Term One Dates

Free Parent Webinar

Parent guide to digital technologies and mental health. 

This free webinar, hosted by the Council of Catholic School Parents NSW/ACT and delivered by the eSafety Commissioner, is designed for parents and carers of young people aged 10–18.  Parents and Carers can register at  https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/6726877427764036623 Date of the webinar will be Tuesday 8 March 7.30pm – 8.30pm

The webinar will cover:

• What do to about accidental exposure to content about suicide, self-harm or eating disorders
• Using games, apps, and social media to support mental wellbeing
• The pros and cons of digital mental health platforms
• strategies for young people to support friends online.

Morning Club

Morning Club is a free service that we like to offer to our families that provides early supervision for students from 8am (strictly) to 8.40am before our playground supervision commences. Morning Club is to assist parents and carers who have early work commitments or need travel for appointments, etc. It is coordinated by Mrs Nicola Spackman and is made possible through her staffing allocation. Mrs. Gwenda Romer will also assist with Morning Club supervision this year. The Club is supported by other staff members when required.

This year we will commence Morning Club from Week One Term Two, Wednesday 27 April. 

Next term parents and carers will be required to register their child/ren for Morning Club and it will only run Monday - Thursday each week. Parents can make a permanent booking or just book a 'one off' session, as required. These can be made up until 7.30am each day.

This year Morning Club will be held in the Library and students will engage in quiet activities such as drawing, colouring, construction, board games and card games.

Children arriving at school unregistered or after 8.30am will not be permitted to attend Morning Club. We ask that children not registered arrive at 8.40am, the time that regular supervision commences. 

The booking form is available below and can also be found on Szapp. 

https://smpscrookwell.schoolzineplus.com/form/25 

Three-Way Conversations and Interim Reports

School Cross Country Carnival

Our Cross Country Carnival will be held on Friday 18 March at the Crookwell Showground. The students walk with their teachers and support staff to the Showground, to commence at 11.00am. Students have morning tea at school, prior to leaving. The last event is around 1.00pm, enabling students to walk back to school for lunch. This means that the students only need to carry a drink bottle to the showground. There will be no Tuckshop available on that day.

All students participate in our Cross Country Carnival, competing over the following distances:

5/6/7 Years - 600m

8 Years - 1km

9/10 Years - 2km

11/12 Years - 3km

A full program of events is available in our School Sports section of this newsletter.

Any parents who can assist at this carnival are asked to contact our event coordinator, Mrs Rachael Croker.

Local Excursion Consent

Last week you received a Local Excursion Consent Form. This general consent form allows your child/children to take part in local excursions. Examples of a 'Local Excursion' could include going to the showground for our Cross Country Carnival or Todkill park for our Athletics Carnival, a visit to the Senior Citizens centre, planting with Landcare at Kiamma Creek, and the like.

if you have not done so already, please complete and return the form to school as soon as you are able. 

Introducing Mrs Sally-Anne Croker

At St Mary's Primary School, we are deeply committed to achieving our goal, and our system-wide goal, that 'every child will be a competent reader'. Learning to read is an essential skill that not only enables students to have success at school, but allows them to thrive in society. We want every child to be successful with reading.

The reading scores of Australian children have remained somewhat stagnant for over 40 years. Each year, the data shows that only about 35% of 4th graders are proficient in reading. The research is telling us that while reading is more challenging for some students than others, with evidence-based reading instruction, every typically developing child can become proficient by the end of 3rd grade. 

The staff at St Mary's have been studying the research about how children learn to read and what to do when a child encounters difficulty in learning to read. The research that we have been examining and implementing is labelled the ‘Science of Reading’.

The research demonstrates that reading occurs in a specific way in the brain of all people. It does not occur naturally the way that speech does. The process must be taught. It is a process of building neuro-pathways in the brain that link sounds of speech to written symbols or letters. The strings of letters are attached to meaning, and then those ‘letter strings with meaning’ are stored in the brain’s “letterbox” for later retrieval that is instantaneous and effortless. This process is called orthographic mapping and it is our goal to help our students build a giant ‘letterbox’ of instantly retrievable words. That translates into fluent reading and subsequent comprehension. Guessing at words based on context does not aid in orthographic mapping, phonic decoding does.

