21st July 2022
Principal News
Welcome back to Term 3!
We have started our term with the bar set high for behaviour and uniform expectations. On Monday, our teachers and school officers participated in the Essential Skills for Classroom Management professional development with Bill Schneid. This is the second year of our ESCM roll out at St Mary’s School and the success is evident in all areas of our school. If you would like to know more about the implementation of Essential Skills for Classroom Management, please ask your child and/or a staff member of the school.
OSHC Staff Change
Miss Mel Phillips has resigned from the OSHC Coordinator position last week as she pursues her passion at the local Kindy in a few weeks. We thank Miss Mel for her commitment and tireless work in our outside school hours care facility. If you know of anyone who is seeking a position with TCKC, please give Donna Stahlhut a call 0428 518 410.
NAIDOC
As a community of Charleville, last week we are celebrated NAIDOC Week. On Friday, all students participated in the community NAIDOC march and ceremony hosted at St Mary’s School. We are honoured to have been involved and thank our parents and community for their support. We welcomed 2009 School Captain, Taneale Lawton, as our guest speaker this year. Taneale addressed this year’s theme Get Up! Stand up! Show up! and shared how the theme encourages us to champion all forms of change while celebrating those who have already driven and led change. She spoke about the meaning of NAIDOC to her and our community. NAIDOC is when we see a coming together of organisations, partners, and people from all walks of life embracing the strength and resilience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. It’s a sense of belonging and community that make us love Charleville, our home, so much. We also had our school choir present the Aboriginal Our Father. Check out our school Facebook page for photos and videos from the day.
Year 6 Camp
Miss Morrison and I are currently attending Year 6 Camp at the Sunshine Coast. Students have participated in a range of beach games and team building activities so far this week. Everyone enjoyed the SEA LIFE experience, kindly purchased by the St Mary’s P & F. We have many memories and photos to share with our school community. Follow our Facebook page for updates throughout the week.
Catholic Education Week
Catholic Education Week will be celebrated across Queensland from 24 July to 30 July 2022. This annual event is held to promote the special ethos of Catholic schools and to highlight the great things that take place in Catholic schools every day. This year’s theme – ‘Communities of Faith, Hope and Love’ encourages young people to live out the message of Jesus and to reach their full potential as compassionate, contributing, life-giving members of society.
On Wednesday 27th, we will hold our Catholic Education Week Mass in the church, starting at 9:30am sharp. We invite all family and friends to attend our Mass as we celebrate Catholic Education Week together as a school community.
Next Monday 25th July will be a pupil free day as staff participate in Bishop’s Inservice Day at St Mary’s School, which is held at the start of Catholic Education Week each year. Acting Director: Education Services, Mr Paul Murphy and Brother Damien Price will travel out and join us, along with Sacred Heart from Cunnamulla and St Finbarr’s from Quilpie.
Date Claimers:
- Student Free Day – Bishops Inservice Day Monday 25th July and Friday 2nd September for Consistency of Teacher Judgement (CTJ) Day
- Catholic Education Week Mass – Wednesday 27th July @ 9:30am.
- Whole School Athletics Carnival – Friday 29th July @ CSHS Oval
- Performing Arts Festival 24th – 27th August
Have a fabulous fortnight!
Cheers
Katrina
APRE News
Sacramental Program
Our candidates to receive the sacrament of Confirmation received their booklets and have begun their preparation. Confirmation Mass will be Saturday, August 13 at 6pm. Bishop Robert McGuckin, along with Fr Warren, will preside. Please come along and join us in supporting our St Mary’s students as they take this important step in their faith journey.
Parish Mass – led by St Mary’s students!
Parish Council has kindly given permission for students from Yr 4 – 6 to help Fr Warren to lead a Parish Mass. The Parish Mass students will help to lead is scheduled for Saturday, August 6th at 6pm. This is in place of students doing a prayer assembly this term. Helping Fr Warren involves reading, choosing music for the mass, helping with offertory and generally participating in Mass. I will be speaking to students in Yr 4 & 5 this week, and Yr 6 next week, (after they return from camp), to see who would like to participate and attend mass with their family. This is a first for our modern day students and we are very excited to be given the opportunity to help Fr Warren. Please let me or your child’s teacher know if you have any questions.
