Thursday 14th November - The Annual Twilight Swimming Carnival - 4.00 - 8.00pm please see below for more information.

Friday 22nd November - Starry Starry Night

Wednesday 27th November - Year 6 Graduation Dinner

Thursday 28th November - End of Year Mass

Friday 29th November - Last day of school

Dear Parents / Caregivers

Welcome to week 6 of Term 4. The term is flying past.  We have been very busy with designing and constructing our habitats, writing our information reports, growing plants and learning how to video each other. The students are also busy creating pictures using warm and cool colours. 

Starry Starry Night (22nd of November)

The students in Prep are dressing up as angels. Please dress your child/children in white for the night. Their wings will be provided along with their halo’s. 

Hamper items

The Prep classroom is lucky enough to have the Pamper Hamper.  We would appreciate any pampering items that’s brought in. Thank you to everyone who has brought something in. 

The students are enjoying swimming lessons on a Friday morning and maybe even a little bit more the bus ride there and back. 

The boys playing soccer at lunchtime. 

Please find the tricky words below that we have been working on:

Thank you to everyone who brought in boxes. 

This fortnight we had 70% of students attending school 95% of the time or more.  Thank you to those parents who communicated absences in advance, we were able to organise learning events based on each students needs.  If you know your student is going to be away over the next few weeks, please let me know so I can take this into consideration when planning.  Of course illness is a different matter and students should stay home to recover and limit the spread of germs.  

In Reading, we have been learning to identify syllables (sound beats) in words, use chunking to break unknown words into decodable sounds, and blending these sounds together to read the whole word.  It is important when we do this that students sound out the word, say the whole word and continue reading. If students fall into the trap of going back to the start of the sentence and re-reading the whole sentence every time they reach an unknow word, they become fatigued and lose the flow of meaning.  This in turn can impact comprehension and the enjoyment of reading. We will continue to focus on passage reading over the next few weeks, with an emphasis on fluency.

In Writing we have been learning to persuade our readers by using emotive words, facts and targeting our reasons to suit our audience.  Sorry in advance if you have some argumentative students over the next few weeks! Next week we will be focussing on starting our writing at the moment of change.  We have banned the boring - no sentence starters like: On the weekend… In the morning I… We will begin our writing at the start of the most interesting event. You can support at home by asking the students what the most interesting part of their day was (could be the best part of their day or it might be the worst part).

In Maths we have been consolidating our number sense by solving simple (and some tricky) addition and subtraction problems.  The students have been getting really excited about identifying the MANY different strategies they now know to solve problems - doubles, friends of tense, partitioning, counting on, counting back etc.  We will continue this learning by incorporating number talks and connections to place value.

I hope you are all enjoying practising Little Donkey at home.  Just a reminder if you could please start bringing in costumes for Starry, Starry Night now, we will have a few dress rehearsals at school.  Students may choose whether they are Mary, Joseph or a traveller (in which case they need a towel for their head and sheet or towel for dress/toga), or a donkey (in which case we have made a mask/ears at school and they just need to wear “donkey” clothes - brown, grey or white).

Can you believe we are over halfway through the term already? Christmas will be here before we know it!

Our class is looking forward to Starry Starry Night on Friday 22nd November from 5:30pm. We hope to see you all there!

The girls are asked to dress as Angels in all white and can wear fairy wings or a halo headpiece if they have one. The Preps have kindly offered to lend us white fairy wings if need be.

Boys are dressing up as shepherds. A sheet with a belt and cloth over their head will work well.

Please bring your outfit to school in a labelled plastic bag for dress rehearsals when you can. We will then send them home the day before Starry Starry night so that we know everyone has a costume and is organised.

We are now in the thick of assessment time. A chance for me to formally gather what your child has learnt in each subject throughout the term. Please inform me if your child will be away so I can organise a time to assess them. 

Our attendance is very low at the moment which makes it tricky to complete tasks. We currently have 11 students in the red zone which means they are attending school less than 85% of the time. Let’s finish the year off strong!