A New Path at St Mary's Primary School

If your family has been a part of St Mary's Primary School for some time, you’ll notice some changes in how we teach reading. It’s an exciting time to be in education as we align our instruction with the Science of Reading.

Listed below are some points of research that we are embedding into our teaching practise at St Mary's.

Code Emphasis

This means that grades K-2 especially will focus on acquiring the skills to crack the code of our alphabet to the speech sounds in English. Did you know that there are forty-four speech sounds in English and one hundred and fifty ways to read and spell them? Kids must first learn to decode/sound-out words before they can understand the meaning of the text. Our InitiaLit K-2 programs focus explicitly on teaching our students to crack the code.

Explicit and systematic phonics instruction

Our explicit and systematic phonics instruction continues progressing from simple to complex from the early grades to the middle grades (3-4) and into the senior grades (5-6). Students focus on the study of words with grammar and morphology (learning about word parts such as Greek and Latin roots) as they progress.

Early intervention

If we see any signs that a student is struggling with the foundational skills of reading, we will implement interventions and monitor their progress. The best solution to the problem of reading failure is early identification and intervention. The programs we use at St Mary's for intervention are called MiniLit, MacqLit and the Reading Tutor Program. These intervention programs have been based on research from the Macquarie University that aligns with our pedagogy.

Phonemic awareness

Phonemic awareness is the ability to decode the individual sounds in words by listening, identifying and manipulating those sounds orally. While this skill will be emphasised in grades K-2, we will make sure all students at St Mary's have this necessary skill. Students in the primary grades continue to practise phonemic awareness as they progressively decode more challenging words.

Decodable Readers

Our early readers will be working with decodable texts. These are books or passages that only include words that the students can ‘decode’ (sound-out) according to the skills they have been taught thus far. Our students need practice with the phonics skills they are learning, and these books and passages provide that practice. 

As our students become more proficient at reading they will move to a variety of texts suitable to independent readers.

Assessments

Our students from Kindergarten to Year 6 are assessed using a variety of tools. These include MultiLit, InitaLit and Dibels diagnostic assessments. These nationally normed assessments give us a good indication of how easy or difficult reading is for your child. These tests include Oral Reading Fluency, Letter Naming Fluency and Nonsense Word Reading to find out which areas in the continuum of phonics skills they need help with. They will be given regular spelling tests that show which phonics patterns they are able to apply in their writing and they will also be assessed on Phonemic Awareness so we can make sure they have those crucial foundational skills. As students become proficient word readers, comprehension is a natural outcome. If your child shows a weakness in any area, they will be progress monitored and given interventions to help them become stronger in their area of weakness.

Three-cueing system

This is the practice of teaching kids to identify words by using strategies other than decoding. In the three-cueing system, students are taught that they can identify a word by deciding if it makes sense, if it would structurally/grammatically ‘fit’ in a sentence, or if it looks right rather than closely examining the phonics patterns in the word and sounding it out. This is a practice that the research has indicated that we must abandon. Your child will not be taught to check pictures to identify words or make guesses based on the first letter they see. We want our students to look at every letter in the words, apply phonics knowledge, and sound words out.

Knowledge Building and Vocabulary

Research has indicated that reading comprehension is closely connected to the background knowledge we have on a topic we are reading about and by understanding the vocabulary contained in the text. Our students will have the opportunity to build a broad knowledge base of history, science, and the arts. Students will have access to complex text, often read aloud by their teacher, and in the process, gain more complex vocabulary. The research tells us that building knowledge and vocabulary contributes significantly to their reading comprehension and should be taught beginning in the earliest grades.

Comprehension

The ultimate goal of all reading instruction, is for students to understand what they read. The model of ‘The Simple View of Reading’ demonstrates that reading comprehension occurs only when students have both Decoding/Word Recognition Skills and Language Comprehension skills. Children need the essential skills to get the words off the page as well as knowledge, vocabulary, and a good understanding of how our language works in order to comprehend what they read. We must provide instruction that will help students achieve these goals.

