From the Acting Principal

Term 3 Week 8

Parents and Carers,

What a success Italian Day was on Tuesday!  The students put in so much effort and creativity in preparing their costumes for the day. The Year 6s did a marvellous job of organising the activities for the students and the decorations around the school. I know I speak on behalf of all the students when I say a huge thank you to Signora Chesterman and Signorina Liv for working so hard to organise the day. We would also like to acknowledge the Grade 6 students for organising and running engaging activities for the remainder of the students to participate in. Thank you to Liz and Loretta for coordinating the pizza order and a special extra thanks to the parents who picked up the pizzas. The children were delighted with the opportunity to celebrate the day with a special lunch. The puppet performance captured the attention of the students and had the juniors up and dancing. The students were active participants during the performance and had many opportunities to practise and use some Italian phrases. 

Friday 8th September is a school closure day. The teachers will spend this day planning collaboratively to ensure the final term of the school year is filled with engaging learning opportunities. Next term the overarching concept for the Religious Education and Inquiry Units, from Prep to Year 6, will be CONNECTIONS. The staff has been working closely with MACS to merge Religious Education and Inquiry to create richer and deeper units of work, which foster curiosity, risk taking and critical thinking and questioning. Moving forward this new initiative from MACS implemented in many Catholic primary schools, will be referred to as  Faith Life Learning. 

As we welcome the season of Spring, as a SunSmart school it is time for our students to find their school hats and start wearing them again.  Please take this weekend to find any school hats that may be hiding, as from next week, students will be expected to be wearing their hats at school. 

Shortly, all families will be receiving an email which provides a link and unique code for the school’s family Melbourne Archdiocese Catholic Schools – School Improvement Surveys (MACSSIS). Please take a moment to complete this survey as we highly value this feedback from our families. We use family responses to help us to better understand the needs of our families, as a tool to set future directions for the school and as a way to celebrate what we do well and ways we can improve in the future. 

On Monday the Year 5/6  students will be heading off to school camp at Lyrebird Park. Thank you to Mrs Askew who has been busily working behind the scenes to ensure that the camp will be a wonderful experience for our students. This adventure camp will give the students an opportunity to try new things, take on new challenges and build connections. I know that some parents are going to be a little teary on Monday morning while others will be walking away from school with big smiles on their faces. We will take good care of your children and hopefully they will come home with long lasting memories. With our 5/6s out next week, there will be no whole school assembly on Monday.

We had a wonderful Father’s Day celebration and liturgy at 2.40pm in the community centre today. The Preps, who are fast becoming our star performers, presented a lovely song and the slide show of all the students and father figures was fantastic, mostly due to the great response to our request for photographic contributions. The children love to see themselves and their families represented on the big screen. As always, we had the Father’s Day stall on Thursday and I saw plenty of goodies going home in colourful bags after school. I hope all the fathers enjoy the selected gifts, as the conversations around what to select were very earnest. I take this opportunity to wish all dads and father figures the best for Sunday and hope that there is an opportunity to create a new family memory. 

A reminder that the PFOL team are busily working away to ensure the School Disco on Saturday 2nd of September is a wonderful night  and at the same time, putting the finishing touches on organisation for the  Trivia Night for Saturday 9th of September. Once again I encourage all families to support both these events. If you don’t have enough numbers to create a whole table for the Trivia Night, reach out to the PFOL who can find you other like minded ‘quizsters’ to sit with. This event has always been a big night on the OLHC Social Calendar and is a great opportunity to leave the kids at home and enjoy a light hearted and slightly competitive evening.

In staffing news we have finalised teacher arrangements for 5/6W for Term 4, with Emily Ashworth and Anita Simpson sharing the class until the end of the year. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Connie  Lania who stepped in initially for a couple of weeks but has stayed and helped us all term. She has worked very well with the students in the class and is looking forward to going on camp with us next week.

In sporting news, we played a home round of matches against Research Primary school to complete our season of weekly Inter School Sports of basketball, volleyball, finska and rounders. 

In this week's sporting highlights we have the start of the AFLW season where we have 3  past students, Lauren Brazzale (Collingwood), Ashleigh Riddel (North Melbourne) and Georgia Tait (Carlton) playing. We wish them all well and hope to see some of our current students achieving similar feats in the future. In world sport the Aussie Men's Basketball team has made it through to the second stage of the FIBA world championships which is inspiring for all our school basketballers.

Regards,

Mark Pinkerton

Acting Principal

Canteen window for (Friday) recess sales has started. 

Available for sale will be snack packets of Red Rock chips, Grain Wave whole grain chips, Pringles, Raspberry Twisters, Snakes, Smarties (Small 16g pkts), Yoghurt Frogs and Juicies. 

These items can be purchased through CDFPAY (and will be ready to pick up at recess) or can be bought directly from the window. 

If you are interested in helping our PFOL as a recess helper, please let us know. 

Disco

Trivia Night

Friday Recess Orders

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Please refer to our School google calendar for events throughout the year.  

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