21 July 2021

Newsletter Articles

FROM THE PRINCIPAL

Welcome back as we commence a busy Term 3.

For the next few weeks, we will be conducting quite a few Prep enrolment interviews for 2022 and hosting a number of new families as we begin to show them around our school facilities. Due to the nature of these interviews and the time the process takes, I may not always be as available over the next few weeks as I usually prefer to be. If you need to contact the school further than your classroom teachers, please ring through to the office and one of the Assistant Principals will be available if needed.

Last week I was very fortunate to attend the Catholic School’s Challenge Cup at St Brendan’s in Yeppoon. As per usual, the event was a smashing success even though the rain impinged on the netball draw and venues.

Joey’s netball and rugby league teams were extremely successful as they both swept their pools to make the final four to compete for their respective competitions.

Unfortunately, both teams were narrowly defeated in their semi-finals by the teams that went on to be the eventual carnival champions.

The netballers came 4th out of over 40 teams and the rugby league team came 3rd out of over 20 teams. With these results, as a school we came 3rd overall across the entire Diocese of Rockhampton. This includes every Catholic school from Mackay in the north, Bundaberg in the south, Longreach in the west and everything in between.

This is a HUGE accomplishment for our little family school from Park Avenue as we continue to compete and do well against much larger schools.

To the coaches and parents, your children are wonderful. They showed tremendous heart and skill while competing and represented our school tremendously.

I truly believe that we can win this overall competition in the near future.

Well done to all involved from a very proud and grateful Principal.

A special thankyou also to JP McCrohon who transported our tents to and from the venue. Your acts of kindness are much appreciated.

CHALLENGE CUP MEDALS

Netball

Best and Fairest – Ava Tranberg
Coaches Award – Amelia Horton

Rugby League

Best and Fairest – Daniel Tanner
Coaches Award – Diesel Gorringe

Just a reminder that in the next week or so we are scheduled to have our new Upper School Ninja Course installed at the Haynes Street end of the school. This should have very little impact on the school other than some play space being unavailable for a few days. The biggest impact will likely be that we are getting a top up of soft fall chip bark in the Lower Precinct Adventure Playground which means our youngest students white socks will not be white for very long. Our students are excited with anticipation.

Last week the Year 4 parents received correspondence from myself in regard to Mrs Vaz De Miranda taking time off to look after her health. Gisele met with me over the holiday break and let me know that she was unable to continue teaching full-time for the remainder of Term 3. I have provided support for both Gisele as well as Mrs Elizabeth Carter who continues to ensure the continuity and consistency of learning experiences in Year 4. As soon as I am able, I will advise parents who will be joining Elizabeth in Year 4 for the remainder of the Term.

Congratulations to Cassius, Gustavo, Hayley, Quinn, Zaeleigh and their families as these students celebrated the sacrament of First Holy Communion at Our Lady Help of Christians last Saturday evening. This signifies another major step along your faith filled journey as Christians called to spread the Good News of God’s love for all.

Well done to Sacraments Coordinator, Beryl Mills and Joey’s APRE Bernadette Brennan for their commitment to helping these students, and the other students who will be celebrating over the coming weeks, and their families travel this Christian journey together.

Have a great week.

Don’t Forget …

• Prep Enrolment Interviews for 2022. Weeks 1-3 in Term 3
• July Board Meeting. Wed 21st July @ 5:30pm in the Library
• CAPRAS Cup Gala Day. Sat 31st July
• Children’s Mass. Sat 31st July in OLHC Church @ 6:30pm
• Catholic Education Week. 25th – 31st July
• Prep 2022 offers emailed out 20th August

Regards
Bernard Fitzgerald
Principal - St. Joseph’s Catholic School Park Avenue

St Joseph’s 2021 School Improvement Priorities:

• Writing
• Parent Engagement
• Social Emotional Learning

RELIGIOUS MATTERS

18th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Jesus pities the crowd, sheep without a shepherd
Mark 6:30-34

Have you thought? Prayer and reflection

Jesus demonstrated how important it is to engage in times of quiet prayer and reflection. When you expend a lot of time and energy in the service of others it is essential to reflect on those experiences, to learn from them and consider what you’d do differently next time. It is also important that any ministry that seeks to be based in the message of Jesus can only remain so if it is fuelled by prayer. Only through prayerful dialogue with God can we learn what God desires for us.

