Dear Parents,

Congratulations to the Year 6 community for leading the Mary MacKillop Mass last week. Mary MacKillop is an important role model in our school. Mary MacKillop followed in the footsteps of Jesus, carrying out important work with the poor and vulnerable and opening schools to ensure the young were educated. She began the order of the Josephite nuns, who founded our school in 1919. Her motto of never seeing a need without addressing it is an important value in our school today. Well done to all the Year 6 class, Angela Aldag and Natalie Dullard on your wonderful efforts with the Mass.

Natalie Dullard and I will be heading off on a Mary Mackillop pilgrimage in Week 6. We will journey with Sr Rita from the Josephite order and other educators from various schools to learn more about this amazing Saint and founder of our beautiful school.

Congratulations to students and teachers in Years 3-6 on a wonderful effort at the Parish Sports last Thursday. It was such a great community day and I thank all the parents for coming along to support our students. Thanks to Lisa Galvin and the staff members and parents who assisted with the organisation of the event.

Days like our Parish Athletics are so important for our students, providing opportunities for them to shine, use their learning powers and dispositions and put our school’s tool kit into action, ensuring they are ready and able to compete for their team.

Go Aussies! What an amazing achievement our country has achieved. The Australian Olympic team showed such inspiration, resilience and determination, solving problems, collaborating, being strategic, changing and adapting and completely focused on the task at hand. We continue to focus on the learning powers our students require to flourish.

Aistear defines dispositions as ‘enduring habits of mind and action. A disposition is the tendency to respond to situations in characteristic ways.’ (Aistear, 2009, p.54).

A child’s disposition to learning affects the attitude with which they learn.
Learning dispositions directly affect the effort that students are willing to put in.
Positive learning dispositions go a long way to creating positive learning outcomes.

At St Mary’s, we use our learning powers to ensure our students develop the disposition to be able to shine and flourish in all that they do. These are inclusive of four domains: cognitive, emotional, social and strategic.

Our students will be putting their learning powers to the test in the upcoming Wakakirri performance. Best of luck to our Year 3, 4, 5 and 6 students on Tuesday week as they compete at the Frankston Cultural Centre at the 2024 Wakakirri Story-Dance Festival. Their dance story looks brilliant. A huge thank you to Amanda Strickland for her excellent leadership in this years' Wakakirri and to all who have helped in any way to ensure our students have the opportunity to participate in such an amazing event.

We are commencing our transition programs for 2025, including our Mini Mary’s Club which commences on Thursday 22nd August. Children’s transitions to school can have lasting effects on their learning and development, including assisting our students to be prepared to handle any challenges along with evidence linking good transitions to academic success in later years.

We know transitions require continuity of learning and development, in addition to focusing on building and shaping children’s identities through their evolving experiences and relationships. These are strengthened through coordinated efforts, such as collaborative partnerships with families and communities. This includes adjusting to new environments, identities, relationships, interactions and expectations (Krakouer et al. 2017; Rimm-Kaufman and Pianta 2000; Vitiello et al. 2020; Webb et al. 2017)

The relationship between families and educators is critical in ensuring children begin their school journey with success.

The transition to school is not a single event, but can be thought of as a dynamic process of both change and continuity of learning that occurs over time (Dockett et al. 2017; Moyle 2019; OECD 2017).

Our Mini Mary’s program is a wonderful way to ensure our newest members and their parents are prepared for the school journey. Please promote this highly successful program in the community. We have a few places still open for Foundation 2025, but places are limited so please let anyone know to come and enrol as soon as possible.

We are also working with our feeder secondary schools to ensure our Year 6 students have a successful transition to Year 7. This includes working with Padua College on transition processes.

We are so proud of the students who finished at St Mary's in 2023 who are achieving excellence in their Secondary schooling. I received great feedback from Padua last week highlighting our 2023 Year 6 students who have won academic awards:

Callum Baird - ACADEMIC ENDEAVOUR Science 7

Emily Jones - ACADEMIC ENDEAVOUR Drama 7

Kristina Hovancek - ACADEMIC ENDEAVOUR Mathematics 7

ACADEMIC ENDEAVOUR Religious Education 7

ACADEMIC ENDEAVOUR Science 7

ACADEMIC ENDEAVOUR Visual Art & Design 7

Rachel Davidson - ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE English 7

ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE Italian 7

ACADEMIC ENDEAVOUR Religious Education 7

Fundraising

Thank you to Christa and all parents and staff who volunteered to assist with the Bunnings Sausage Sizzle last Saturday. It was such a great day and I take this opportunity to thank all involved. The sausage sizzle raised approximately $1800 for our school. What a super effort!

We encourage you to join in and support our school in the following fundraising events in 2024.

Parent social night - Save the date - October 25th 2024
Colour Run and End of Year Event

All money raised will go towards the garden and our new member at St Mary’s - our school dog.

Yours in Partnership,

Gab

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