Dear Parents and Guardians,

Next Wednesday is a very special day here at St Joseph’s as we celebrate Father’s Day with a Colour Run/Obstacle course. All parents are invited to come and run with their children on the day and join in the fun. We will also be joined by some of the PYCYC staff and local Army Cadets.

The celebration will begin at 1.30pm with a Father’s Day Liturgy presented by Prep followed by our Colour Run/Obstacle Course. 

All St Joseph’s Students will be provided with a White-Shirt and pair of sunglasses on the day. We ask that every child wear old clothes and running shoes as they will be getting wet, dirty and very colourful as we go around the course. It is also advisable that children wear bathers or a singlet top underneath their white shirt as there is lots of water involved.

The course is quite extensive, and we welcome volunteers to help set up after 3.30pm on Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning from 8am.

We are looking forward to having a fantastic and memorable Father’s Day Celebration.

At St Joseph’s we are not boastful, but it is important that we celebrate success and acknowledge our student’s achievement. 

2021 NAPLAN results have come out this week and I am proud to share with our community the significant academic growth made by both our Year 3 and 5 students across the board. 

St Joseph’s Parish School is proud to recognize that our Year 3 Students have demonstrated above average growth in their NAPLAN results in all areas assessed.

This is great news and a result of all the hard work of teachers and students focusing on individual needs and personal improvement.  We have had a big focus on numeracy and literacy development across the whole school which is obviously working as we continue in an upward trajectory.  

The strategy of staff and parents working together to develop a joint understanding of what students need to improve their learning outcomes and wellbeing for all our students has been paramount. I am extremely proud of the exceptional work happening in our school.

We look forward to sharing these results with the school community early next week, once an error on the NAPLAN site has been corrected.

Food for the Journey 

In the Catholic tradition we believe that God’s Holy Spirit is with us. The Holy Spirit especially influences our lives as we are fully initiated into our faith through the sacraments of Baptism, Eucharist and Confirmation. The Holy Spirit gifts us with a number of traits that help us on our journey of life. 

Among these gifts is one called “wonder and awe”. Many Catholics will recall that this gift is sometimes referred to as “fear of the Lord”. Pope Francis reminds us that this does not mean we should be afraid or scared of God. It means that we should acknowledge “how small we are before God and of his love and that our good lies in humble, respectful and trusting self-abandonment into his hands.” 

When we experience God’s creation, in all its forms, our only response can be wonder and awe. 

Our prayer this week is the one prayed by the Bishop during the Sacrament of Confirmation. 

All-powerful God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, 
by water and the Holy Spirit 
you freed your sons and daughters from sin 
and gave them new life. 
Send your Holy Spirit upon them 
to be their helper and guide. 
Give them the spirit of wisdom and understanding, 
the spirit of right judgment and courage, 
the spirit of knowledge and reverence. 
Fill them with the spirit of wonder and awe in your presence. 
We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen. 

With every blessing, 

Excerpt from the The Catholic Enquiry Centre Team 

PB4L Weekly Assembly and School Wide Focus 

Every Monday the school gathers for a short assembly to set the PB4L (Positive Behavior for Learning) focus for the week. St Joseph’s PB4L is based on four expectations to be respectful, responsible, resilient and ready for leaning in every class and setting in the school. This week the focus was on being respectful by following instructions the first time. Students explored the importance of this to maximize earning time every day and a way to show respect to their teacher and peers. At the assembly, posters are also given out to display in classrooms for the week and revisit the expectations as a class. You may like to have a conversation with your child about how well they have followed instructions the first time this week at St Joseph’s.  

School Uniform Reminders 

School Uniform- school shirt and shorts/skort, navy fold down socks, all black school shoes/sneakers or navy crocs 

Sports Uniform- school polo shirt and shorts/skort, navy fold down sock, all black school sneakers. 

All students must have a school hat, school bag, lunch box and drink bottle which they bring to school every day. 

Hello Prep Families, 

The Preps have had a great 2 weeks of learning and engaging with lots of things happening like book week and the fantastic parade of costumes was delightful to see. 

In Maths, we have moved on to learning about statistics and measurement. In the next few weeks, we will be exploring length, mass and capacity whilst finishing up our learning of shapes and statistics.  

In English we have been learning about procedures, we explored the traditional way of making damper and drew and wrote some simple steps for making damper, then we got to try some! Yum! Our focus for InitiaLit has been Phonics set 8: ch, v, x and y sounds. With new tricky words put, as, do, like and a new tricky words booklet will be coming home soon so keep practicing! We have been writing some astounding sentences this week.  

In science, we have been exploring chemical sciences and the different materials that we can find around us and what things are made of. 

Kindest Regards, 

Anneka and Summer

Hello Year 1 and families,  

We have had a great week with lots of celebrations and a couple of science experiments. Thankyou for all the effort creating and organising some wonderful costumes, it was a great day.  

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been experimenting with different materials and the features they have. How strong or stretchy and even how thin or short something is.  

Here are our science experiments where we explored how to make the tallest tower with uncooked spaghetti and marshmallows. 

Hello families of Year 2, 

Year 2 had a great time at book week. We all loved dressing up and explaining our characters in class. Thank you to all the parents and cares for organising costumes for the students! 

