Welcome to 2023!

Welcome Parents and Guardians to 2023! I would like to formally introduce myself, if you don't know me, my name is Rebecca Beveridge and the students call me Mrs Beveridge/Mrs B! This is my fifth year of teaching and I absolutely love it! This year I was lucky enough to take on the role of Wellbeing leader! I am very excited to be taking over this role and hope that I can live up to Liz's legacy. This year I have also been accepted into my Master of Education specialising in student wellbeing at Melbourne University. I am looking forward to going back to studying and learning more new things to help continue the growth of my knowledge and skills.

This year I will be having time out of my classroom on Tuesday mornings to allow me to work on Wellbeing jobs and planning within our school.

If you need to contact me please use my email rheenan@sjyarrajunction.catholic.edu.au alternatively you can call the school on 5967 1183.

I am looking forward to a great year!

Wellbeing Week

Our first week of 2023 has involved every class participating in Wellbeing week! Each class has been engaging with tasks that involve building community. Building community within a classroom develops great communication and social skills between the students. It also although children and teachers a chance to develop relationships and an understanding of each other. This week for wellbeing week, each class has been making things that represent each student in their class, whether that would be a self portrait, posters/crafts that display students interests and identity or even a piece of writing that allows us to see a snapshot of who they are as a person. Creating student voice and identity at the start of the school year sets students up for success. To continue to foster relationships within our school community, we had a few shared special lunches this week between year levels as well as our buddies. It was so wonderful to see so many happy and new friendships develop.

On Friday, we had a special afternoon of fun activities to finish off our week. Students participated in their house colours/friendship groups doing team building activities. Student got to play with the big parachute, balloon races, hulahoop races and tower building competitions. It was so fun to see the students connect in their groups.

Positive Behaviours for Learning (PBL)

What is PBL? PBL aka Positive Behaviours for Learning is our school wide behaviour approach that looks at explicitly teaching students behaviour expectations. Our school has chosen Respect, Responsibility and Resilience to develop behaviour expectations around. Last year as a staff we developed a 'behaviour matrix' that indicates the type of behaviour we are wanting to see in each area of our school. Through developing those expectations last year, we as a school have been having explicit lessons once a week that demonstrates and models to students the types of behaviours we want to see.

To back up these behaviours we have a whole school reward scheme that enables students to receive 'Gotcha tokens'. Gotcha tokens are collected as a whole school in our new gotcha tower! Once we get to a certain amount we will be able to have a whole school reward. In the past two years, we have had a hot chip lunch, dance party, movie and pj day and more!

Friendship Groups

This year we are finally able to bring back our friendship groups to their full extent. Friendship groups have been around at St Joes for a number of years now. Friendship groups are groups that consist of students in Foundation all the way to Grade 6. These friendship groups are also the same groupings as our coloured house teams. Buddies and families are grouped in the same friendship/house colour groups.

Friendship groups is an initiative started to connect students from multiple year levels and build connections between students and teachers as an extra person/people that they can look out for/get help from whenever they need. Friendship groups allow a small community to grow within a big school community and create new friendships.

Friendship groups will be on a rotating roster every three weeks on Monday afternoons.

Grade 6 leadership

This year at St Josephs we are aiming to creating more opportunities for student voice and student leadership. The grade 6's have had a chance to indicate what areas they would like to be a leader in the school. The next step we are currently in the process of completing is receiving nominations from students as to what role they would like to be considered for. We are looking forward to seeing our grade 6's excell as being fantastic role models for our school.

Congratulations to our school captains who were announced last year- Ruby Smith and Spencer Lucas!

Student Shout Outs!!!

Has your child done something amazing that you are proud of? Please email me so I can share it with our school community! My email is rheenan@sjyarrajunction.catholic.edu.au

From the Playground this week