Learning 

Message from Learning & Teaching

Each week hub teams gather together to analyse and reflect on evidence of your child’s learning and growth. Children attend targeted literacy and numeracy groups daily and educators are constantly gathering new data to inform your child’s targeted teaching.

With the intention of strengthening your understanding and supporting the learning link between school and home, Seesaw is used to share your child’s learning. For the remainder of the term, we are going to trial a new approach to Seesaw based on staff reflections and parent feedback. You will receive a Seesaw post sharing your child’s learning focus (from their target groups) for both literacy and numeracy. There will also be a Seesaw post for Faith and Community Projects over the remainder of Term One. Specialist educators will also share what your child is learning in their relevant learning areas. At St. John’s, we will constantly revise our purpose and innovate on initiatives to improve our connection with families. We thank you for your feedback and look forward to gathering more at the end of term.

Kind regards,

Lauren Davis, Jarryd Bradford, Gemma Goodyear

ldavis@sjfootscray.catholic.edu.au

jbradford@sjfootscray.catholic.edu.au

Literacy

All children across the school have taken part in Target groups for Reading and Writing. They are engaged in various practices that support them in Learning to Read and/or Reading to Learn. 

Our Preps have taken part in Language Experience, Shared Reading or Guided Reading. During a 'Language Experience' children compose sentences about a shared experience, which is written by the Educator and 'cut up' for the child to re-assemble and practice reading the text they composed themselves! 

The children in the Grade 1 and Grade 2 Hubs have continued to explore skills that support them in learning to read to enable them to become effective learners that 'read to learn'. They're working towards building skills in decoding texts, reading with fluency, enhancing their vocabulary and making meaning of what they read (comprehension).

The children in our 3-6 Hub have engaged in robust dialogue and discussion using rich texts as the springboard; exploring these texts through various 'lenses' i.e. making connections, analysing the Author's purpose or 'looking beyond' the text/illustrations (inferring) to explore hidden meaning/themes! Their Book Clubs are coming along, too!! 

This week you will receive a Seesaw post about their writing goal. Children, across the school, have explored writing to Socialise and created texts that demonstrate their knowledge of this Genre. You might like to engage in dialogue with them about how they have learnt to communicate effectively within this genre by asking questions, such as:

- What are the various ways I could communicate with someone effectively?

- What if I was communicating with my friend, what might my tone/language be? Would this be different if I were writing a letter to a Politician? How?

- How is a letter/email/note/phone call 'structured'? i.e. To x, From/Yours Sincerely x

Should you have any Literacy-related questions please never hesitate to shoot me an email or call the school!

Daniela De Luca

ddeluca@sjfootscray.catholic.edu.au

Message from Wellbeing

Learning to identify and label emotions plays an important part in cultivating emotional intelligence, developing skills for self-regulation and can contribute to improved academic outcomes and improved relationships. (www.casel.org)

At St. John’s we use the Zones of Regulation to help educators and students become more mindful of how their emotions can change throughout the day and can in turn impact their actions. We also use the Zones of regulation to build and expand emotional vocabulary. Students move from using words like ‘happy’ and ‘sad’ to words like elated, tranquil, disheartened or lonely. By teaching subtle distinctions between similar feelings we are empowering students to be able to recognise a wider scope of their own feelings and be able to address those feelings in a more strategic way.  

A great way to use the Zones of Regulation at home is to make links between the feelings and actions of characters in the books that you read. Often children find talking about the feelings of a third person easier than talking about their own feelings. You might ask questions like:

• How do you think Grandma is feeling as the wolf approaches her house?
• Can you think of another word for scared?
• How can you tell from the picture that Grandma is scared?
• What is her body/face doing?
• What could she do to get back into the green zone?

If you would like a copy of the Zones of Regulation - please get in touch. We would be happy to share one with your family.

Ashlee Owen

aowen@sjfootscray.catholic.edu.au

Message from Faith

Prayer Gatherings

Despite the snap lockdown last week we managed to gather as a faith community both online and in person! Thank you to the large number of families who joined us online for Shrove Tuesday pancake making and for our Ash Wednesday reflection. Fr Rene celebrated a Distribution of Ashes with us in the Church Hall on Thursday where he warmly welcomed our 2021 Prep children and led us in prayer. 

Lent/Holy Week 

We are beginning to explore the events of Holy Week, what happened in Jesus' life on the significant days and why we still remember and celebrate these events today. We will gather as a whole community to celebrate Holy Week/Easter towards the end of this term and at the beginning of Term 2.

Prep will lead us in reflection of Palm Sunday

Year 1 will share the Washing of the Feet

Year 3/4 will lead us in celebrating The Last Supper

Year 5/6 will commemorate Good Friday

Year 2 will celebrate Easter Sunday with us.  

Project Compassion 2021

Our Social Justice Leaders would like to thank the families who sent in food for our Shrove Tuesday collection, it was a small collection due to the lockdown but each item makes a difference to a local family. Throughout Lent we will be supporting Project Compassion, an annual charity collection in aid of Caritas Australia who make a life-changing difference to those in need, both here in Australia and overseas. This year the theme is: 'Be more', Caritas asks us to consider the small actions we can take to be more for others.  Collection boxes are in each Hub and at the main office if you would like to donate some money. Project Compassion will run throughout all of Lent, our Social Justice Leaders will work with our children to build an understanding of the very real difference that this money can make to children in need. If you would like to know more about Caritas and the work they do please visit: https://lent.caritas.org.au/ 

Sacraments 2021

A letter was sent home this week to all Year 3/4 and Year 5/6 children detailing our plans to celebrate the Sacraments of Reconciliation, Eucharist and Confirmation. We will be holding Family Faith Evenings in the lead up to each of these sacraments and we invite all families from Year 3/4 and Year 5/6 to join us in reflection.  These evenings are an opportunity for families to reflect and talk together about concepts such as love, forgiveness and the gifts we all have to offer one another. 

Please note: 

Sacrament of Reconciliation will be celebrated on March 30th, 6 pm

Sacrament of Eucharist will be celebrated on September 12th, 10am

Sacrament of Confirmation will be celebrated on June 10th, 6pm

Please do not hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions about our Sacramental celebrations. 

Kind regards,

Aoife Mc Carthy

amccarthy@sjfootscray.catholic.edu.au