Mrs Ryan's Fortnightly Reflections

Welcome to Week 3 everyone! St Mary’s is a-buzz with learning, fun and action. With sports events, excursions and assemblies, all celebrating our many achievements and nurturing engaging learning experiences. 

Thank you to the many families who are continuing to act with vigilance and care around ill health during this time. Covid continues to challenge all of us as well as the typical winter bugs. We have had many, many students present at sick bay with temperatures that we immediately send home. Unfortunately we do not have the capability to care for unwell children nor risk others becoming unwell in these times. We ask that parents continue to keep the school informed of positive covid cases and follow the recommendations of isolating and having other family members with positive cases wear a mask. We do have masks available in all classrooms for students over 8 years of age. We support the recommendations to wear masks while indoors. 

St Mary’s is excited to announce that we have committed to a partnership with Adam Voigt from Real Schools in revamping and ensuring current and best practice around behaviour at school. This approach enables restorative teaching and restorative practices for our whole community. This learning will involve all stakeholders in our community and may be a challenging mindset at first, however a lifelong skill that we hope to instill in our students. St Mary’s will begin this journey in Term 4, ready to embed change and build a positive culture. 

Internally, staff have been collaborating to ensure we have high expectations across the school of our students both behaviorally and academically. Post covid we have reflected on the need to explicitly teach language, mindset and conduct for the varied spaces and experiences in which we learn.  Our students respond exceptionally well to expectations and as staff we are striving to ensure their learning is a priority. As a school we use a tool called PIVOT to access our students' thoughts on our teaching and learning practices. Some areas for future growth and exploration will be; Student voice & choice for learning, Assessment capable students and collaborative learning experiences. As a staff we will set goals around these areas, sharing strategies and improvements. 

St Mary’s has launched its new leadership structure for 2023. These structures took into account current leaders' reflections and the future goals for our school. This was recently shared with staff who will provide feedback and wonderings. These leadership structures may see employment and leadership opportunities for possible internal and external candidates. Once the structures are finalised they will be presented to the School Advisory Council and then our community. 

We look forward to the end of our week. This week we celebrate 100 days of school with all of our Junior classes! We recognise that our Year 1’s and 2’s missed this celebration so we thought why not celebrate altogether! We can’t wait to see how creative our students are in celebrating their 100 days at school! 

God Bless & Stay Well

Jasmine Ryan 

Principal