NAIDOC Week

This week we celebrate NAIDOC Week. While NAIDOC Week is usually celebrated earlier in the year, it was moved this year because of COVID 19.

Teachers have been working hard to plan some activities for the whole school to participate in over NAIDOC Week to help deepen our understanding and appreciation of the First Nations peoples of our country and local area. We will also gather as a school on Friday for a NAIDOC Week Liturgy. Unfortunately, we are still unable to invite parents and families along because of social distancing requirements but will record the celebration and share it with all families.

Prep -    Ella Coleman, Amelie Hancock and Riley Wright

Year 1 - Joshua Emerick and Madison Johnson

Year 2 - Jed Hall, Jack Potter and Claire Pritchard

Year 3 - Nate Robinson and Sophia Clements

Year 4 - Jade Andresen and Max Lawerance and                                           Ayden Vogler

Year 5 - Ryan Potter and Sharli Wallace

Year 6 - Luke Clegg, Charlie Hockey, Angus Larcombe                                   and Jasmine Scikluna

Let's teach our kids road safety

From 15 to 22 November, it is National Road Safety Week- a time to wear a yellow ribbon and remind our students how to be safe on and around roads. It is so important to teach our students how to travel safety to and from school each day but we need your help. Please encourage your child to practice safe behaviours around roads. Our School Crossing Supervisors have some great tips to share on road safety:

• always STOP, LOOK, LISTEN and THINK before crossing a road
• wait for the School Crossing Supervisor to signal it is safe to cross
• before crossing as a pedestrian (zebra) crossing, wait for all cars to stop
• at pedestrian traffic lights wait for the ‘green man’ or the green WALK sign and never cross when they can see a ‘red man’ or the red DON’T WALK sign.

We also encourage you to get involved by wearing a yellow ribbon and committing to road safety by:

• Explaining traffic signs and signals with your child
• Driving slow around schools and remaining attentive
• Looking out for children and school crossing supervisors entering the road
• Making sure all of your passengers are wearing a seatbelt.

The safety of our students is our highest priority and together we can build a safer school community.

For more information view the school travel options on the Transport and Main Roads website.

Dear Parents and Caregivers,  

In Literacy this week we have been reading The Fun Bus. We have then written about our own bus and bus driver, when writing we are focusing on sentence structure, sounding out words and integrating the phonograms that we have learned.  We are continuing to practice the phonograms:  /a – z/ /wh/ /oo/ /ay/ /th/ /ou/ and /ng/. 

In Maths we have introduced capacity and students had fun experimenting with different sized containers in the sandpit, they were able to order the containers from smallest to largest capacity. 

In Religion we have been looking at the symbols of the Catholic Church and what they mean, we have also discussed events that we celebrate, how we celebrate them and what a celebration means to us. For most of the students a celebration means spending time with family and friends doing something fun! 

In HAAS we have explored where we live and our place in Earth, we have learned about our school, our street, our town, state and country! 

We have been busily practicing our wonderful songs for Starry Starry night which we are looking forward to singing for you on the night! 

Andrieka Knight 

This week in Year 1, we created our very own Magic Faraway Trees with our own Land at the Top.  The students wrote a story about the adventures that happen in their land, and have recorded themselves reading their stories on SeeSaw. 

In Maths, we have been learning to measure length and capacity using informal units.  We extended this learning to order and compare length and capacities.  Next week, we will be learning about time durations and directions (north, south, east, west, left, right, up, down).  We will be creating treasure maps with directions on how to locate our hidden treasure.  This could be a fun game for us to practise at home.  

In Religion we are learning about the Nativity story and the significance of the birth of Christ.  Next week, we will be developing our Starry Starry Night performance, and we will practise this over the next few weeks.  We are very excited to share our joy for learning about the Nativity at our Starry Starry Night concert.  

Could you please make sure all library books are returned this week.  We have a number of students with overdue books, now would be a great time to have a hunt around for them and return them.  We would like to do a stocktake in our library ready for the new year. 