After the parade and lunch time we completed some math tasks. We played some chance, shape, and location games. In maths we are continuing to look at maps and location. Next week we will learning about slides, flips and turns. This is something that can be talked about at home…for example, can you slide me the remote? Or could you please turn the door handle?  

In science we have been looking at Earth’s Resources and how we can begin to save them. This week students looked at coal and what we use this for. We discussed the use of coal and how we access this through mining.  

Thanks for reading,  

Emily  

Year 3 had a very creative assortment of costumes for Book Week and I would like to thank you, the parents, for going above and beyond. In class, Year 3 have been very busy completing tasks on Seesaw. 

In Digital Technology, students have been learning how to create an iMovie. In pairs, students have been working hard to add photos, video and audio to create an entertaining video on their favourite animal. I have been very impressed with their enthusiasm towards this task. Over the next couple of weeks, students will be creating an iMovie to show their understanding of the patterns and relationship between the Sun, the Moon and The Earth. 

In Writing, students have had practise in writing a full procedural text. We will be completing assessment over the next couple of weeks. 

In Maths, our focus has been on addition, subtraction, multiplication and division facts. These have been improving and students are becoming more fluent in recalling their 2, 5, and 10 times tables. 

In Geography, we have been learning about States, Territories, and major cities of Australia. Students have also been completing a research task on major landmarks of Australia. 

Just some reminders: 

• Homework is sent home on Monday and collected on a Friday.  
• Overdue library books need to be returned.  

I look forward to more quality weeks of learning with Year 3. 

Regards, 

Miss Trudy Sinnamon 

Thank you to all of you for the wonderful costumes Year 4 turned up wearing last Friday! It was great to see the students enjoy themselves and express their love of reading. Some of the purchases from Book Fair are also being used during our 10-4-10 reading challenge which is lovely to see.   

This week’s focus in Maths has been division and working with 2D shapes. Year 4 tried their hand at making some tessellations and although it was challenging at times, there was great resilience shown by all students. Tessellation patterns are great at developing spatial and creative thinking skills. 

It is so nice to be back with the Year 5’s these past two weeks. We have been busy with Book Week activities last week and the continuation of learning from units that were started at the beginning of the term. How nice was it to see so many of the Year 5 students dressed up for Book Week last Friday. I must applaud the commitment from you the parents in ensuring your child had something to wear. Everyone looked amazing.  

For our English this past fortnight we have had a focus on punctuation and grammar to ensure that we are creating sentences that make sense. Doing this has ensured that a lot of the students were more confident going into an unaided writing task. We complete these each term to see how students are progressing in their writing abilities. I’m very much looking forward to marking these and providing each student feedback on how they are going and what they need to improve on.  

In Maths we have been looking at Multiplication and Division. We are all improving on our rapid recall of our multiplication facts to ensure that when we are working with 2 digit or larger numbers we can calculate quicker. This is also assisting us with our division. So far, we have used a lot of skip counting to work out our division facts but we do know that multiplication is vital in completing these equations.  

The Religion unit is starting to come to an end with students having a greater knowledge about St Mary Mackillop of the Cross. She was an amazing person and it is no wonder she is one of our patron saints. The students have been learning about how Mary and Fr Woods founded the Josephite Sisters and the connection it has to St Joseph Parishes. We are still discovering some of Mary’s great achievements with the support of her family by completing a scavenger hunt. The Year 5’s have also been delivering daily prayers to the class which they will be assessed on. So far the ones I have seen, have been amazing. How nice is it to know that our students are able to create a prayer experience for themselves and others within the class.  

Homework will be back in full swing this week now that the library is back in working order for students to borrow. Students will have some Maths to complete, reading of a book of their choice and some assigned Literacy Planet activities. Your student will be able to find these assigned to them on the home page within Literacy Planet. Homework return day is still Thursday and will go home on Fridays.  

Yr 6 News  

At the moment every student is working hard on their Science task of completing a model with an electrical working circuit in it.  This has been a process of completing their model, fitting the circuit into the model, working out how switches work, working out positions for their bulbs/motors/wires and ensuring there is enough room or too much room for the circuit to be effective. Next week the Yr 6 students will present these to younger classes and will explain how their models work.  It has been great to see teamwork, lots of problem solving and has tested each student on their time management.  It has also made them reflect, to see if their original plan of their model actually worked and what changes they needed to make.  All part of the learning process and such positive feedback about how they could improve things! 

For our English task, everyone is currently on the final draft of editing and conferencing with peers and myself with their persuasive writing piece. The focus has been to add language devices to their writing to persuade about their topic.   

The next step is to look at how to deliver an effective speech to an audience, practice their speech and next week they will deliver it to a selected audience.  

Some of the topics are:   Why Weipa Tackle World should be bigger! 

                                    Fishing should be included in the school curriculum at St Joseph’s. 

                                    How we can help to clean up Pennefather beach. 

Our Maths work has been all about the connection between decimals, fractions and percentages.  It takes lots of repetition and practice to get this concept right and to work out the formula or strategies to use.  Everyone works differently and this has been great to share different problem solving skills and the steps used to work problems out.  Great work everyone.  We are on track! 

Super excited about our camp that is in Term 4.  Lots of planning and discussion this week. 

Busy but happy learning in Yr 6. 

Libby Lange