice. From dragons to bunnies, their arguments were thoughtful, creative, and very persuasive—some parents may have even been swayed!

➕➖ Maths Magic
In Maths, we’ve been building our confidence with addition and subtraction, learning a variety of strategies to solve problems. We’re now diving into sharing and grouping collections, and exploring skip counting by 2s, 5s, and 10s—a great foundation for future number work!

Exploring the World Around Us
We’ve had so much fun across all our subject areas:

• Science: Discovering the wonders of how properties of materials change and making predictions.
• History: Learning about the past and how things have changed.
• Digital Technologies: Getting hands-on with tech
• Religion: Learning about Jesus’ Mission and Ministry
• Health: learning how to recognise, react, and report when we are in unsafe situations.

Special Events Galore!
Term 3 has been bursting with memorable moments:

• A special visit from Bishop Joe
• Our fabulous Dance Night
• Winning the Golden Boot in the Weipa Running Festival ?
• Basketball visit
• Rodeo Dress-Up Day
• Book Week and the Book Fair
• Leading Assembly Prayer
• A beautiful Father’s Day Liturgy and Morning Tea
• Birthday Celebrations and Student-Led Meetings
• And sadly, saying goodbye to some of our friends and families ?

We’re finishing the term with a splash at our Water Play Day this Friday—a well-deserved treat for all the hard work!

Looking Ahead to Term 4
Next term promises to be just as exciting! Here’s a sneak peek:

• Science: Exploring how different places meet the needs of living things.
• English: Writing information texts with labelled drawings.
• Digital Tech: Representing data in creative ways.
• Geography: Learning how we can care for places and how people describe them differently.
• Religion: Discovering more about Mary, Mother of Jesus.
• Maths: Diving into measurement and statistics.

Wishing You a Wonderful Break
To all our amazing Year 1 students and their families—thank you for your support, enthusiasm, and joy this term. We wish you a restful yet exciting school holiday break, and we can’t wait to see you all in Term 4 for more learning, laughter, and adventure!

Warm regards,
Lyndsey Fielding
Year 1 Teacher

Hi families and friends of Year 2,

What a term! From the school dance, to NAIDOC, to book week, to Father’s Day and all the things in between...we’ve been busy! Thank you to each and every family for their participation and support in making our school such an engaging and fun environment for the students.

Over the past few weeks, the students have been writing and presenting their persuasive texts to the class. This has been a great opportunity for students to develop their presentation skills, including pitch, volume and even confidence when speaking in front of others.

The end of the term maths activities has centered around data and statistics. Students have been collecting data from different inquiry-based questions and recording and representing this data in various forms, such as pictographs, tally marks, line graphs and bar graphs. Students were also required to make justifications and inferences based on their findings in each data set.

Across our other learning areas, the students have mapped out the changes that occur in the human life cycle, ranging from baby to adult, as well as the different stages of life in animals and plants. In our history lessons, the students investigated what life was like at school 50-100 years ago and wrote a short diary entry of a school student of that time. It was also great to see the students sharing their grandparents' school life adventures, some were quite the comparison!

Thank you to the families who were able to attend the student-led conferences in Week 8. It was great to see the children take ownership of their work and show their families where they spend most of their time!

With only an 8-week term coming we will be getting straight back into routine in week 1, please keep an eye out for upcoming calendars, curriculum letters and seesaw messages for dates and events. I wish you all a lovely school holiday break with your families.

Thanks, Emily

Year 4 News

Our students are very excited this week to present and read their Magazine article to a teacher about a place to visit in the world.  This is a cumulative task over the last 6 weeks of work tp produce their assessment article. It required using set criteria and a formula, research skills, feedback many times with peers and a teacher, using technology and finally editing skills.  Quite a process and we all learnt something new! 

The end results have been amazing articles, and the students are so proud of them.  We are so proud of the quality and how each student worked on their finished product to get it just right.   Super effort Year 4.

Last week the students wrote a Letter about being a Convict on the First Fleet OR Being an Indigenous person once Colonisation started in Australia as part of our History task.  This was super informative about our Colonial history and really good discussions about how our Indigenous population were impacted.  Some really deep and interesting conversations.

During our Digital Tech lessons the students were amazing coding their own map using all the codes for an Oz Bot to follow. Some future coders in the pipeline….

Have a great holiday!

Libby and Tiffany.

Year 3 

As we wrap up Term 3, Year 3 students have been busy exploring a wide range of exciting learning experiences across all subject areas.

English & Science – Melting Chocolate
This week, students combined English and Science by writing procedural recounts of our investigation: How does heat affect a solid piece of chocolate? They carefully followed steps in a science experiment to observe how adding heat can change a solid into a liquid. Students then created a procedural recount to explain how they did the experiment and what they learned about heat, solids, liquids and mass.

