Dear Parents,

Congratulations to our Foundation learning community on such a wonderful family night last Thursday. Our Foundation families gathered to make moments matter, share a meal, be entertained by Lachlan the magician and spend time ensuring every student and family feels a strong sense of belonging. A special thanks to Matt for cooking on the night and to all staff who attended.

The Womin Djeka Festival will be held this Saturday 2nd March at Emu Plains Reserve, Balnarring. Please try to come along and support this wonderful festival. It is such a great day facilitated by Balnarring Preschool in partnership with local schools, day care centres and other organisations. What a wonderful way to celebrate, respect and honour our first nations people. St Mary’s has a stall and we would appreciate your support if anyone can volunteer to help on the day.

Community underpins all that we do in our beautiful school. By immersing students in a school that has a strong community at its base, we can ensure the environment students learn in is enriched and learning is deepened by the connections we make with each other.

From the school families to staff to Parish to local and global communities, each person we connect with partners with us to create a village around our students. It is a privilege to have the opportunity to co-create the environment in our school where every person has a strong sense of who they are and where belonging and connectedness are paramount.

Our Catholic schools are wonderful landscapes where together we support each individual to achieve success in all they set out to do. We do this together, reaching out and partnering with others in our community to ensure connection for every person.

Furthermore, we are committed to ensuring every student reaches their full potential with the highest academic standards. MACS has just released their new Vision for Instruction strategy. This is part of the MACS 2030 strategy of ensuring every student flourishes in our Catholic schools.

The vision for instruction strategy has two goals:

Goal 1 – Excellence: All MACS schools deliver a knowledge-rich, evidence-based teaching and learning program. We believe in teaching excellence, where all teachers are empowered to implement evidence-based practices and deliver the knowledge that students need to become intellectual and moral citizens of the world.

Goal 2 – Equity: Every student, regardless of background, achieves literacy and numeracy proficiency. Our vision is that every student is inspired and enabled to flourish and enrich the world. The dignity and worth of each student is valued, which places the individual student at the heart of what MACS does. Our educators are dedicated to providing all students with fundamental literacy and numeracy skills, ensuring their active engagement in society while fostering lifelong learning.

We are committed to ensuring the new MACS 2030 strategy is embedded in our school and have already embedded many aspects to date. Our vision for learning at St Mary's is very much in line with the new vision for instruction, putting us in a wonderful position to ensure the two goals above are at the forefront of our school.

We have been studying and implementing the science of learning for many years, focusing on the development of the brain and impact on learning and cognitive load. We have many strategies in place to ensure every student’s learning style is respected and scaffolded. The following is a snapshot of information from the MACS Vision for Instruction strategy and is very much in line with what we are currently doing in our school.

Working memory has limits (Sweller 2011). Students can only keep so much new information in their minds at once. Cognitive overload can occur when students try to process multiple pieces of new information or try to complete new tasks without prior instruction or scaffolding. We respect students’ cognitive load by providing new information in manageable parts or steps. We space out sequencing logically using guidance and scaffolds (Chen et al. 2018). We teach new content explicitly, using modelling and worked examples (Barbieri et al. 2023) to reduce cognitive load (Deans for Impact 2015).

I am proud to be Principal of this wonderful school and thank you for all working in partnership with me to ensure we provide every student with a community they can flourish in. Please continue to support your child’s learning at home and follow our home learning plan. This includes daily reading, maths fluency and word work.

Read to your child every day! It makes a world of difference to their success in life and you will make moments matter as you sit, snuggle, explore, talk and learn together.

One cannot underestimate the value of reading. Reading is important as it helps everyone grow mentally, emotionally, cognitively and psychologically. Every book gives you an opportunity to learn new things and explore new ideas. By reading every day, you expand your understanding of the world around you: broadening perspective, building vocabulary, increasing brain capacity and making important connections.

At St Mary’s, it is an expectation that every child reads every night, does Maths fluency and word work each week and gets their diary signed. Please make this a high priority in 2024 as we strive to make moments matter together. If you cannot do this, please let us know so we can support you and assist in making sure your child reads every day.

Please also make sure your child is in the correct uniform. Excellence comes from how we present and turn up every day, so wearing the correct uniform is important. This includes black leather shoes with the formal uniform. Please email me on principal@smhastings.catholic.edu.au if you need funds for leather shoes as I have received a kind donation to assist our families for uniforms.

Yours in Partnership,

Gab

Elysium OSHC