Dear Parents,

Congratulations to the 5/6 community for leading the Mary MacKillop Mass. 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, opening schools to ensure the young were educated. She began the order of the Josephite nuns, who founded our school in 1927. Her motto of never seeing a need without addressing it is an important value in our school today. Well done to all of the Year 6 community on your wonderful efforts with the Mass.

Kerry Colliver and myself will be heading off on a Mary Mackillop pilgrimage in Week 6 as part of our Parish schools Mini Vinnies initiative where 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 of the parents for coming along to support our students. Thanks to Emily Reed for her excellent 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 to 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, determination, strategic, and completely focussed on the task at hand.

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 Joseph’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.

Transition Programs

We are commencing our transition programs for 2024 including our Joey’s Club which commences this Thursday. 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 Joey’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.

We are so proud of the students who finished at St Joseph’s in 2023 who are achieving excellence in their Secondary schooling. I received great feedback from Padua last week highlighting our 2022 Year 6 students who have won academic awards

Fundraising

Thank you to the parents who have volunteered to assist with fundraising this year. The following activities have been selected and we encourage you to join in and support our school.

Bunnings Sausage sizzle
Community Christmas Carols and end of year event December 6th
Colour Run

All money raised will go towards the upgrade to the fencing which will commence in Term 4.

Yours in Partnership,

Gab

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