@Liturgy Help – Greg Sunter

Liturgical Celebrations Coming Up

*OLHC – Our Lady Help of Christians church – next to school
*MPA – Multipurpose Area (Basketball court)

Peer Support

Our whole school started Peer Support sessions this week. The children will be participating in a new module, Moving Forward which focuses on resilience. The experiences in the module help children to identify their qualities and strengths, develop skills, respond with a range of strategies and seek support when faced with challenges. In this session, the children will establish connections with other members of their group and develop their group agreement to enable them to work well together. The children will discuss an example of a challenging situation and some resilient and non-resilient responses.

You are encouraged to discuss with your child what they can do to help them take an active role in Peer Support.

You Can Do It!

We are now at the halfway mark for the school year, so we are halfway through the You Can Do It! social-emotional learning program. YCDI focuses on teaching the children positive attitudes and behaviours. You may have seen the 5 keys in the learning spaces. These are the behaviours YCDI explicitly teaches. This week we look at Confident Behaviour.

Confident Behaviour: attempting hard work first before asking for help, sharing a new idea with a teacher or the class, reading a difficult word out loud, coming up to the board, putting up your hand to ask your teacher to explain something again.

Positive Attitudes that help Develop a Young Person’s Confidence

• Accepting Myself means that, when I make a mistake or don’t understand something, thinking that I am not useless or a total failure, I am still proud of me.
• Taking Risks means preferring but not needing to be successful and thinking that it’s good to try to learn new things even though I might not be able to do it.
• Being Independent means preferring but not needing the approval of others and thinking that it’s important for me to try new activities and to speak up even if classmates think I’m silly or stupid.
• I Can Do It means thinking that, when learning something new, I am more likely to be successful than to fail.

Bernadette Brennan
Assistant Principal Religious Education

CURRICULUM NEWS

INVITATION TO PARTICIPATE IN SCIENCE WEEK

National Science Week is celebrated during the week of 15th – 21st August, which for us, is Term 3, Week 6. The 2021 theme is: Food: Different by Design. This year we are going to celebrate Science Week by organising an expo of displays for our students to engage with.

We are hoping to get some experts to volunteer their time to teach our students something interesting about Science or Technology (if that sounds like you or you know someone who might be interested, please let me know).

As well as these professionals from our community, we’d love for some of our own students to run a display. It doesn’t have to match in with the theme but simply be something to do with Science or Technology that they are interested in.

If your child is interested in running a display, and you are happy to help them learn about their topic and put together an engaging display / activity, please fill in the form that came home last week and return it to the office by the end of Term 2 so that I can begin to organise the logistics of this event and check that the display/activity fits in with our workplace health and safety requirements.

Some ideas:

• Teach the community about the importance of bees and how they help us
• Explain how a volcano erupts
• Show how to filter dirty water
• Become an expert on a natural disaster and teach the community what you know
• Teach the community how to make soap
• Show off your coding skills with a robotics display
• Design a solar powered vehicle

Please note, this is not a competition but simply a way of celebrating Science by sharing our knowledge and passions. Also, parents don’t need to be present on the day as long as the student can talk to their topic and their display.

If you have any questions or would like to volunteer your expertise and time, please contact me through the office or via email: deanne_senini@rok.catholic.edu.au.

UNDER 8S DAY

At the end of last term, we held our annual Under 8s morning. It was a fantastic morning. Thank you to all the members of our community who volunteered their time to run an activity. We had members from the SES, Fire Brigade, Police, Correctional Services, Rockhampton Library, Pumped Sport and Rockhampton Playgroup join us for the morning. It was lovely to see so many community members willing to be part of this day. I’d also like to thank our Prep – Year 3 staff as well as the Joey’s Kindy staff for putting together and running activities. Thank you also to the P&F for providing the school with a sausage on bread and ice block for lunch. Your support of our school is always appreciated. Finally, thanks to Mrs Leonie Mooney for being our official photographer. I hope you enjoy the selection of photos included in the newsletter.

ICAS

St Joseph’s will be offering ICAS assessments again this year. These assessments are online assessments designed to recognise and reward academic excellence. The assessments are based on the curricula for the relevant year. Students are asked to demonstrate a deeper, integrated, and thorough level of knowledge. New ICAS assessments are developed annually for each subject in every year level. This is to ensure an engaging and beneficial experience for all students.

ICAS offers the following assessments:

Please note that your child may miss out on their PE or Arts lesson if the ICAS assessment is scheduled for that time. If your child is absent for the scheduled assessment, there is no opportunity for a catch up assessment and you would need to speak to ICAS directly to try to organise a refund.

To purchase an ICAS assessment for your child please log on to our ICAS parent page at the following link and using the following access code:

Your school access code is: XWG624

ORDERS MUST BE PLACED BY SUNDAY, 25TH JULY.

