Dear Parents and Carers,

We were very excited today to invite our grandparents to a special liturgy and picnic lunch experience. Grandparent’s Day is in honour of the wonderful gift grandparents are to our lives and occurs in accord with the feast of Joachim and Anne, Jesus’ grandparents. The love, wisdom, generosity and care our grandparents bestow on us is immeasurable and its effects life-giving and life-long. Research shows that our life expectancy overtime has increased due to the influence of grandparents in our lives. Thank you to all grandparents who were able to share this special day with us. I hope you enjoyed the extra cuddles and time with your grandchildren. To those who were unable to be join us, thank you for the roles you play in making our children’s lives rich and meaningful. Thank you to our Kindergarten team and Mrs Williamson for organising today’s liturgy.

The last two weeks have been filled with activity and learning. I was in awe of the students who performed in this years’ Aspire production and congratulate Nanma Joy on her stellar performance. We celebrated Mary MacKillop’s feast day with prayer and had students participate in the Diocesan Athletics Competition with great sportspersonship. Thank you for representing Holy Name with pride. This week we have been working on fostering relationships.

I am pleased to inform you that our yarning circle is taking shape. You may have noticed the transformation taking place when you do back gate drop off or pick up. Thank you to David Mills and his co-workers who are working on the project. Lara Went will be very excited to see it when she returns from her holidays. 

I would like to acknowledge the great work that Mrs Amato and the gardening team do each week to grow and harvest fresh vegetables and herbs for our community kitchen. The quality is outstanding.   

The next two weeks are gearing up to be quite busy. We have guest speakers for Stage 3, literacy assessment for Year 6, Book Week parade, Book Fair, school photos, Father’s Day breakfast,  Wellbeing Week and special visitors from diocesan principals and for our Annual School Review.

Holy Name will host speakers Melinda Tankard Reist and Dr Marshall Ballantine-Jones who will be presenting to Year 5 and Year 6 students on Monday 19 August 2024. These age-appropriate sessions will focus on respectful relationships.

Melinda is an author, speaker, media commentator, blogger and advocate for women and girls. She is best known for her work addressing sexualisation, objectification, harms of pornography and violence. Marshall specialises in online sexualisation education, bringing over 25 years of experience working with children, youth, and families. The student session will be tailored to a primary school context.

These student sessions are in addition to the invitation to parents and carers in our recent Compass notification, hosted by St Clare’s High School, Taree. I have included the link if parents from other grades are interested in participating. Increasingly schools across Australia are seeing challenges that can stem from students navigating an online world that is ever evolving. We recognise educating our students in this space is a shared responsibility alongside parents and carers and are pleased to take a proactive approach and discuss these broad topics with our Year 5 and 6 students in an age-appropriate way. Melinda and Marshall deliver factual and powerful messages, and we understand that, for some, this content may be confronting. Please contact the school if you have any concerns.

On Wednesday the Primary Principals of the Diocese will have their term gathering at Holy Name. They will be meeting in our school hall and visiting classrooms as part of their visit. I look forward to our choir singing to them as part of our prayer. On Thursday we will have 15-20 people from the Diocese visit out school to conduct an annual review. They will use data from Tell Them from Me, NAPLAN, PAT, attendance, enrolments, finance, building inspections and education officers to ask questions of the executive team as well as present their thoughts on our data and the direction for the school’s improvement plan. Although I have only been at Holy Name a short time, I am very confident that this visit will be positive as the data is strong.

Please be reminded that school photos are taking place in Week 6 and students are expected to be wearing full formal Winter uniform. Please read about other happenings in this edition of the newsletter.

I look forward to seeing you for the upcoming events.

God Bless,

Niamh

Attendance

PB4L

KT	Abby Gardiner & Wyatt Godbolt
KM	Taylor Quinn & Jett Tull
1M	Remi Miller & Deon Jith
1N	Rocco Retke & Kristel Lakin
2S	Oscar Garr & Anika Tan
2L	Matilda Harvie & Johnny Black
3M	Alfie Laidlaw & Will Naughton
3W	Tane Te Raki-Pitfield & Hallie Clark
4H	Noah Adamson & Ruby Trunley
4Q	Joshua Matthews & Grace Rinaldi
5S	Levi Miller & Grayson Wood
5H	Elijah Suckling & Eden Lucenti
6M	Airlia Coulton-Donnelly & Caleb Younani

Principal's Awards:

