Dear Parents and Carers,

This is now my final Newsletter article as principal of Holy Name. Niamh Marzol commences on Monday and although we will still work together throughout the transition until the 2025 principal commences, it is Niamh who will be the point of contact for the families of Holy Name. Niamh is well aware of the projects in the pipeline and is looking forward to working with our staff, students and families for the remainder of the 2024 school year. In 2025, Niamh will head back to the Hunter region as the principal of St Patrick's Lochinvar.

Thank you for your support of the changes that have occurred during my time as principal. Your support has never gone unnoticed and is evident in the success of our work together. Holy Name is in a great place, with a secure and professional staff team who continually refine their practice to positively impact our students. I believe my contribution has been focused on balancing the learning agenda with our sporting, cultural, formation and creative opportunities. There is a strong culture of feedback developing across our school and this will continue to be the focus for the remainder of the year. There are always new ways to grow a school and I look forward to hearing of positive changes in other areas of the school as new and fresh ideas form under new leadership. 

I would particularly like to thank Mr David Isbel and our Parents and Friends Association for the growing energy they have for building the community culture of Holy Name. Many years ago, we made a decision to shift the focus from solely fundraising to balance with friend-raising and I believe they have remained committed to this goal. I hope that everyone has their tickets for the P&F Trivia Night next Friday night; this promises to be a fun time, and from what the team shared with me at the P&F meeting on Tuesday night, quite an exciting night with high quality prizes on offer. 

I am looking forward to taking on a new role at St Joseph's Taree and wish you all the best of journeys for your children as they move through their educational years at Holy Name.

Yours sincerely,

Brooke Stephens

Spelling Bee & Maths Mentals Competition at Holy Name  

In week 5, Holy Name buzzed with excitement as students participated in two thrilling events: the annual Spelling Bee and the Math Mentals Competition. These competitions not only showcased our students' talents but also encouraged them to strive for excellence. 

Spelling Bee Success 

The Competitions took place On Thursday 30 May in the school hall. Students from Years 1 to 6 competed in their respective age groups, spelling words with confidence and precision. The atmosphere was electric as participants took to the stage, one by one, to face increasingly challenging words. Our young spellers displayed remarkable composure and skill. 

Congratulations to our Spelling Bee champions: 

• Stage 1: Arden Cassar 
• Stage 2: Hafsa Omar 
• Stage 3: Amna Omar 

We are incredibly proud of all the participants for their hard work and dedication in preparing for this event. 

Math Mentals Competition 

The Math Mentals Competition brought a wave of excitement to our school. Students worked through a series of mental math problems, testing their quick thinking and numerical abilities. The competition was intense, with students solving problems at lightning speed. 

Hats off to our Math Mentals champions: 

• Stage 1: Luke Jajo 
• Stage 2: Selim Hamdy  
• Stage 3: Max Isbel  

These students demonstrated outstanding mathematical skills and a deep understanding of mental math strategies. 

All students who participated in the heats and finals should be very proud of their achievements. Events like the Spelling Bee and Math Mentals Competition are vital in fostering a love of learning and encouraging healthy competition among our students. 

Hafsa went on to win the Regional Spelling competition at St Joseph's, Wingham the following week and will now progress to the Diocesan finals.

Athletics

The Manning Regional Carnival at Tuncurry Sports Oval on June 6th saw students from Wingham, Gloucester, Bulahdelah, Taree, and Forster compete in various events under clear skies. It was a fun day filled with enthusiastic participation and competitive spirit with 19 Forster students are progressing to Dio on the 7^th August. 

Team Points

HNS                     459

Joey's Taree          375

Joey's Wingham    270

Joey's Bulah         167

Joey's Glouc          47  

Champions 

Junior Girls                        Junior Boys

1^st  Alirah Griffiths (T)    Brabham Cooper

2^nd  Scarlett Garrard      Lucas Campbell-Wrigley (T)

3^rd Charlotte Allan          Ryan Simpson

                                     Saul Simon (W) 

11yrs Girls                         11 yrs Boys

1^st  Eleanor Healy (W)   Flynn Yates (T)

2^nd  Karlina Steohr(W)   Eli Lea

                                    Candland-Hart (T)

3^rd Mia Collins             

Senior Girls                                       Senior Boys

1^st Nevaeh Huckstadt (B)            Zac Te Raki-Pitfield

2^nd Jessika White (T)                  Tarickai Smith

3^rd Aimee Grey                           Shaneden Clarke

                                                 Lucas Hammond

SRC

In last week's Student Representative Council meeting we started our session with a team building exercise called A Work of Arts. The children worked in small groups and each had 30 seconds to start a drawing. They then had to pass the  drawing to their right and that person continued the drawing. This happened until the drawing was back tyo its original owner and it was fun to see what the end products were.

