Deputy Principal's Report

Book Week

What a wonderful way to begin Book Week, with our school filled with an incredible array of creative and colourful costumes on Monday! A special thank you to our wonderful parents and families for the time and effort that went into getting your child/ren ready for the day, and to our wonderful staff for always embracing a fun dress-up opportunity and joining in the excitement. Throughout the week, classrooms have been exploring the shortlisted Book Week books and continuing to build a love and enjoyment of reading. On Wednesday afternoon, the whole school also came together for a special Stop, Drop and Read on the Mary Clare after snack. It was a wonderful sight as students paused to immerse themselves in a good book.

A message from our Year 6 Language Leaders

Every year we have a Book Week parade where all the kids get to show off their awesome costumes on the catwalk! They’d go all around the hall and let the whole school see their outfits. We all had an amazing time at the parade and we hope everyone else had just as much fun as we did.

We saw some amazing costumes! We had some pretty cool, funny, and creative costumes on Monday. We remembered some of the costumes like the Elphaba, Dobby, Lorax, the crayons, Lottie Brooks, Glinda, princess, villains, BOB the Builder, Thing 1, Thing 2, Captain Underpants, and more. All the teachers dressed up and it’s always really funny. This year they dressed up as the crayons. After the parade, we went to each class and took some great photos. 

For Book Week this year we read some amazing picture story books each day. These books are all shortlisted so the children can really enjoy them and get something out of them. Some of them are Derek, Frogs are our friends, The colours of home, Once I was a Giant, Dear Broccoli and many others. Then we completed some hands on activities related to them, like drawing your favourite character or writing a diary entry pretending to be one of the characters. On Wednesday we also did a Stop, Drop and Read which promotes kid's reading in a calm outdoor space.

We hope you all enjoyed Book Week! We had so much fun and we hope you guys did too. HAPPY BOOK WEEK!!!

From your Year 6 Language Leaders,

Isla, Izzy & Olivia 

Looking after ourselves - health, wellbeing, learning

With several big viruses going around at the moment, it's a great time to remind everyone about the importance of rest and recovery. If your child is feeling unwell, the best thing to do is stay home and rest, so they can return feeling fit, healthy and ready to learn. When we are run down, it affects more than just our physical health. It can impact how we cope with everyday challenges, making us more easily dysregulated and sensitive. We can't reach the best outcomes, whether socially, emotionally, or academically, when we are not feeling our best. By taking the time to rest when we're sick, is not just looking after ourselves, it is helping keep our whole community healthy and ready to learn together. Thank you to all of our families for doing such a great job already in supporting us to achieve this.

Junior Learning Beyond the Classroom

There is such a buzz in the junior classrooms with the students learning all about habitats. We have loved hearing all about the recent Year 1s and 2s adventure to Werribee Zoo. Such a great opportunity to extend the learning and make connections beyond the classroom. A big thank you to our Year 1 and 2 teachers, supporting staff and parents for making this happen.

Our Preps are off to the Aquarium tomorrow. I am sure they will come home with plenty of highlights to share and will likely sleep very well after the big day!

Positive Behaviour for Learning (PBL) Update

Our Positive Behaviour for Learning (PBL) initiative continues to run across our school from Prep through to Year 6. As many of you know, for many years St. Finbar’s has dedicated time each Monday to explicit Social and Emotional Learning. Over the past two years, we have incorporated PBL mini lessons into this time as well, allowing us to explicitly teach and discuss the school values and expectations that we encourage all students to uphold. This term, we have introduced a new initiative where teachers are handing out tokens to students when they see our school values and expectations on display. This reinforces postive behaviour instantly. Each token is worth one House Point, with Houses working together to reach a range of exciting incentives, beginning with their first goal of 300 points! Below you can see the total amount of house points collected. Thank you to our wonderful Class Reps, who deliver the tokens to the office each Thursday, and to our fantastic Year 6 leaders for their hard work sorting and counting them.

Each Friday at assembly, we celebrate students who have demonstrated our school values of being Safe, Respectful and Resilient. All collected tokens are entered into a raffle, with one winner chosen from both the Junior School and Senior School for each of our school values.

Lamont Book Fair - Opening this Friday!

The Lamont Book Fair will be at St Finbar’s from Friday 28th August after school through to Wednesday 9th September. All students will have the opportunity to browse the Book Fair and create a Wishlist of books they may like to purchase. Purchases can be made in person or online, with books delivered to classrooms. The Book Fair will first be opened this Friday 28th August after school. Parents and students are invited to come in for browsing and purchasing, and will be open each morning before school and after school next week. All purchases support our library and allow us to purchase more wonderful books for our library collection. We look forward to seeing you at the Book Fair!

Learning Showcase

We always love having students bring their work to our office to showcase their hard work, creativity and dedication. This week, Frankie from Year 2 came to proudly share her wonderful book all about animals that she made during Italian. She read the book to us in Italian before translating it back into English! You’ll see a copy of her fantastic work below, and we hope you get as much joy from it as we did. A special thank you to Signora Sirriani for her engaging Italian program, which is enjoyed by students from Prep to Year 6 each week. 

We have also had some of our wonderful Year 2 students sent to the office to showcase their fantastic writing inspired by one of their Book Week books. The students were incredibly proud to share their work and explain how they had successfully met their learning intention.

SunSmart Reminder 

A friendly reminder that school hats must be worn from Monday, 1st of September. As we head into the warmer months, please ensure your child brings their school hat to school each day. Students without a hat will be required to stay on the grassy steps in the designated shaded area during outdoor activities and break times. 

Thank you for helping us keep our students safe in the sun!

Thank you for your ongoing support,

Peggy McDonald & Laura Zeeng