Dear Parents and Carers,

This week's Book Week Parade and Book Fair were both very successful school activities. It was wonderful to see so many parents and grandparents here celebrating alongside our students. Thank you to Mrs Arrow, our Teacher Librarian for her organisation of these events and for working with Yr 6 on the Holy Name Hive Podcast with our Yr 6 students. What a fabulous idea and a wonderful example of how we are teaching students to use technology in creative ways to improve their experiences of learning. We will share the first episode of the podcast as soon as we can!

Parents and carers of students in Kinder, Year 1, Year 4 and Year 5 have been attending the Goal Setting Conversations with their child and teacher. We hope you enjoyed this opportunity and had the chance to complete the Parent Feedback on Student Learning Survey. This is a great help as we plan for the future. Students Led Conversations will occur in all other classes on Tuesday afternoon, 19th September, along with a BBQ to celebrate the opening of our new classrooms and play spaces. Parents will access the same survey during this time and classrooms will be open for all families to check out with their children. We are inviting our grandparents to join us for this afternoon that will commence at 3.30pm and wind up around 6pm. Please put the date in your calendar and join us in gathering as a community.

This coming Thursday morning, we are celebrating our Father's Day breakfast. This is a wonderful event that is normally well attended. Mrs Williamson has included more information a little later in the newsletter.

Next Friday evening 1st September, our P&F are hosting a Movie night for students and families in the Mackillop Hall. Our students love to gather together outside of school hours and it should be a fun time. I have included the flyer for your information.

COSI

This week I submitted our Curriculum Self Evaluation paperwork to the Catholic Schools Office as part of the system’s Continuum of School’s Improvement. It was really affirming to see that our teacher’s have high quality teaching programs, based on syllabus outcomes and following our school scopes and sequences. The work samples I checked were also of high quality. I thank our very dedicated staff for keeping up to date with this important area of teaching and learning and for the collaborative way in which they plan engaging experiences for the students across all Key Learning Areas.

NDA

The National Day of Action Against Bullying and Violence was on Friday, August 18. As many students were supposed to be at the Soccer Gala Day, we decided to acknowledge this day at HNS this Monday.

The students were able to watch a video about how connections are such an important part of our lives and do some learning around who we are connected to and how that makes us feel. In Week 8, the students will take part in Australia’s Biggest Online Safety Lesson organised by the Daniel Morcombe Foundation. Please see the foundation’s website for more information.

https://danielmorcombe.com.au/

Tennis

Todd Woodbridge Cup

The Todd Woodbridge Cup was a great success for all the schools in our area of Forster/Tuncurry. Also, we’d like to thank Forster Tennis Club for volunteering to help and for letting us on their facilities. When we arrived, we all knew that it was going to be a great time, also while we were playing tennis everyone got to see and make new friends from other schools.

For lunch, all the kids received free sausage sizzle while the adults and teachers obtained scones and tea or coffee. After we had finished lunch we had the playoffs, where we versed other teams from different schools with the same points as us.

In the end we had a presentation for awards that you earned for Passion, Participation, Teamwork and much more. Finally, after the presentation we helped pack up and walked back to school feeling happy about our achievements.

Overall, everyone had an entertaining day and finished with a big smile on their face. Even everyone who hasn’t played tennis before had the best time however they might not have won.

By Eli Lea and Haya Hamdy

PBL                          

Our Positive Behaviour for Learning focus over the past fortnight has again been Listening to the Teacher. The following students received certificates at assembly this morning for being the leading surfboard winners in their classes:

A huge congratulations to Isabella, Charbel and Rocco for being given 60 surfboards! This means a Principal's Award and a silver badge.

Father’s Day Breakfast 

Next Thursday 31st August we will be hosting our annual Father’s Day Breakfast. Father’s will be served bacon and egg rolls, children a sausage sandwich from 7:30am until 8:45am inside the school hall. At 8:30am we will stop serving for our Year 6 Captains to lead our school community in a short prayer of thanksgiving for our fathers. Children will also take the opportunity to show their dads around the school playground to see the newly completed building works. 

We look forward to celebrating this day with our fathers, carers, and father figures. 

Classes attending Parish Masses 

The following classes will be attending the Friday parish mass at 9:30am. Parents and friends are very welcome to attend these masses. 

Week 6 25th August- Year 3 

Week 8 8th September- Year 1 and Year 4 

Week 9 15th September- Kindergarten and Year 6  

Genevieve Wiliamson

Religious Education Coordinator

Great Learning Happening in Year Four!

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 4. During reading sessions Year 4 have focusing on improving their comprehension strategies, in particular the skills of predicting, visualising and inferring. Students have been working hard on their ability to use punctuation effectively and identify how it changes our intonation and pausing when reading aloud. Each week as part of their reading lesson, Year 4 are introduced to new vocabulary which is pulled from their shared text. These words are analysed with a focus on definition, morphology and examples and non-examples identified. These words are added to the class learning wall for students to refer back to and use in their writing and in their oral language.

Students have been working hard within their Book Club groups to analyse their chosen texts. Each week students are required to read up to a certain point in a text, which is then used for their group work and completes their allocated role from the previous week’s session. During book club sessions each child presents the work they have done within their role. There roles include: ‘The Connector’, ‘The Discussion Director, ‘The Illustrator’, ‘The Passage Picker’, The Word Master’, and ‘The Summariser’. The discussion that comes from within these groups is so rich and the know that they are accountable to each other so work hard to ensure they come to school prepared with their completed tasks.  

The students had great fun planning their costumes for Book Week. Check out some of the photos of our Year 4 book characters!

In writing, Year 4 have been learning how to write effective informative texts. Students started by engaging in mini lessons where they have been learning to write using compound and complex sentences effectively. The students worked on multiple mini lessons prior to starting their information texts in order to ensure they had the knowledge of grammar concepts and language features such as lessons on: consistent use of present tense, effective use of multimodal features eg. tables/images, adverbial phrases and adjectives. Students worked on developing a plan for their informative texts based on examples they had heard from previous students writing. Students have chosen an animal they are interested in learning more about to write their report on. Part of the co-constructed success criteria was to include a paragraph on survival which links to the Year 4 Science unit on techniques for survival.

In Maths, Year Four has been focussing on the Big Idea Project ‘Super Sports Stadium.’ The students having been learning to use maths skills such as estimation, multiplication and division to design a junior sports stadium. The students were tasked with deciding how many blocks of seats they will need for 2000 spectators and how many will be in each block. The students now need to draw their stadium and seating plan to scale including all of the dimensions. During this process there will be lots of peer and class discussions where the students will need to justify their seating arrangement to prove that their stadium can seat 2000 people. The students have been so engaged in this maths investigation because they are able to see how the mathematical skills they learn in the classroom can be applied in the real world!

During sport this term, Year 4 Students will have the opportunity to practise skills in fun and challenging situations and through common games and activities. Students have learnt about and practised using an implement to strike an object at targets, learnt about and practised striking a ball to score runs against a fielding group. Batters are learning about and practising striking a ball with an implement while working with others to score points. Students are also learning about and practising fielding a ball to prevent the batter from scoring points. Students were able to put their striking skills into action during tennis matches at the recent Todd Woodbridge Cup which was held here in Forster.

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

 Mrs Suzie Monks

Primary Coordinator