We then had a discussion about the Term 4 Canberra excursion and practised public speaking by preparing an impromptu speech.

The Sport Team was reminded about responsibilities around geeting the correct play equipment out for the breaks and to put it all away at the end of lunch 2. We then discussed a plan to hold a colour run in Term 4 and will continue this discussion in our meeting in Week 10.

Finally, the students split into groups and began to script some videos to support our PBL behaviour focuses. We hope to share these videos with all classes in the school to support social and emotional learning.

Garden

The school garden is at it's Winter best thanks to Mrs Amato and her band of green thumbed students. Our Community Kitchen at our Parish is always grateful for the produce we provide to assist in making meals.

Staff Faith Formation

Follow Me 

At our lastest pupil free day, the staff of Holy Name took part in a faith formation day led by Mr Adam Frost from the RE and Spirituality Team of the Maitland Newcastle Diocese. The day involved the staff looking deeply at the theme "Follow Me" taken from the Holy Gospel according to John (1:35-39), where we too are invited to consider this call of Jesus. To firstly “come and see the place of God” and to respond to His call of “follow me!” was the focus of our program. This theme focused on the importance of not only listening to the needs of our people – our families, our colleagues, our students, our society. But to learn how to better accompany and walk with others in a more intentional and deliberate way. We also continued building upon our journey of walking with Christ – and in particular, to see the world as Jesus did, to respond with mercy, charity and love. To spend time contemplating how we can live a life of Christian service – to be a neighbour to all our brothers and sisters.Throughout the day for the day we explored this invitation.

Through Visio Divina, we studied two icons, the first, “Come and See” by Franco Vignazia which is located in the church Chiesa di San Giovanni Battista di Coriano in Italy and the second icon of the barb wire fence by Robert Lentz.  A Visio divina is a form of divine seeing in which we prayerfully invite God to speak to our hearts as we look at an image.

As this is Mrs Stephens last newsletter as principal, I thought I would take the opportunity to thank her for the continuous support she has given to Religious Education at Holy Name.

Catholic Identity has always been at the forefront of Mrs Stephens decisions making. Mrs Stephens led the creation a new school Vision and Mission Statement, and a clear path forward for belonging and serving in His Holy Name. Our staff formation days these past two years have been explicitly on learning how to be a community of service through Catholic Social Teachings. Holy Name staff have been encouraged and supported under Mrs Stephens leadership to build their personal spiritual formation as catholic educators by attending a suite of formation opportunities led by the RE and Spirituality team of Maitland/Newcastle. She has organised to be made available professional development for teachers to strengthen and deepen their capacity to teach an assessment based religious education curriculum, embedded in a researched based pedagogy of “Encounter”. An inclusive way of teaching that is inclusive to all religious backgrounds.

Mrs Stephens has been a member of the parish Baptismal Team for years and has welcomed many of our students into God’s family through this sacrament of initiation, along with always being present as students from Holy Name receive the sacraments of Confirmation and Eucharist in our Church. As principal she has welcomed Fr Andrew, Fr Greg, Fr Peter and Fr John into our school, supporting and working collaboratively with them in their service as Parish Priest, being the conduit between school and the Church. Mrs Stephens has sat on the Parish Council and Parish Finance Team and also been part of the Synod Leadership Team.

We sincerely thank you for your service to Catholic Education at Holy Name Mrs Stephens, and wish you much happiness in the future.

Mrs Genevieve Williamson

Religious Education Coordinator.

Year Five in the Spotlight!

