Reminders 13th May 2022

Dear families,

I hope you are all doing well.

It’s been great to see some normality continue to return to St Mary’s with lots of excursions happening throughout the week.

I’m sure those of you with children in Year 3/4 would have noticed most of your children slept well last night after their trip to the Aquarium.
Year 1/2 parents, I hope the same goes for you tonight!

I hope all our mums had a great Mother’s Day and that you were spoilt by your family.

Thanks so much to the P&F team for preparing and hosting the Mother’s Day stall.

NAPLAN

The first week of NAPLAN has come and gone. It was a seamless experience for our students and teachers, who, for the first time took NAPLAN assessments online. 

The online assessments were adaptive in nature, meaning that every student could have potentially completed a very different test from their peer. As students answer the first set of questions, the test adapts according to how well they did with those questions. If a student got this set correct, the next set is harder; if they were difficult, the next set was easier.

Ultimately, this means that the results that are garnered will be far more accurate than they have ever been.

Historically, the results for both students who found the test very difficult or very easy, were not very helpful as they did not tell us exactly where their students sat. This year’s test results will be more accurate as students will be challenged at their own level, rather than all sitting the same test.

See below for a visual representation of how the test is formulated.

Reconciliation

It has been wonderful to be able to recommence Sacraments this last week. I know some of our students were nervous, but Father Michael has been able to adapt the processes to make sure the children who needed extra support were comfortable. Who would have thought that even our Sacraments can be adaptable to accommodate students’ needs?  Thanks Father Michael for helping our children re-connect with their faith.

Parents and Friends

Our Parents and Friends Annual General Meeting (AGM) will be held this term on Wednesday 3rd June at 7:30pm. Stay tuned for more details. We would love to increase the number of parents on the team. It’s a fun, dynamic group and meetings are a lot of fun. Please consider joining. You don’t need to be available during work days to join us. We acknowledge that you may only be able to commit to certain events or times. Any level of involvement is welcome.

We’d ideally be looking to have the team include 2 or more members from every year level.

The team tries to meet monthly (depending on term dates) from 7:30pm at school. Meetings run for approximately an hour.

Enrolments

Next week we commence our Enrolment interviews for new families. We are looking forward to commencing the process. We will soon be scheduling enrolment interviews for our existing families who have a child starting in Prep in 2023. 

Have a wonderful weekend,

Sonia

Respect • Responsibility • Resilience • Courage