Dear families,

I hope this message finds you all well.

We are fast approaching the pointy end of the year, can you believe it?!

  I fear my goal of learning every student’s name before the end of the year is fading more and more with each passing day.

 The children are very patient with me and I have definitely made some gains, but I don’t think I will reach my goal this year. There’s always next year!

I want to extend my thanks to Xavier Barry and his mum, Mia for donating supplies from Bunnings for our veggie garden. The students thoroughly enjoyed planting the seedlings. Hopefully we will be able to enjoy some of the produce before we break for Christmas holidays. We will be looking at starting up a gardening club. If last week’s photos are anything to go by, we will not be short on members.

  

As we begin making plans for next year, we can confirm that the first week back will look a little different to what has happened at St Mary’s in the past. Term 1 commences for staff on Wednesday 27 January. These 3 days will not be regular student days. 

• The first 2 days will be allocated for student assessment. Families will be allocated a time for students to come in. Your children will be allocated either a morning or afternoon session on one of these 2 days. We feel that utilising the days at the beginning of the year, before classes officially resume, will be a great way to share some one-one-one time between teachers and their students and also gather valuable information to help start targeted teaching sooner. 
• Our new Prep students will attend onsite in their classrooms on Thursday 28th.
• On the Friday of that week, staff will be undertaking professional learning in the area of Restorative Practice.

If you have any questions about these changes, please let me know.

Have a wonderful weekend,

Sonia

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In my previous articles, I've written about the features of dyslexia as well as some of the best practices that can be used to support someone with dyslexia. You may remember I spoke of the importance of phonological awareness & the need for explicit teaching in the area of phonics.

 

For the past four years in Prep, we have been using the Little Learners Love Literacy program. Maureen Pollard who created the program realised there was a need for explicit and sequential phonemic and phonics teaching in Australian classrooms. Evidence-based literacy research stresses the importance of explicit and sequential literacy teaching from the beginning. 

From Day 1 in Prep, children have been explicitly taught, in a very systematic and enjoyable way, the sounds of the alphabet. In Term 1, children are taught the sounds m,s,f,p,t,i,a. Once they know these sounds they can begin to make and read words such as pat, ta, tip, am etc. The books that the children take home to read are made up of words using those 7 letters as well as some high frequency words that we call ‘heart words’ because you need to know them by heart e.g. the, was, of, etc. These books are called decodable because the children can use their knowledge of letters and sounds to read all the words. They do not need to guess or use the pictures for clues.

As the year progresses the Prep children learn the sounds of all 26 letters as well as common digraphs such as sh, ch, th etc and some vowel digraphs for the long vowels such as oa, ea, ee etc. The books continue to be decodable but the text becomes more complex as they learn more sounds.

Some of our staff will be attending two days of professional learning which is being run by the staff from Little Learners Love Literacy to further develop our understanding of this approach of teaching young children to read, write and spell. Recently Maureen and her team have broadened this approach to be taken into Year 1 so we are very excited to see how this can be incorporated into Year 1 and 2.

If you would like to read more about Little Learners please click here

Cathy Sims

Learning Diversity Leader/Junior Literacy Leader

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With so many new apps and games coming out it is hard to keep up with them all. It is important that we know lots about the apps and games our kids use. The Office of the eSafety Commissioner has a great resource - The eSafety Guide The eSafety Guide has hundreds of apps and games that children use. Each app or game has a breakdown of some very important information for parents: what is is, how people use it, how to report inapproriate behaviour, how to protect your child's personal informations and key safety features. So if your child is asking about the latest game or app that they would like this is a great place to start.

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Our next Walk / Ride to School day will be on Thursday 19th November.

 Come to school in an active way and earn points for your house team. 

  Remember to see the house captains on the netball court to get your name written on the house team charts.

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News from around the community...Parish, Secondary schools, Hobsons Bay council and Camp Australia.
    Take a peek...there might be something for you.

There's new information about the Hobsons Bay Music Academy who are running music lessons for children from a young age.

Church Bulletin 13th December
Williamstown Magic Basketball
Camp Australia - Summer Holiday Club
Hobsons Bay Music Academy
Hobsons Bay Netball Club
Creative Music for Schools


St Mary's College - Enrolments
Dear Family and Friends of St Mary’s College
Our final newsletter for 2020 is now available:

https://newsletters.naavi.com/i/kNVOjyJ
Just a reminder – to continue to receive our newsletters after this year, please subscribe:
https://newsletters.naavi.com/p/O5gLrNE/subscribe

Wishing you all a blessed Christmas!
Warmest regards  Jenny Knox ~ Director of Innovation & College Develpment

 

Camp Australia

Camp Australia brings to you The BIG Art & Expression Competition – where your child can display their creative talents and win BIG prizes. The competition is open to all registered Camp Australia families and, if you’re not registered, registration is free! Register free at http://pp.campaustralia.com.au/ and find out more about the competition at https://campaustralia.com.au/bigartcomp

There will also be 3 prizes for the top 3 schools; 1st prize $3,000 art grant, 2nd prize $2,000 art grant, 3rd prize $1,000 art grant. 

 

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Snuggling with your child on a bed or couch to enjoy a book can  be one of the most special and rewarding experiences you can have. Often parents begin reading to their children when they are still very young, enjoying beautiful picture books by various authors.

Sometimes reading a favourite one over and over again,  ensuring not to change anything because the listener will surely let you know that “That’s not right!”

Slowly things begin to change as the parent begins to be the listener and the child the reader. Often parents will ask how they can help their child with their reading.

Read the following article from Speech Pathology for Schools that gives some very easy ideas of what to do when listening to your child read.

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Lavish 

Adjective

If something is lavish, it is very fancy, luxurious and rich.

Synonyms: luxurious, lush, opulent

We had a lavish dinner at a very expensive restaurant.

I walked past all the beautiful lavish houses where rich people lived.

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After taking on board requests from members of the community, we have decided to increase our usage of our School App - Updat-ed.  It will become the medium we use for sending quick alerts & reminders about school events and to update you, if for example the bus coming home from camp is late.
When we send an alert, your phone will ping and the message will land in the ALERTS folder.
Another feature of the app is the EVENTS folder. In it you'll find all our calendar dates. Just click on an event to save it directly into your phone's calendar. Easy!

       

Click on the images below to download Updat-ed, or visit the App Store for iphones and Google Play for Androids. Search for Updat-ed.  

      

If you already have the current app there is no need to download it again. 



If you have any questions about the app, please don't hesitate to contact me.

Regards
Marg Masseni - mmasseni@smaltona.catholic.edu.au
Website Curator

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Respect • Responsibility • Resilience • Courage

 

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