Catholic Education Week – July 24 – 31
We are excited to celebrate Catholic Education Week next week. Please note Monday, 25 July is a PUPIL FREE DAY. Our staff will meet with staff from St Finbarr’s Quilpie and Sacred Heart Cunnamulla to listen to Fr Damian Price and hear from Bishop Robert McGuckin. On Wednesday, July 27th, we celebrate Catholic Education Week with a whole school mass and morning tea afterwards. All are welcome!!! We would love to see as many parents, grandparents and friends of St Mary’s as possible to celebrate our fantastic school. Mass begins at 9:30am in the church with morning tea following here at St Mary’s.
Can’t wait to see lots of you at our Mass on Wednesday, July 27th!
Until then,
God bless,
Kirsty Lines
APRE
Curriculum News
Hi Families,
Welcome to Term 3! This fortnight I would like to share with you some tips to support your child with reading at home.
Tip #1: Have as many reading experiences with your children as much as you can. See the article below from Scholastics Australia about reading for 20 minutes each day. Please find the full document here: https://scholastic.com.au/media/5452/scholastic_book_club_parent_guide.pdf
Tip #2: The number one skill for supporting successful readers is oral segmenting and blending. This is an activity that can be played like I Spy. Break one-syllable (one clap) words like tree, road, duck, park, and dog into their individual sounds and ask your child to blend the sounds back together to guess the word. For example: T-R-EE, R-OA-D, D-U-CK, P-AR-K, D-O-G. When your child is confident with this, you could guide them to segment the words. When children have mastered one syllable words, you could move on to two and three syllable words. Please see the website below for more information: https://fivefromfive.com.au/segmenting-and-blending/
Tip #3: Help build reading muscle. When your child is learning to read, they may not be fluent. This maybe a little confronting for adults. Give your child the space to sound out unfamiliar words in their decodable texts.
See this extract from Alison Clarke’s blog about building the reading muscle:
“We want young children’s lives to be fun, and free of struggle and hard work. We want them to enjoy reading, like we do. So, listening to young children reading simple books containing the spelling patterns they’ve been taught in phonics lessons can be quite painful, and a little confronting, for adults.
They grunt and groan and sweat their way through the words. Most of their cognitive horsepower gets used up just extracting the words from the page, and they don’t understand much of what they’ve read. It’s certainly not fluent. It looks and sounds more like hard slog than fun.
However, inside a child’s brain, something extraordinary is happening. They’re creating a new brain circuit linking the visual areas at the back of the brain with the language areas on the left. They’re shifting some tasks usually done on the left side over to the right hemisphere, and repurposing left hemisphere brain cells for reading.”
For more information, please go to: https://www.spelfabet.com.au/2021/09/the-sweaty-sounding-out-stage-builds-reading-muscle/
Hope you all have a wonderful fortnight and get into some reading with your kids!
Vanessa Alexander
Middle Leader: Curriculum
Learning Support
Library News
We are all very excited to be back and borrowing!
Students reserving titles on our Library Web App.
During last week’s library lessons all classes participated in a Dreamtime storytelling session.
The year 2 class listening to the Dreamtime story, How the Kangaroos Got Their Tails.
Prep students answering questions about their Dreamtime story.
The first time they have used Kahoot, an online quiz platform and they were amazing.
Issue 5 out now!
Due back Thursday 28th July
Available on all LOOP orders (Linked Online Ordering and Payment platform for parents.)
Coming Soon!
Book Week Character Parade 2022
23rd August
HPE News
Hi St Mary’s Families, welcome back for semester 2.
This term in week three our whole school sports carnival will be held at the Charleville SHS. Please encourage your child to participate to help earn points for their team. A note has been sent home with timetables attached.
Please remember to nominate your child/children for their track events and to wear their green or gold!!!!
In PE, students continue to refine their techniques for all disciplines, so they are well prepared for the sports carnival.
In health this term all classes will engage in the Daniel Morcombe curriculum. A note has been sent home to communicate with parents what is involved in the lesson.
Please remember if you have any concerns about your child in PE or Health, please feel free to contact me via Class Dojo or Email susan.mcinnes@twb.catholic.edu.au
Yours in HPE,
Ms Mac.