Thanks,

Holly

In Year 3 we are full throttle mode heading to the end of term. The students have been super busy working towards finishing off their procedural texts. I have been blown away by how much they have learnt and how detailed their explanation on how to do something. In Geography, the students were challenged this week with having to remember the continents, oceans and climates around the world. In our Math lessons we have been looking at probability and angles. We have increased our vocabulary around the correct terms to use for when we are making predictions of an outcome or event. The students explored their surroundings for acute, right and obtuse angles and were able to correctly sort and identify the features of these angles. In Religion we have explored what good news it and how we receive and spread it to our family and friends. The students reflected on how Jesus spread the good news and why he did it the way he did. Our Science unit is coming to an end with students understand the concept of heat and how it is transferred. We will be building our pizza box solar ovens in Week 7, so please bring one into school over the next week. A reminder to all students that we need to start bringing our Starry Starry Night costumes into school ready for our practices and the actual night. Our attendance this fortnight has been a lot better with 13 out of 20 students here above 95% of the time. Great work! 

Our attendance for this fortnight is 55% of students attending school 95% or more. There are also a number of students in the red area for attendance, meaning that their attendance is less than 90%. This is an important time of the year for students to be at school every day with lots going on in the classroom and around the school. If your child is unlikely enough to catch the sickness that has been going around, a day of rest is probably best for them.  With less than three weeks left until school finishes, lets save the holidays and getaways until after school finishes! 

Our hamper item is christmas party items. If you could please start bringing in items for our hamper like bon bons or decorations that would be great. 

This year for Starry Starry night the students will be singing Drummer boy. The committee has organised for the students to each get a yellow shirt to represent hope. The students will need to wear dark blue or black shorts. 

Thank you to all the parents that have been supporting their children with their homework at home. It has been great to see many children bringing their homework back on Tuesday with the reading log signed off. Practising reading helps students improve their vocabulary, comprehension and understanding of texts that support the work they do at school. It has been rewarding to see the growth in students' reading abilities over the year and this is definitely helped by reading at home.

We have been busy working on narratives in writing. Through some different activities, we have been exploring our knowledge of the structure and vocabulary associated with narratives. We have also been consolidating our knowledge of punctuation by correcting our own work and making sure what we write makes sense. Below is a photo of one of the stories multiple students created together.

• The students are deep into researching their Inquiry topic for our Integrated Unit. Many students have chosen local topics and over the next week we have some guest speakers coming in to help us gain more knowledge and understanding.  Once their research is complete, we will do some peer review and after teacher conferencing, the students will create a Multimodal presentation. I am impressed with how the students have taken on this challenge and positively accepted feedback so far.  We are all looking forward to the end result of this task.

Environmental Team visit

                 

• In Maths we have reviewed elements of measurement and fractions.  Looking at ordering equivalent fractions and decimals on a number line, converting to the lowest term and comparing different fractions.  In English we have been revisiting the parts of speech daily (prepositions, adverbs, articles etc) and we all feel that we have a better knowledge of what each part of speech does and how to use in our writing.  The genre have been writing about is a Letter to the Editor. We have so far written 2 letters about topics of interest and next week will write our assessment piece. This has taught the students about letter writing skills like writing their address and formatting a letter correctly.

• We are preparing for Starry night with a lot more enthusiasm.  The students will require a white tshirt for this, a note will be sent home regarding this.  Lots of great swimming happening at the pool and we are looking forward to presenting the Remembrance day Assembly on Monday.

• Only 3 weeks of school left, so lots to do and lots of learning still to come.

Congratulations to Charlie Lawrence who has been selected to represent Far North Queensland in the Under 12’s development Cricket team that will travel to Brisbane in January to play for the Ian Healy Cup against 7 other teams. 

As the end of year approaches, the year 6 students are finishing off assessments and preparing for transition to year 7. We visited Western Cape College in week 2, and each Monday from now until the end of term we will be having follow-up visits to learn about the school most of us will be attending next year. 

Our events to mark the end of the year will have special significance for the year 6 group as we prepare to leave St Joseph’s school. Our graduation dinner on Wednesday 27 November at the school will be an opportunity for us to celebrate the achievements of the past and look forward to the future. We have been preparing some special music for the Starry Starry Night concert which is also at the school on Friday 22 November, and we look forward to seeing all students and families there. The year 5 and 6 students are collecting gifts of BBQ, camping and fishing items for a hamper which will be auctioned on 22 November.

Year 6 students making hacky-sacks for sale on our Socktober mission day on October 31. We helped raise over $300 for Catholic missions.

During terms three and four, Year 6 have been reading buddies with year 1 students twice each week. This has helped students in both year levels practice and improve our reading, as well as being a lot of fun.