Welcome to 2024

Hello!!!! Welcome back to 2024!! I hope you all had a wonderful holidays!!! I enjoyed spending my holidays catching up with friends and family, going camping, going to the tennis and hanging out with my dog! I enjoyed a much-needed rest and I am now ready for a great 2024!

PBL- Positive Behaviours for Learning

At St Joseph's our three school values are Respect, Responsibility and Resilience. In our Behaviour Matrix, our behaviour expectations are grouped into areas around the school. The Behaviour Matrix outlines the behaviour that we expect our students to display. Explicit teaching of School-wide expectations and behaviours occurs fortnightly in the classroom at St Joseph’s. There is a fortnightly focus that each class pays close attention to and teachers provide Gotcha Rewards to those displaying the expected behaviours.

When giving the Gotcha to a student, the adult explicitly tells the student why they are receiving the Gotcha. Students write their name and the teacher's name on the back of the Gotcha. The Gotcha is then placed in the Gotcha token jar in the student's class. Each fortnight on a Monday morning, each class empties their Gotcha token jar into the big Gotcha collection jar. At the fortnightly afternoon assembly, two Gotchas are chosen out of the big collection jar to win a prize. In the classroom, the teacher picks out a Gotcha token for their class’ jar for a classroom reward of their choice. When the big Gotcha collection jar is filled, the whole school receives a reward.

Respectful Relationships

This term for Respectful Relationships the topic we are doing is Emotional Literacy. Students participate in a fortnightly lesson within their classes.

At the end of this unit, here are the skills that the children will explore and gain:

Foundation- Recognise and identify their own emotions and describe situations that may evoke these emotions.

1/2- Recognise and identify their own emotions, Describe situations that may evoke these emotions and Compare their emotional responses with those of their peers.

3/4- Describe the influence that people, situations and events have on their emotions, Investigate how emotional responses vary in depth and strength, Understand how to interact positively with others in different situations and Examine how success, challenge and failure strengthen personal identities.

5/6- Explain how emotional responses influence behaviour, Explain the influence of emotions on behaviour, learning and relationships and Analyse factors that influence their ability to regulate emotions.

Friendship Groups

Friendship groups are multi-age groups that we have at St Joseph's that meet on a fortnightly basis to participate in various wellbeing activities and sessions. The Friendship Groups are the same groups as our school house colours of Red, Blue, Green and Yellow. Family members and buddies are in the same groups. Friendship Groups will start next Friday afternoon! The first few Friendship Group sessions will be focused on getting to know one another more and participating in team-building exercises. After this, we will be focusing on practising our house dance and chants for our upcoming Twilight sports night that will occur this term.

Towards last year in Friendship Groups, each group were given an area of the school that needed a refurbishment and created some designs to make the area look better. These were finished within the last week of school last year. We are very proud of how much they brighten up our schoolyard. Here are a few photos.

Wellbeing Group

As some of you may know, last year I started a little Wellbeing group to work with students who needed some extra support in the development of their social-emotional skills.

Last year I started my Masters of Education specialising in Student Wellbeing and wanted to use my newly learnt skills to help provide extra support to students at St Joseph's. Last year we had a few on-and-off sessions as the year grew busier with production. I am hoping to start up this group again.

If this is something you think your child would be interested in/needs to gain some more skills in, please let me know by the end of next week- 9th Feb. This is open to students who were in my group last year as well.

Please contact me rbeveridge@sjyarrjunction.catholic.edu.au

If you have any other queries, concerns or ideas feel free to contact me.

Bec

New Staff Member

Stephanie Curtis