Learning Across the
Junior School
From the Head of Junior School and Early Learning
Welcome back to Term 2! We are delighted to see our girls return to school, rested and ready for another great term of learning and fun in Junior School.
Our Year 5 classes started the term with a beautiful Showcase, attended by many parents and extended family. During their presentation, the girls celebrated their achievements and shared how our Mary Ward values of Freedom, Felicity, Justice, Sincerity, and Verity guide their actions, personal growth, and academic development. Their reflections demonstrated how they are learning to act justly and show care for others at school and in the community, to be authentic and true to themselves, to be courageous and determined, to learn with a positive mindset and to enjoy life.
We are also guiding our girls’ spiritual formation and on Tuesday 9 May 24 students from Years 3, 4 and 5 celebrated their Sacrament of Reconciliation during a beautiful and meaningful service, led by Fr Chris Jenkins, Parish Priest of St Ignatius, Norwood, and Fr Gaetan. The sacrament of First Reconciliation teaches our students about forgiveness and how to learn from mistakes. I would like to thank Ms Isabelle Roberts and our teachers for preparing our students for this special day. We congratulate the girls on their First Reconciliation and look forward to continuing to support them in their faith journey.
Our girls are very excited about all the events and activities planned for this term, including our Grandparents’ and Special Friends Day celebration in Week 4, our Year 3 Camp to Monarto Zoo and Woodhouse, Aerobics Competitions, Footsteps Dance lessons and our fabulous Pink Day to be held on Friday 16 June. We will also be celebrating our wonderful mothers with a delicious breakfast on Monday 15 May; we look forward to a fabulous morning and wish all mums a beautiful Mothers’ Day on Sunday.
Mrs Marika Taylor
Head of Junior School and Early Learning
Year 5 Showcase
Last week, all the Year 5 students participated in our Year 5 showcase. We based our showcase off the Loreto values Felicity, Freedom, Justice, Verity and Sincerity. We used our learning from the previous term and hooked it with each of the values. Below you will read more about each of the values and how they connected to all the learning we did in Term 1.
JUSTICE – We combined our HASS unit on choices and challenges of colonization with this years school value of Justice. For the Justice part of our showcase, we used tableaux to show how the Gold Rush and the Eureka stockade events transpired between the years 1800-1901. We think it was very creative when we had to think of what to say on the spot. Most people said stuff like, “I found gold!” Or “No fair she found gold and I didn't” Or even “Noo! I think I'm dying!" I'm quite sure all the parents loved it, and all the students did too!
FREEDOM - In teams we organised, planned and created stalls. Mrs Roberts encouraged us to hold our stalls on Purple Day. While we knew this was not a competition, we had secretly hoped to beat the year 6s and raise more money than them. Lots of us ran bake stalls, but other people decided to do other things like ice cream and biscuit decorating. You will be pleased to know that our hard work paid off, and we succeeded in raising $1437! We hope that everyone is free and all oppressed people can be themselves.
VERITY – This year we started a new program called Maths Pathways. Maths Pathways tracks how we are going and the areas we need to learn and develop using modules. Verity is all about truthfulness so we connected our data in Maths Pathways to being truthful to who we are.
FELICITY – Last term we were part of many fun activities. We are so grateful for the opportunity to go to Year 5 camp, attend our whole school swimming carnival, our school athletics carnival, writing narratives for a writing competition, enjoy many new friendships with lots of new students and learn band instruments in music. Each of these activities filled us with joy and love and lots of felicity!
SINCERITY – We developed our understanding of sincerity through our strengths self-assessments and artworks. I think the flower activity we did also showed how we were growing in class. It let us be honest with ourselves and write down our strengths on the stems. The flower parts made it look like we had bloomed and underneath the stems, which had our strengths written on them, showed what we had bloomed in. I think it was a fun activity!
After our beautiful showcase we went to the lawn to have a picnic with our parents. While we were enjoying delicious snacks that our parents had brought, we showed some of our excellent work to our parents. On behalf of everyone we really enjoyed our showcase and hope to keep on being the wonderful people we are. Our parents were so proud of us, and I know we were all proud of ourselves too!
Written by 5 Gold