If you have any questions or concerns about ICAS, please let me know.

ART COMPETITION

Students are invited to enter the 2021 Independent Education Union’s Awards for Excellence in Art Design competition. All students from Prep – Year 6 are eligible to enter.

Design Task:

• Your task is to produce a piece of artwork that best reflects the theme: Our World.
• You may include a statement or caption to reinforce your visual image.
• You may use a variety of media (paint, crayon, pencil, ink etc). It must also be suitable for exhibition purposes.

Entries close: Friday, 23rd July. Cash prizes of $100 - $350.

Please note: All entries must be posted to the appropriate address in time for it to be received by Friday, 23rd July.

Parents are responsible for posting their child’s entry.

Please see Mrs Senini for an official entry form if you are interested in entering this competition.

Regards,
Deanne Senini
Assistant Principal Curriculum

CLASSROOM NEWS

A look at a day in Year 2

We thought we would share what a typical day looks like in Year 2.

We choose Wednesday 21-7-21.

We say good morning, organise the message bag and mark the roll, we then come together to talk to God in prayer.

In the morning session we participate in four English workshops. In the Writing workshop we are focusing on sentence fluency to help us build complete sentences. Our mentor text in Reading is ‘Miss Lily’s Fabulous Pink Feather Boa’ by Margaret Wild, where we are looking at ‘What the Author does’. The text study workshops are looking at the name and illustrations of the characters in the mentor text. The independent workshop will be completing online Sound Waves activities on Seesaw. Mrs Johnson will also be working with students in the morning session for writing extension.

Before we go out to eat lunch, we are learning to pray a blessing before meals.

In the middle session we have three Inquiry workshop rotations. In Religion we are examining mediative prayer as a way in which believers nurture their relationship with God. In HASS this term we are looking at Significant Places and today we are discussing what makes a place special to us. The Science workshop is all about the force of ‘Pull’.

We have shared reading time after second break then we mark the roll for the afternoon. The afternoon session is four Mathematic workshops and Mrs Wayman will be working with the extension Math’s group. In the multiplication workshop we are looking at repeated addition in relation to multiplication concentrating on our timetables. Measurement is looking from metres to centimetres to estimate and measure the length of an object. The Think Mentals workshop focus this week is the Subtraction Strategy ‘Extended Facts’ once Day 3 is complete they will be working on their Ipads on Matific. The independent activity will be working on Skip Counting using games and a worksheet. To complete our day we collect the message bag and reflect on our day concluding with a prayer.

Hope you enjoy a little insight into a day in Year 2.

From Year 2 Teachers and Students.

FINANCE NEWS

TERM 3 FEE ACCOUNTS

Fee Accounts for Term 3 have now been emailed and posted on Parent Lounge.

Term 3, 2021 Fee Statements were emailed and posted to Parent Lounge last Thursday 15th July. These are due for payment on Thursday 29th July.

If you have a means tested Concession Card and have not yet given a copy to the Finance Secretary, please do so as soon as possible.

All new families should have received your Parent Lounge Login details.

If you have not received these, please contact Tracey or Megan in the office.

If paying by Direct Deposit, please use your Account Number as the reference instead of names (this is the 6-digit number on your Fee Statement).

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

Congratulations to the following students and staff who will celebrate their birthday last week and this week. They are: Jacob Baker (Yr 4), Freya Schoneveld (Yr 2), Cairon Smith (Yr 5), Keelie Vass (Yr 6), Maiya White (Yr 5), Mikkaylah-Rose Serio (Yr 4), Jaxson Toon (Yr 2), Isabel Harth (Yr 5), Natalie Cavanough (Yr 4), Trinity Toon (Prep) Carlo Safic (Yr 2), Hudson Roati (Yr 2), Jake Baker (Yr 3), Henry Burgess (Yr 6), Izabella Darwin (Yr 5), Rhyver & Saxon Maker (Yr 3) and Mrs Mooney.

Have a great day.

DRAKES SUPA IGA

Drakes Fundraiser for St. Joseph's Cathedral

I thank you for your support of this project which has raised over $40,000, of which the school community has played an important role. Please continue to support the Cathedral by shopping at DRAKES using your key tag and receiving the benefits.

If you have not been part of this fundraiser you are invited to get a key tag from your local School or Church and shop at your local Drakes, one cent in every dollar you spend will go to the Cathedral. No Fuss, only benefits.

Hoping to see you at Drakes

Stay Safe

Shirley Hopkins,
Co-ordinator, Drakes Fundraiser for St Joseph's Cathedral