Hi Families and Friends of St Joseph’s,

We are steaming ahead this term and are striving for kindness this week. Each day we use a different adjective that Year 2 strive towards, and this week we will cover words such as forgiving, friendly, generous, helpful, and sympathetic.

Even though there was no assembly in week 4, there were still 2 star students for that week. Both Kade Larcombe and Archie Carroll are to be commended on their fantastic efforts!

In the classroom this week we have been exploring special places and connections we have to those places. Students are interviewing a partner about their connections and gathering data, such as how they get to their place or how often they visit. We will then represent this data into a bar graph, and conclude with a final summary of year 2’s connections to places!

In week 7, St Joseph’s are holding a Starry Starry Night like no other! More information on a time and date are to be released soon, however each year level will need to come dressed in a specific colour. We have chosen 2 Christmas songs that year 2 will perform – Little Drummer Boy and Santa Claus is Coming to Town. Each song has some actions which the students are encouraged to practice at home and also learn the words. We are rehearsing at school too and are quickly becoming a great group of singers!

I hope you have a great week!

Warm Regards

Emily

The science investigations have continued in Year Three as we continue to explore heat and energy in Science. This week the students explored conduction and convection heat transfer. They used ice cubes to investigate which type of heat transfer would melt the ice the quickest. Like any scientific investigation the students spent time hypothesising (making predictions) before carrying out the investigation and then reflecting on their predictions once the results were in.  

Next week, Year 3 will be leading the NAIDOC week prayer assembly. Earlier in the year we looked at the Dreamtime story The Rainbow Serpent. Did you know that the Rainbow Serpent travelled to Cape York? We have enjoyed reading this story which is significant for our community and the students have been illustrating parts of the story which will be displayed on Friday. 

Just a few gentle reminders 

• Homework needs to be submitted on Fridays. The final week will be Week 7. 
• Students need to bring in a piece of fruit to eat during crunch and sip in class and a drink bottle.  
• Laptops should be coming to school charged and ready for learning every day. 

In faith, 

Mrs Michelle Gear 

Dear Parent and Guardians, 

Welcome to Week 6, the weeks are certainly flying. We are busily working on our Assembly Prayer for Mission Week this week and practising our Christmas Concert songs for Starry Starry night. 

Maths  

For Maths the students in Year 4 are looking at Fractions and produced some fantastic Posters for to show their representations for a Homework Task. 

Reminders 

Library and Homework 

Library Day is Wednesday – please ensure Library bag is packed on that day and Homework is due in each Thursday and will be sent out on Friday 

Health and Physical Education 

Teacher: Melanie Turner (Thursday) 

Physical Education is Thursday – please wear Sports Uniform on that day 

Health Lesson 

Teacher: Mr Simmons (Thursday) 

Daniel Morcombe Program 

Auslan 

Teacher: Meg Newall (Friday) 

Communication 

If you have any questions or queries, please email us on 

mturner@cns.catholic.edu.au and sulanas@cns.catholic.edu.au 

and we will endeavour to return your email within 24 hours. 

Regards, 

Mrs T and Ms U. 

We have been busy learning about how to prepare for Natural Disasters. We have identified the safest place in our homes by drawing a floor plan and listening to authorities advice on the best place to bunker down if needed. Students recognised the bathroom was the safest place because of having bathtubs that could be filled with water, a window to allow fresh air to flow, a space that was big enough to lay down to rest and a secure place in the home. We also used a government ready site to play a game where we built an emergency kit. Our next step is doing up a flyer or poster to promote the need for a preparation kit and what should be included.  

Our writing lessons have been all about our Natural Disaster reports. The students are identifying what happened and how to prevent or be better prepared when their chosen disaster occurs. This week students will present this information to the class. We can’t wait to learn about a variety of natural disasters that have occurred around the world.  