Amillia Hackett	1N	20 surfboards
Corrine Widjaja	1N	20 surfboards
Robyn Wyldman	1M	20 surfboards
Rudolph Bergagnin	1M	20 surfboards
Ashton Howard	4H	20 surfboards
Darcy Dabovic	4Q	20 surfboards
Vincent Croad	1N	40 surfboards
Deon Jith	1M	40 surfboards
Remy Miller	1M	40 surfboards
Oscar Garr	2S	40 surfboards
Sophia Sleiman	3M	40 surfboards
Eniko Tan	4H	40 surfboards
Anna Brooks	3M	60 surfboards
Arlo Haywood	4H	60 surfboards
Grace Rinaldi	4Q	60 surfboards
Mila Newman	4H	80 surfboards
Ruby Trunley	4H	80 surfboards
Piper Webb	4H	80 surfboards
Georgie Hippe	4Q	100 surfboards

National Week of Action Against Bullying

This week HNS has acknowledged the National Week of Action Against Bullying. We began at assembly on Monday morning looking at a Powerpoint and video around the 2025 theme of Everyone Belongs.

We looked at our school motto, "Concern for Others" and discussed what this meant in regards to choosing the right thing to do.

We talked about the need to stand up for what is right and look after ourselves and each other. We also talked about bystanders and how being a bystander is as bad as being a bully.

The students then participated in learning throughout the week around diversity and acceptance.

Pupil Free Day

Our final Pupil Free Day will occur on Monday, September 2nd. The staff will be working on strategies to engage our students in positive work habits and Surface, Deep and Transfer Learning through the research of Michael McDowell.

Cheerleading

Our HNS cheerleading team competed recently and had great results!

Dolphins have recently competed at the International Convention Centre in Darling Harbour. Dolphins compete as a scholastic level 1 division. Dolphins won 1st place in their division and won silver grand champions over all scholastics team. 

Dolphins are off to Newcastle in October to compete next and we wish them all the best for their next competition. 

Garden

Next Fortnight at HNS

Great Learning Happening in Year One! 

Each fortnight we like to put a spotlight on the great learning happening in a particular grade in our school. In this report the spotlight is on Year One.

In English, the Year One classes are engaging in their reading lessons with a high level of engagement and motivation. The students are enjoying having their own copy of the class decodable reader each week, which enables them to use the reader during group sessions and practise reading the text at home. The decodable reader the students have week is linked with the class sound focus which assists the students in building their knowledge of more complex letter sound combinations. Each day students read the class reader with their small group to build reading fluency and work towards their goal of reading a target amount of words per minute. Students take part in a daily dictation within their groups where words containing the sound focus are included in the sentence the students need to record.

During writing our Year One students are learning to construct quality sentences to respond to their comprehension questions from their shared text. Over the past fortnight teachers have been modelling how to identify the author’s purpose and find noun and verb groups within the text. Next week the Year One teachers will introduce persuasive texts that will have the students discussing language such as opinion, how an author convinces a reader of their opinion with supporting reasons and the difference between fact and a personal opinion. The students will have fun playing oral language games of ‘Would you rather?’ where the students will argue their opinion on a topic. For example, ‘Would you rather own a pet dragon or a pet unicorn?’.

In Maths, Year One been focusing on patterns such as counting in 2s, working with odd and even numbers. Students showed their understanding of patterns through their use of shapes to make tessellating patterns. Students have also been working on their subtraction skills where they have used number lines to represent their answers. Next week the students will be working on their understanding of equal groups.

In Science, Year One have been working on a unit titled ‘Energy Comes in Different. In this unit, the students have used their senses to explore light, sound and heat energy. Students were then introduced to the elements of close observation and scientific drawings. The students had fun making popcorn and used their senses to smell, touch and hear the way the heat changed the popcorn kernels.

 Well done Year One students and teachers keep up the awesome work!

K-2 English Reading Groups

As you may be aware our Kindergarten to Year 2 Reading Groups have been going strong since their implementation in Term 1. This continues to involve a team of Classroom Teachers, Learning Support Staff, EALD, Aboriginal Education Workers coming into the classroom and supporting individual groups to work on Phonics, high frequency work identification, work on heart words (words that have tricky spelling and unique sounds that need to be learnt by heart) reading of the decodable reader, comprehension and a set dictation. The wonderful part of this process across our K-2 classes, is that students are working in small groups with other students of a similar ability which enables the teacher is able to target specific skills that need to be developed. At the end of last term, teachers from Kindergarten to Year 2 made changes to the structures of their groups during our Professional Learning Teams meetings in response to the current reading data we had collected. It was so pleasing to see that due to the consistent work on improving student fluency there was impressive growth in the reading data.

In Year One some groups have been ready to be extended and are now working on a developing their understanding of different comprehension strategies through a variety of different activities. Year 2 have made the most significant and exciting change where by they have a large group of students who are working on the 3-6 Reading Pedagogy where they are focusing their lessons on results from the reading assessments. Lessons focus on reading comprehension from factual texts and address areas like noun groups, author’s purpose and detailed retell.

 Mrs Suzie Monks

Primary Coordinator