Learning & Teaching 

LEARNING & TEACHING - Vira Pirrotta

TERM 3 AT GLANCE 

Our aim at St Fidelis, is to create learning environments that cultivate curiosity and create confident, capable and creative learners. Through our shared Inquiries, teachers will engage students in learning opportunities for them to work as collaborators, self-managers, communicators and researchers.  

This term our focus will be design and creativity. Teachers will address the science and design technologies domains of the Victorian curriculum. 

Throughout the term, students will engage in many authentic learning experiences that will lead them to design and create a product that they will present at our Celebration of Learning at the end of Term 3. 

This term is going to be a busy and exciting one. Look at what we have planned in Inquiry and as a community!

Excursions and Incursions 

• Foundation Excursion to the National Gallery of Victoria
• Year 3/4 Building Billy Carts
• Year 5 Building Leadership Skills 
• Yea 5/6 Creating a Radio Station 
• Mad about Science Chemical Chaos 

Grandparents' morning (Friday, 28th July)

The morning will start with mass to celebrate the feast day of St. Anne, the grandmother of Jesus. The celebration will continue with an opportunity for all grandparents to work with their grandchild/ren in their learning spaces followed by a special morning tea provided by the Parents and Friends Committee. The students can’t wait to welcome their grandparents to the school.

100 Days of School for Foundation students (Tuesday 1st August & Wednesday 2nd August) 

Our Foundation students will celebrate the milestone of 100 days of learning. Mrs Wenckoski has some fun and exciting activities planned for these days. I can’t wait to see the incredible costumes. 

Footsteps Concert (Thursday 17th August)

Throughout Terms 1 and 2, students participated in dance classes run by the FOOTSTEPS program. At the concert, each year level will perform dances from around the world.  Grandparents and other family members are invited to the rehearsal. 

STEM MAD 

With Mr Frazetto, six teams are designing a product, service or innovation to Make A Difference (MAD) to others or the environment. All six teams will submit an entry and we can’t wait to see which entries make the final showcase. The six groups designed an invention to make a difference in the following areas- 

• Space
• Health
• Social Wellbeing
• Sustainability
• Safety
• Environmental

 Mr Frazzetto will showcase all the entries on his newsletter page. 

Science Week 12th August to 20th August

National Science Week promotes and encourages interest in science, engineering, mathematics, technology and innovation. The National Science Week theme is Innovation: Powering Future Industries. Students will participate in activities and experiments based on the theme. We will aim to celebrate Science in many ways that week. Look out for the exciting activities planned for that week.  

Book Week 19th August to 25th August 

This year’s theme is Read, Grow, Inspire. We will celebrate with a week of book-related activities in our learning spaces and a dress-up day and parade. Leading up to the celebrations, students will explore all the Children's Book Council of Australia (CBCA) short-listed books and look forward to finding out which books will win the awards. 

Father’s Day Breakfast and Assembly 

Our celebration will include breakfast, morning prayer,  assembly and activities in the learning space with your child. All dads or men that are special to them are welcome to join for any part of the morning.  We are looking forward to seeing them all. 

Literacy & Numeracy Week (4th September to 9th September)

Literacy and Numeracy Week was started by the Australian Government and is celebrated all across the nation. We will celebrate the week with competitions and activities. 

Fire Education Visits (September)

Fire Ed for the Foundation students involves two visits to our school by the Fire Rescue Melbourne. On the first visit, the firefighters will facilitate a program about the essentials of fire safety. On their second visit, students will have the opportunity to explore the fire truck.  Students will also have activities to complete at home. Ms Wenckoski will send more information to families closer to the dates. 

Book Club - Issue 5

Orders due in this Friday, July 21. Scholastic are giving away up to 3 FREE books with all LOOP orders to help celebrate and spread the love of reading in our school.  (If you missed out on getting Liz Watson's new book, Diary of a Netball Star, it is also available in the latest issue.)

NUMERACY - Colleen Monaghan

The power of investigations.

Recently while teaching a unit on Money with the juniors, Tess asked if we could count the tub of coins we were using. She was wondering how much money might be in the tub altogether.  Tess continued to talk to me about the idea and how we could manage the amount. She suggested each child count a pile of coins and add them all together.  Such great problem solving! I thought it was a great idea, but probably well above these kids' level of skills to count out such a large amount of money. They happily proved me wrong !

While the curriculum standards for Year 1 students is to recognise, describe and order Australian coins according to their value, and the Year 2 standards are to count and order small collections of Australian coins and notes according to their value.  This task was much more than a small collection of coins, however they all worked so well together and counted dollars, then ten dollars and then made one hundred dollars. As you can see in the photos they were all so engaged and busy counting their piles and then working collaboratively to count the last of the coins.  A total of $985.75 was in one tub. A great team effort to count it all.

It just goes to show, never underestimate children and their ability to go above and beyond when they are curious and interested!

SUSTAINABILITY - Annette Gasbarro

What’s happening in Sustainability?

Welcome back to yet another exciting term of Sustainability learning.  

We began Term Three by welcoming our Foundation children to take part and learn about Sustainability.  During our focus groups we worked together to establish a Sustainability Hub. This Hub is located in Saunders Yard under the shelter area.  This is where our Sustainability focus groups will occur. Throughout the week, our learners were busy sorting out garden tools and materials needed for our Sustainability Hub. We continued by installing some more worm towers in our new garden beds.

This week our learners will engage in learning about how to grow strawberries. The children will be given the opportunity to document any wonderings they have about strawberries. We will continue by exploring the following:

• What soil is suitable for strawberries to grow?
• How much water do strawberries need?
• Do the need sun or shade?
• How big do they grow?

To explore these questions further we will contact Bunnings Coburg and ask a garden expert to answer any wonderings that the children have documented. 

Annette Gasbarro

Sustainability leader

SPORT & PE - Michael Jennings

Good luck to the St Fidelis Primary School’s Girls’ Soccer Team who have qualified to compete in the School Sport Victoria (SSV) Coburg District Winter Sport Finals Competition. This event will be held at Hosken Reserve this Friday 21 July, commencing at 10.00am and concluding by 11.30am.

VISUAL ART - Joe Frazzetto

Vincent Van Gogh Sunflowers By Foundation

Students explored the art elements 'Paint' and 'Colour'. The students explored and experimented by using their hands and fingers to mix colours and create an image. It was amazing and fun to watch the students mixing the primary colours to create a variety of different colours.  

Students were introduced to the artwork titled 'Sunflowers' painted by Vincent Van Gogh. We discussed the colours, how Vincent Van Gogh created his different tonal yellows and the shape of the sunflowers. Then students were asked to paint a sunflower using the following colours: warm and cool yellow, brown, white and black by using their hands and fingers. Then they used the same colours to produce their overlapping handprints on a white A3 cartridge paper, with the overlapping hand prints they created a collage of the vase. Students cut out their sunflowers to produce our own giant Vincent Van Gogh painting of his Sunflowers.