In Maths we have been telling the time to the minute as well as in 24 hour time. We are finding this a great challenge at the moment and are getting better at telling the time in a variety of ways. Our knowledge and skills on using timetables and timelines are getting better as well.   

How much fun did we all have on Friday for Mission Day. We got to wear our crazy socks and participate in a joyful activity in the afternoon. We acknowledged that by participating in one of the activities, it brings joy to us and those around us.   

Events or dates to remember in coming weeks: 

Wednesday 11th November- Remembrance Day 

Monday 16th November- Bump up Day 

Tuesday 17th & Wednesday 18th November- Wonders of Living  

Thursday 19th November- Western Cape Crusader Cup 

Friday 20th November- Starry Starry Night 

Yr 6 Newsletter 

As part of our Yr 6 Leadership journey, each student is part of a Committee. We had to decide on a Call To Action task that would benefit others in our school or in the community.  

Stewardship Committee   Our committee includes Liam, Luke and Jess. Our Mission is educating the school and younger grades how to recycle.  The students have been shown how to put their poppers, yakults, water bottles and any other recyclable bottles into a bin called MR BIN. On Friday we count up the bottles and poppers and then we check for any rubbish. Then we pull out of a hat which class will win the icypoles for the week. So far we have counted $20.20 that we have raised for a charity like CAPS or RFDS.  The teachers won last week as they have one in their staff room.   

Keep up the great recycling everyone!   This is only after 2 weeks.   We will keep you updated. 

Mission Committee     On Friday 6th November we are promoting awareness of people in need all over the world for Mission Day.  Jake, Charlie, Jaiden, Angus and Thomas are all running this wonderful day where all the students are free to wear any silly socks or shoes they want?  You still have to wear your uniform but you can make these socks as silly and weird as you want!   Each class will be participating in a Mission day activity, and we as the school leaders will be helping the teachers. We can’t wait to see your silly socks and shoes on Friday!!! 

Charity Committee   We are the charity committee: Sienna, Sophie, Kai, Ramona, Jasmine and Kyan. Our goal is to organise each class to collect hampers each week from Week 7. We will then donate these hampers to a charity.  Our CALL TO ACTION is to show the younger grades how important it is to give to the underprivileged in communities and to always see a need to do things without asking.  Each class will be given a specific item to collect in their hamper, we will check in each day and encourage them to bring in items.  In the last week of school we will collect each hamper and prepare them for giving to charity.   We will be around each class next week explaining this.  

WCC visits:  

We have enjoyed our Transition days, today being our last. We have been going to a core class each week with a different teacher and experiencing some of the class routines they do every day. The last 2 weeks we have had our lunch over there as well which gave us the opportunity to see where things are, where to sit and how to get lunch at the tuckshop if we needed too.  I was exceptionally proud of how our St Joseph’s students handled the change, the excitement, the nerves, the change of pace and were respectful.  I think they are all feeling so much more confident about Yr 7 now. 

In class, for English we have been exploring different songs and deconstructing their lyrics.  This has helped us understand what many songs mean and how bias can influence what and how we think when we listen to music.  We have spent the last few weeks discussing different language features and how they influence music, lyrics, poetry and what the message of songs portrays. 

We looked at a few songs of protest, like “From Little Things, Big things Grow” and “Gadigal Land.”  Each student then chose a song of their own to analyse and examine the language features. This has been pretty challenging, but we have learnt lots about songs and the hidden message behind many. We have now started writing our own lyrics for a song, following a format and using different language features like rhyme, repetition, emphasis, metaphors etc.  Next week we will add music to our lyrics. 

In Maths we have been looking at graphs, data, timetables and statistics. We have learnt how these are used in everyday living and our job has been learning how to interpret and read these different types of maths examples. 

In Geography we are looking at different indigenous groups around the world, locating them on the world map and also discussing different cultures.  Our focus is to compare similarities and differences between them. 

Always learning and being respectful! 

Year 6 Students and Miss Libby