Classroom News & Student Awards

Classroom News

Junior Class - Mrs Creek

We are indeed blessed to have such a caring and supportive parent community. Your children, our students, are gathering life skills: to be patient, to listen with intent, to try their best and to consider others.

Our literacy learning focus this week is to see how visual texts convey meaning. We always look at the picture first to cue us into the text when learning to read. The same applies for pictures embedded within an informational text. They are there for a reason, and should be attended to. The students are learning to give an opinion about their experiences. So was the case for our procedural text about making banana splits. Thank you for the pictures you sent.

Mathematics involves using strategies to support addition and subtraction, such as doubling plus one, and understanding the commutability of these. If I know one fact, I also know others. For example, if I know 9+1 =10, I also know that 1+9= 10, and 10-1=9, and 10-1=9.

I have been involved with an on-line conference this week, so a thank you to Mrs Bell for assisting the F-1 class in my absence.

Middle Class - Miss Williams

This week the 2/3s have been taking a trip around Australia with our shared reading book ‘Are We There Yet?’ By Allison Lester. We have had a lot of discussions about the places people in our class have visited and where these places actually are in Australia. This has also been a wonderful book to use for our writing topic of paragraphs. We have been learning that paragraphs group ideas together and arrange texts to make them easier to read. The Year 3’s now have the task of including paragraphs in their writing all the time to be able to show the Level 3 writing standard for the end of the year.

In Maths the Year 3s have been working on their division and multiplication facts for the numbers 10, 5 and 2, and have just begun looking at angles. The Year 2s have been working on subtraction strategies and are currently looking at how addition and subtraction relate.

We had a challenging task set this week - how would we present our weekly assembly to the school community? Due to current restrictions the whole school can’t gather in the hall for assembly, so we hosted the first ever fully online assembly for St Pat's. What an effort it was to practice and make sure that we had it all working the way we wanted and then to get everyone online and run it. We were very proud of ourselves in the 2/3 classroom. Thank you if you joined in our assembly, we really appreciated it and would love some feedback from you to help our next classes as they prepare to continue our online assemblies as well.

Senior Class - Ms Murphy

It is wonderful to be back in the classroom again and we have had an absolute whirlwind of a week! Firstly, a big shout out to all the parents and carers who have been so flexible, adaptable and incredibly supportive on our lockdown journey. I acknowledge just how tricky all this is and really appreciate all that you do. I am very grateful to each of you for getting through the teething issues with logins and so forth, knowing this is largely behind us, we are in a good position to transition in and out of the classroom fairly seamlessly should we need to.

While this week has been somewhat all over the place in terms of our work, we are continuing to make good inroads into our sense of ‘Identity’ which we have been busy developing through our activities in the daily classroom and more directly, during our lessons in Religion and Wellbeing. We are all progressing well and gathering a lot of knowledge around forces and functions, the level of enthusiasm the students are showing in learning is simply AWESOME!

The students have worked very hard to create a series of Collective Commitments in our class. These are the rules in our class, how our class should look, feel and sound like and what it is that we expect from each other as a class group. It is immensely pleasing to see students going into ‘auto-pilot’ and making our class work collaboratively.

We are all hoping for a ‘good run on’ and with a potential 80 learning days left in the year it is vital we make the best of our time in the classroom. Understandably there are a number of very tired heads in our room, I get it! It is important at the moment that we all get a good sleep prior to school in order to get the full potential out of the little time we have for 2021!

We are building our Balloon Powered Cars next week so I am sending a shout out to all families for a modest donation of clean recyclables e.g. milk cartons, drink bottles, caps, aluminium cans etc., and if anyone has a stash of plastic straws they don’t want we’d love that too!

Many thanks ☺☘

Little Joey

This week we continue to acknowledge the significant role of the "Brown Joeys" in the establishment of St Patrick's School, and recognised Kelsey with a Little Joey award. Our Little Joeys receive a certificate, sticker and a voucher/goods donated by a local business. We are very grateful for the contributions from our local businesses.