Mathematics – Time and Shapes
In Mathematics, our focus has been on telling time to the minute and using this to calculate the duration of events. Students have also explored the features of 2D shapes (like hexagons, rectangles and triangles) and investigated 3D objects (such as pyramids, prisms, and cylinders), building their understanding of the world around them in both flat and solid forms.

Digital Technologies – Hardware, Software and Computational Thinking
Students have been learning about the differences between hardware and software in computers. They have also been introduced to computational thinking, practising how to break down problems into smaller steps and test solutions. Using these skills, students began designing their own games, applying creativity alongside logical thinking.

Health – Stereotypes and Situational Awareness
In Health, students discussed stereotypes, recognising how assumptions about people can be unfair and can influence us to make decisions that are not fair. They also explored situational awareness – how we can use our senses to notice what is happening around us to keep safe and make good choices in different environments.

Religion – The Beatitudes
In Religion, Year 3 have been reflecting on The Beatitudes and what they mean for us in daily life. Students considered how Jesus’ teachings guide us to live with kindness, peace, and fairness, and they shared ways we can put these values into action in our classroom and community.

It has been a wonderful term of learning and growth. We are so proud of the effort and enthusiasm Year 3 has shown and look forward to continuing the journey together in Term 4!

Debra Hamilton

Year 3 teacher

St Joseph’s Parish School Weipa

Year 5 Class Newsletter – Term 4 Adventures!

Hello families!

Term 4 has been bursting with energy, creativity, and hands-on learning in Year 5! Here's a sneak peek into what we've been up to and what’s still to come...

Mathematics Magic
We’ve been diving into Statistics and Chance, exploring data, graphs, and the likelihood of everyday events. In Location and Mapping, students have been using coordinates and directional language to navigate and create maps. It’s been a great way to connect maths to the real world!

English – Growing Ideas
Our English unit has taken root in the theme of Sustainable Gardens. Students are writing persuasive articles to convince readers why sustainable gardening is important for our future. They’ve been learning how to structure arguments, use emotive language, and back up their ideas with strong evidence. Green thumbs and sharp minds all around!

Religion – The Holy Spirit
This term, we’re exploring the Fruits, Gifts, and Symbols of the Holy Spirit. Students are learning how these elements guide believers in their daily lives and how symbols like fire, wind, and the dove represent the Spirit’s presence. It’s been a thoughtful and reflective journey.

Science – Let There Be Light!
In Science, we’re investigating light—how it travels, reflects, and refracts. Students have been experimenting with mirrors, lenses, and shadows to understand how light behaves. It’s been a bright and fascinating topic!

HASS – Gold Rush Minecraft Project
History has come alive through our Gold Rush Minecraft Education project! Students are recreating the discovery of gold, life on the goldfields, the Eureka Stockade, and the impact of the gold rush on Australian history. It’s been a brilliant blend of research, creativity, and digital design.

Year 5 Camp – 51st Battalion Weipa
Camp was an unforgettable adventure! Students built their own tents and stretchers, took part in team-building challenges, went on an eco boat tour, and even got to walk the CAPS dogs! We wrapped up the day with pizzas and pool games, making memories that will last a lifetime.

We’re so proud of the enthusiasm and effort our Year 5 students are showing this term. Thank you for your continued support—stay tuned for more updates as we head toward the end of the year!

Warm regards,
The Year 5 Team (aka Miss Bell) 

Dear Parents and Carers,

Students have now completed their persuasive writing pieces. The highlight of their work was without a doubt the use of emotive language and some very colourful noun groups that really brought their arguments to life. In the final week, we will begin exploring internal monologues and the language features that contribute to them. This will ensure we have time to work through the unit, as next term time will be against us.

In Mathematics, students have completed a very visual and detailed assessment on their dream backyard. They have now turned their attention to applying percentage discounts and using percentages, decimals, and fractions to manage budgets.

Within Health, we are still working through our Real Talk unit, and this may extend into early next term to ensure we are able to complete it fully. Students have engaged respectfully and asked thoughtful questions that have sparked meaningful discussions among themselves, and hopefully these conversations have also continued at home.

Over the past two weeks, we have visited WCC several times, attending the opening assembly for their NAIDOC Week, taking part in their community day, and enjoying the NAIDOC football match. Students also took part in their first transition afternoon across at WCC. They were outstanding in the way they conducted themselves, and hopefully, they took a great deal out of the experience. There will be two more transition days next term.

Finally, to finish Term 3, students will enjoy an incursion from the Democracy in a Box team from Canberra, before wrapping up the term with a fun-filled swimming carnival.

Looking forward to hearing about adventures over the holidays and welcoming back the students for our final term of the year! 

Mr Bakes