17 March 2017

Newsletter Articles

News from the Principal

Dear Families,

As we travel towards the end of the first term, I would like to invite your feedback on a number of areas that we are currently focusing on throughout the school. Some of these areas will support requests for working parties to commence in Term 2 to provide opportunity for collaborative and active participation through the school and wider community. Each newsletter, I will discuss one area to initiate feedback.

Positive And Responsible Behaviour Model

In the school calendar at the beginning of the year, we provided a model to all families to assist with awareness and support of the revised Positive and Responsible Behaviour Policy. The model provided in the calendar identifies the five levels that we refer to when providing support or recognition of behaviour. Attached to this newsletter is the policy.

March 17th identifies an awareness day in Australia to remind us all that bullying is not accepted. Throughout our policy we identify the definition of bullying. This has been part of teacher discussions this term with students and is an important awareness in schools.

We are also supported by Code of Conducts for staff, parents and volunteers in our school which support the adults who work or are part of the community of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart School.

If you or your child are being impacted upon by bullying, please contact your child’s classroom teacher or the leadership team for support.

Our Positive and Responsible Behaviour Model provides opportunity for mediation, reflection and restorative justice. The significant practices are preventative ones, that enable all in our community to have a ‘toolkit’ of ways in which we can solve problems and find solutions. Modelling to our children the appropriate way to respond to conflict is the most powerful gift we can provide them in their lives.

If you would like to provide any feedback on the levels or policy implementation from Term 1, please feel free to contact me or email on scounty@cns.catholic.edu.au.

This year, we will be establishing a school board at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart School. Please see the attached letter which will describe the process and timeline. This is a great step forward for our school community and will align us further with other schools in the Diocese. A school board is a significant source for support to the Parish Priest and the Principal of a Catholic School.

Thank you to staff and parents who have completed surveys for my appraisal and provided feedback to support my leadership. If any one would like to have an interview with the panel, please email me on scounty@cns.catholic.edu.au as there are still some places available on Wednesday and Thursday of next week. We have also held two forums to receive information on what is working at our school and ways we can continue to improve. We will continue to host forums such as these to provide parents and students the opportunity for being part of our ongoing school renewal.

Last week, staff actively participated in curriculum development and planning for learning environments that are contemporary, engaging and contextual to our school and location. This was a great opportunity for our staff and I appreciate the positive feedback that I have received in relation to the process.

This week, most of our staff attended a workshop where they learnt how to create tiny turtles out of ghost nets. I am confident that you will see evidence of these throughout the classes. Exciting times ahead!

Take care, Au esoau
Sharon County
Principal

Year 5/6 Class News

Our Tree of Life

Grade 5 /6 have completed their Tree of Life artwork with a prayer which asks the community to protect the spectacular natural places and beautiful creatures in the Torres Strait. We also had a visit from Melinda McLean, Project Officer at the TSRA Land and Sea Management Unit.

We learned about how climate change will affect marine life, particularly turtles. Turtles are struggling to find places to nest because beaches are being eroded due to high rainfall, storms and high tides. Sometimes turtles can't find places to lay their eggs so they go back out to see and absorb the eggs. If this continues to happen the turtle population will decline.

As a class we have decided to write a letter to Warren Entsch MP asking him to start a conversation with the community about clean wind energy as a local solution to reducing climate change. We will report back on that step in our learning net time.

Year 4/5 Class News

In Year 4/5 our class rules are Respect for Self, Respect for Others and Respect for Property/The Environment. We are striving to live these out in our actions and behaviours.

We have been learning about the impact climate change has on the environment around the globe and we know more about how it impacts on Australia, especially the Torres Strait. Everyone has been engaged in this learning and sharing their understandings to the class. The children have been exploring communities affected by these extreme weather conditions.

We have been learning about what the features of an informative text are and we have continued to investigate what makes a good narrative and how we can plan a narrative and use that plan as a reference and checklist. We are also learning about the need to edit our narratives in our English lessons and to use a checklist. We have been using our public speaking voices to read in character and use various expressions and tones that convey emotions of anger, joy and happiness.