This fortnight I have enlisted the help of some of our clever Year 5 friends, to report to you about what they have been learning over the past few weeks. It was so lovely to see the enthusiasm at which they jumped at the idea to share their Year 5 learning experiences.

From Nanma Joy 5H, Sasha Dempsey 5H, Mackenzie Quilter 5S and Alessandra Devoscovi 5S.

Hi parents, teachers and students we (Nanma, Sasha, Alessandra and Mackenzie) are here to inform you on what has been going on in Year 5.

So far reading in Year 5 is going swimmingly. We all know how to read and most of us have a general love of reading, even if we don’t always show it! All jokes aside, Year 5 reading is pretty fun and we have learned so much all thanks to amazing teachers. Our teachers have helped us build the skills to achieve our Year five reading progression goals and others are on the year 7 level reading progression. A few of us are even working on our Year 8 level reading goals… Pretty impressive! We have been learning important skills like identifying language features, hyperboles, themes of different texts, adverbial phrases and even vocabulary. We also having been learning about similes, metaphors, repetition, and personification. We have learnt about time connectives that are used in our writing. The time connectives that we have learnt about have also made our writing so much more interesting.

In Year 5 writing is so much fun! We can’t even explain it with words but we are writing entertaining texts and don’t tell Mr Hassett or Ms Shephard but I think they are having more fun writing their example texts than we are writing our actual texts. We are learning about how to write informative, persuasive and imaginative/narrative writing. Everyone in our class has their own writing goal that they need to achieve before the end of the year. You get a new goal every time you achieve your current one and we have workshop times in writing, which comes with teacher feedback so we get the skills we need to achieve our writing goals.             

Maths in Year 5 is super fun, we have been learning about patterns and measuring angles which has been fun but challenging at the same time. We created shapes using origami and then measured angles and used different geometric skills to solve our investigation. Good team work while sharing our knowledge and understanding about measuring angles as well as learning different attributes of regular and irregular shapes with our peers, helped with our final work in our investigations.

In Religion, we are learning about types of prayer. The five types of prayer are Praise, Thanksgiving, Petition, Blessing and Intercession. We have also learnt about dignity, which is respect to others. Everyone should show dignity, but sometimes people forget that there are other people around them that need care and compassion and show the opposite.

In Year 5 sports, term 1, we walk to the oval and played games, such as soccer, capture the flag, etc. However, this term we’ve been walking to the YMCA and split up in 3 groups out of our whole year, then, for example, one group learns or play tennis, like backhand and forehand. Another, balancing skills. All of these groups are followed by a tennis teacher, which teaches us some skills, like how to hold the racket. I mean not as much as a real tennis lesson, but enough for most of the students to hit the ball and score/win!

In Visual Arts, Year five is working on painting zombies in costumes and drawing portraits of eyes, noses and eyebrows/drawing the eyes of a face and what is surrounding it. Many Year fivers enjoy this subject because it is a relaxing and clam thing to do at school after running around at lunch. This is what some other people in year five said, “We love being creative and using our skills, minds, and imagination, we love using our creativeness in the lessons and connecting with friends through art.”

In general Year 5 is an amazing year and we can’t wait for term 3, but for now let’s hear the opinion of some of our Year 5 peers about what they love to do the most:

Evie - What I like most about year 5 is that we get to do Mini Vinnie’s

Isabella - I like art

Grace - I like that we get to go out of school for sport

Mia - I like getting to do breakfast club

Eva – I like being in the same class as my friends

Elijah & Jax- We like sport – It’s so much fun this term!

Isla - I love art

Ava - I like sport or free time

Max & Harry- The Footy Gala Day

Alexis- Definitely sport

Maddie - Sport on the oval

Haya- Sport and art

Thank you to our amazing reporters for giving us such a detailed snapshot of the learning that has happening in our Year 5 classrooms! Year 5 are certainly working hard and challenging themselves to be assessment capable learners!

Lego Club Petition

Jax Tull in 5H has started a petition to get a Lego Club at some 2nd lunchtimes at Holy Name. He is aiming for 100 student signatures so he can present it to the Holy Name Leadership Team. If your child would like the option to build with Lego at set lunch times encourage them to sign Jax's petition. 

Have a wonderful fortnight,

Mrs Suzie Monks

Primary Coordinator