The Arts
Prep News
Welcome back to a new term. It’s hard to believe that we are halfway through our school year.
Preps have come into the term with a fresh energy and are ready to tackle challenges. They have shown Mrs Couch and myself the high STAR expectations that we are looking for over the past week.
During our learning this week we explored the term NAIDOC and explored the term ‘bush tucker’ where students smelt different bush tucker ingredients such as lemon myrtle, bush tomato and cinnamon myrtle. From this, students created their own lemon myrtle jam drops which were a massive hit. On Friday students explored another taste testing experience of pumpkin and bush tomato risotto with coconut yoghurt. We asked all students to give it a try and some students loved the taste while others didn’t enjoy the texture or flavour. This was such a rewarding experience for our prep students, and we are grateful for Mrs Couch for bringing in these flavours.
We have a full and fun packed term ahead and I know Prep is reading for the fun to come.
A few important dates -
- Bishop's Inservice Day (student free day) Monday 25th July
- P & F meeting Monday 25th July at 3pm
- Catholic Education Week Mass Wednesday 27th July at 9:30am in the Church
- Athletics Carnival Friday 29th July at Charleville State High School
I hope you all have a fabulous fortnight and can’t wait to update what prep gets up to over the next two weeks.
Thanks,
Imogen Hunt
Year 1 News
Welcome back to Term 3! It was wonderful to see Grade 1 ready for learning after the break. Our fingers are crossed for a healthy and covid free term!!
A reminder that the Athletics Carnival is next Friday 29th. Please make sure that jumpers, jackets and hats are named clearly.
In Maths this week, we will be learning about counting strategies to help us solve simple addition and subtraction. We will learn about measurement and comparing the lengths and capacities of objects. We will also look at the importance of using the same units of measurements when comparing objects.
In English, we are reading the text, “Red Riding Hood” retold by Brenda Parkes. The children discuss the purpose of the texts and talk about what makes the text fiction. They will discuss the setting of the story using images from the text.
Thanks for reading and have a wonderful week!
Courtney
Year 2 News
Welcome to term 3! We have another very busy term ahead.
This term we are looking at sustainability, which is embedded in a few subject areas. Below is a general outline of our topics this term:
English: Persuasive unit - encouraging people to care for our environment. Text focus - The Lorax.
Science: Earth sciences - natural resources (focus on water).
HASS: History - comparing objects from past to present.
Religion: Creation - how can we be stewards of creation and care for our environment.
Design and technology: Designing and creating a shirt that promotes care for our planet.
Math:
- time (embedded daily)
- multiplication and division
- data
- measurement
- flips, slides and turns
Year 3 News
Year 4/5 News
Year 5/6 News
Welcome to Term 3 everyone - boy is this year going quick!
We have had such a wonderful return to school, showing how well we are getting ready for leadership and/or high school. We have been drawing focus to our expectations at St Mary's and we have set such a wonderful example for our younger students.
We enjoyed reflecting and joining in with our community NAIDOC March and Ceremony last week.
Jumping straight back into things, we have been so engaged with our learning this past week and look forward to getting to learn new things this term and enhancing all our skills. Check out our surveying skills in Maths!
This week we are away on Year 6 Camp. We had a blast travelling here and look forward to a fun filled week together.
Have a great term everybody!
Miss Morrison and the Year 5/6 Crew.
July Birthdays
Charlotte Bryant, Jack Doolan, Meg Gentle, Sam Jones, Dakota Latchman, Jensen Latchman, Paisley Saunders, Tori Smith, Hugh Stirton, Ivy Sullivan, Kingsley Tickell, Tom Tickell, Daisy Williams, Miss Price, Mrs Dunne, Mrs Sheehan
Happy birthday to all students and staff who celebrate their birthday in July.
Dates to Remember
- Monday 25th July - Pupil Free day / Bishop's Inservice for School Staff
- Monday 25th - Friday 29th July - Catholic Education Week
- Wednesday 27th July - Whole School Mass - morning tea provided afterwards
- Thurs 28th - 9-12 years - Athletics events at the CSHS 8am-12pm
- Friday 29th July - Whole School Athletics Carnival @CSHS Oval - Lunch order due Friday 22nd
- Performing Arts Festival - 24th - 27th August