In Maths we have been focusing on learning strategies to solve problems and learning to use number patterns to help us in our basic recall of number facts and times tables. We have been revising our times tables and quick recall of number facts. We have been learning the language of maths such as, symmetry, vertex, acute, three dimensional, etc. Our assessment of maths knowledge and understanding continues this week.

In our RE we celebrated Ash Wednesday by attending a very reverent mass and we set some goals on how we can improve ourselves as better people during Lent by praying more, giving more and being more respectful. We have also been focusing on the various community groups we belong to and what are the benefits of having these different community groups around us. We continued to read Bible stories on how Jesus was on a mission to improve every community that he visited with his knowledge, wisdom and love. We learn from one another and share our learnings and the well- being of all students and members of our school community is discussed each day.

Thank you to Ms Tilly for teaching us about nutrition and how important good food is compared to foods that have poor nutrition .Every week we learnt many new facts. I won’t feel so guilty now when I eat a snickers bar as I now know each one contains twenty two peanuts! Our sessions in the pool have been great and we thank our many helpers in the pool and for being part of this great school community.

Regards,
Peter Shorthouse

Year 2/3 Class News

We have started our Science unit Living and Non-Living Things with no better way than having tadpoles at various stages in the room. A big thankyou to Abbie's mum, Bonnie for coming in and showing the class the tadpoles and frogs. It was very informative. A HUGE thanks again to Bonnie.

The swimming program is also going well with some of 2/3 swimmers perfecting their breathing and correcting their strokes in Freestyle, Breaststroke and Backstroke. Great job Ahliyah, Jacob, Xander, Shauna, Hannah, Cayden and Ned. They are becoming stronger swimmers. Who knows? They may even make it to one of the future Olympic Games!!!

In Maths, 2/3 have been busy with Measurement, Estimation and exploring metres and centimetres. We measured our height as well and it appears that we have some tall kids but Ms Harriet is still the tallest.

Year 1 Class News

Year one has been very busy over the last couple of weeks talking about the value of our memories, presenting in a semi-formal manner in class, and comparing their memories with other family members. During week 10, they will be displaying artwork that depicts their 'golden' memory and parents will be invited to come along to view the display. More details will follow when dates are confirmed.

In Maths we have been working with tens and ones. The students have been looking at being able to count larger numbers faster if they group into tens and have used paddlepop sticks to assist this. It has been great to see how fast the students are progressing with this and I know that there has been much support from home to help them learn to skip count in twos, fives and tens, so thank you parents!

We have just changed over to a new sight word/spelling word system which you have probably encountered before; the Magic Words. There is a booklet in every child's homework folder for them to learn the spelling of the first 100 magic words. Please also check that your child can recognise these words as sight words. As they finish each set, they can move onto the next one at a pace that suits the individual.

Seeds have been planted by every child and they have sprouted very quickly which has been exciting to watch. The year ones are going to be selling their plants on a Mothers' Day stall next term, so please keep a look out for more notices about the stall and ways to help.

Home readers are a vital part of building literacy in year one. Can you please encourage your child to read and discuss their home reader with you every afternoon? There has been rapid progression for those students who are reading daily which really emphasises how frequent, supported reading is one of the best ways to improve reading skills. Comprehension can be encouraged by asking your child to retell the story, or explain the actions of the character. Doing this in a positive, fun way is key to making this something your child wants to do.

As parent-teacher interviews approach, please feel free to make an appointment to discuss your child's progress.

Kind regards,
Stephanie Hogan

Prep Class News

Congratulations Lucia McKinney, Poppy McLean and Kaitlyn See Kee on being our award recipients in week 6. Last week’s award winners were Nate Jones and Isabelle Bryce.

Goodbye and Best Wishes to Lucia and all the McKinney family as you move from Horn Island to your new home and school in Brisbane. We will all miss you in prep!

In Prep this fortnight we have had fun with;

• Making timelines of our personal history.

• Creating St Patrick’s Day Hats in construction time.
• Watching our tadpoles as their legs grow.
• Reading sentences in our frequent sentence book.
• Becoming experts in coding the Bee Bots during Maths.
• Having cupcakes with Lucia for her last week in our class.

