Dear Parents,

On Friday hundreds of students from around 300 Catholic schools from across greater Melbourne attended Mass at St Patrick’s Cathedral in East Melbourne to mark St Patrick’s Day. Following the Mass students enjoyed a concert in the park. Thank you to Mr Luke Hewitt who took our Social Justice and Fire Carrier teams to represent our school.

Congratulations to our Year 3 and 5 students for the way they approached the NAPLAN testing this week and last week. The positive mindset, grit, and resilience they showed is a testament to the learning culture in our school. NAPLAN is one way students can showcase their learning knowledge and skills. Throughout our learning year students engage in a variety of other assessments to help track their learning and target teaching. These assessments include teacher observations, pre and post-assessments, open-ended questioning, moderation of work and nationally standardised tests.

While assessing students helps us to target our teaching, success in learning depends on a strong home-school partnership. This includes a commitment to reading at home daily. We can not underestimate the value of reading. Reading is important as it helps everyone grow mentally, emotionally, cognitively and psychologically. Every book allows students to learn new things and explore new ideas. By reading everyday students expand their understanding of the world around them broadening perspective, building vocabulary, increasing brain capacity and making important connections.

At St. Joseph’s it is an expectation that every child reads every night and gets their diary signed. Please make this a high priority in 2024 as we strive to support all of our students to grow and flourish. If you can not do this please let us know so we can support you and assist in making sure your child reads every day.

To ensure students continue learning and making connections, teachers will also send home some ideas for home learning over the holiday break. This continued practise will support students in embedding the learning they have explored throughout term one and we encourage all families to keep reading and complete at least a few of these over the break.

A big thank you to all of the families who donated an item for our Easter raffle last week for our free dress day. We have a number of prizes for our raffle. Thank you to our board members who are sorting and wrapping our prizes this week. Money raised from our raffle will go towards the new playground and indigenous meeting area. If you would like to purchase more tickets please get in touch with the office. All money and tickets need to be in by Tuesday, March 26th.

We will draw our raffle at the end of term assembly after our Holy week activities. Families are invited to join in our Holy Week activities, this will be a rotation of hands-on activities and retelling of the Holy Week story. This will begin at 1:40pm on the oval and finish in the hall with our Spirit of St Joseph's awards and raffle draw. All are welcome to attend.

Finally, we are always proud of our students achievements, including our past students. We would like to send a big congratulations to Ben and Daniel Collins who graduated last year. Daniel and Ben competed in the Victorian Junior State Surf Lifesaving Championships in Warrnambool over the long weekend. Both Ben and Daniel along with 2 other teammates from Point Leo SLSC took out the Gold in the U13 Surf Team event, plus Ben won Silver in the Beach Relay and Daniel Bronze in Board Rescue!

They are both going on to compete at the Australian Surf Lifesaving Championships on the Sunshine Coast next month. We are so excited for the boys and wish them all the best at the Championships.

Yours in Partnership,

Sue Jackson

Mangrove Warrior