Please contact us at the school/email below if you have any further queries,

Helen Osborne
hosborne@cns.catholic.edu.au

Hammond Campus Prep-Prep News

Playing in the sand was an opportunity for all pre-preps to feel the sand through their hands and enjoyed digging with shovels in the sand to fill trucks or cooking utensils like pots and pans. The children will spend more time in the sand pit. Water play is our next adventure; filling and pouring and having fun!

We have had the opportunity and enjoyable learning experience of our IT skills from Ms Yvonne Grant our teacher librarian who demonstrated the use of ‘Bee Bots’ and Pre-prep Ipads. It was fun to learn of the correct procedures and usage skills of these technological incredible tools.

Our Phonological Awareness program we are covering daily which consists of a letter i.e. ‘S’, learning its sound, drawing, painting and cutting out letters and pictures of the particular letter for the week.

Reading is done daily through Shared Reading and our Pre-Lit Readers that are discussed and shared by our class. It is lovely to hear the questioning and ideas that are interesting background knowledge of the children’s personal lifestyles which they link to the stories read.

The children have taken responsibility in taking roles of taking turns to shake our shaker in order to stop our activities and pack away plus ‘Show and Share’ which our class has started of a specific toy or object/book or picture they would like to bring along and share to the class. Plus, each child has a turn to say our ‘Prayer’ before our fruit break, morning tea and lunch.

‘Thank You’ to all of the pre-preps who have worked hard and to all of their supportive parents that have enabled their child to receive an award on parade for either SEL or Christian in Action. Well Done!

Kind Regards,
Marion Ball & Dorothy Cowley
Pre-Prep Teacher & School Officer

Hammond Campus News

Congratulations to our award winners over the past four weeks: In Week Seven, Fhistina, Aleon, Demond and Nola were congratulated on using their confidence and persistence during their swimming lesson. We congratulated Neville, Elsie Jo’Liyah, Dakota, Aaron and Saskia for showing the keys of confidence, persistence and getting along to assist his classmate during class time. Congratulations to Miss Dorothy and Miss Seba for always going above and beyond in assisting the teachers in their daily teaching. All students have been working extremely hard in class. Keep up the great efforts!

Cultural curriculum in our classroom has started off very well. We would like to say thank you to our Hammond Island community members Aka Lala, Florence Levi, Opera Pearson, Ada Pearson, Sheree Nona and Richard Pearson for sharing their knowledge and for teaching the students their cultural songs, dance and language.

Last week students were excited to travel to TI Campus to spend the day in different classrooms learning with their peers.

We have several events on during the last few weeks of school.

One more swimming lesson on this Friday 17 March.

Swimming Carnival is Friday 24 March: a program is being finalised and will be sent home shortly.

Parent teacher interviews: a letter informing you of your time has been sent home. Please let us know if you cannot make your allocated time so we can try and reschedule.

Students enjoyed learning about measurement with Mr Arndt in their Maths lesson; measuring how far different objects travel when they are projected through the air from their handmade catapults. (Thanks Mrs Davi for making them for us!)

Please don’t hesitate to come and see us if you have any questions or concerns. Mina big eso to parents and families for your flexibility and continued support.

Yours in Education,
Mrs Ceceila Davi, Mrs Brihony Jones,Ms Dorothy Cowley,Miss Seba Sabatino

Indigenous Liaison Officer News

I would like to say thank you to all the parents/carers and the P & F Association President for attending last Wednesday and Thursday Evening "CUPPA AND YARN". I will also follow up the Parents and Carers who couldn't attend by Home visit or catch up when dropping their children off at school. Please feel free to contact me.

Indigenous Liaison Officer Hours:

Wednesday to Friday between 9.00am - 3.00pm

Contact Details:

(07) 40692203 (Office)
0409 062 633 (School Mobile)

Email:

cbenjamin@cns.catholic.edu.au

Our Award Winners – Week 6 & 7

Week 6 Awards

Week 7 Awards

Photos

Thank you Miss Chelsea and Miss Katrina for making our healthy banana and yoghurt snacks. They were so yummy!

Term 1 Events

2017 Special Events and Public Holidays

Community Announcements

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