We now know a great deal about how the brain develops as we learn to read and what instructional practices are most effective for all children. We are committed to stopping doing what doesn’t work and be guided by scientific research to ensure that we deliver on the promise of literacy for every St Mary's Primary School student. Again, it’s an exciting time to be in education and we need you, parents, as our partners!

Pope Francis’ annual message for LENT 2022

Lent is a favourable time for personal and community renewal. ‘Let us not grow tired of doing good, for in due time we shall reap our harvest, if we do not give up’ (6:9-10). ‘So then, while we have the opportunity, let us do good to all” (Gal 6:9-10).

Lent is an opportune time! All too often in our lives, greed, pride and the desire to possess, accumulate and consume have the upper hand. Lent invites us to conversion, to a change in mindset, so that life’s truth and beauty may be found not so much in possessing as in giving, not so much in accumulating as in sharing and sowing goodness. Part of this conversion is the willingness to sow goodness in the life of others; even when we do not see the fruits of what we sow, no act of love, no matter how small, will be lost in the eyes of God.

The Lenten season calls us to place our faith and hope in the Lord, since only if we fix our gaze on Jesus (who is the source of all goodness) will we be able to respond to St Paul’s words, “Let us never grow tired of doing good.”

We cannot ‘do good’ by our human effort alone; it is the result of God’s grace that strengthens the weak and gives youthfulness to the old. Faith does not release us from the storms of life, but it allows us to face them with courage in union with Jesus:

During Lent we are called to respond to God’s gift of grace by accepting His word, which is “living and active”. This brings great joy, yet even more, it calls us to become God’s co-workers. By making good use of the present time, we too can sow seeds of goodness.

Pope Francis calls us to be aware of the addiction of 'digital media'. He encourages us to use the Lenten season to cultivate more integral forms of human communication, made up of 'authentic encounters' with real people. What better way to sow seeds of goodness.

Let us ask God to give us the patient perseverance of the farmer and to persevere in doing good, one step at a time.’ And though we stumble and fall, ‘let us not hesitate to return to God who is “generous and forgiving”.

This Lent we are called to sow seeds of goodness by focusing on our school value and treating each other with RESPECT.

What does the word RESPECT mean? The dictionary says…

…to take notice of;

to regard with honour and special attention;

to regard as worthy of special consideration;

hence, to care for; to heed.

During this Lenten season may we open our hearts to God and welcome him into our lives so we may be filled with his love and reach out to each other with respect, sowing seeds of goodness in our homes, our school and our communities.

Check out this website for short but powerful daily Lent retreats: Bruce Downes Catholic Ministries https://brucedownes.org/view/lent22/lent22-mar02/?pc=WVD220302EM

A Prayer for Ukraine

God of peace and justice,
we pray for the people of Ukraine today.
We pray for peace and the laying down of weapons.
We pray for all those who fear for tomorrow,
that your Spirit of comfort would draw near to them.
We pray for those with power over war or peace,
for wisdom, discernment and compassion to guide their decisions.

Above all, we pray for all your precious children, at risk and in fear,
that you would hold and protect them.
May they never yield to discouragement and despair,

but become heralds of new hope to one another in this challenging time.

May you continue to inspire all of us to oneness of heart and mind, to work generously for the common good, to respect the dignity of every person and the fundamental rights which have their origin in the image and likeness of God impressed upon every human being.
Grant eternal rest to the dead and quick recovery to the wounded,

We pray in the name of Jesus, the Prince of Peace.
Amen.

Prayer for Queensland's Flood Victims

Creator God,
We pray for all those on farms, in small towns, and cities
in Australia whose lives have been disrupted
and whose dreams have been dashed
by the floods that have devastated the country.

We pray for those who have lost their homes,

their treasured possessions, their crops, their animals, and their livelihoods.
Be with and sustain those whose entire world
has been torn apart and washed away.
Assuage their fears and be patient with their anger.
Grant them patience and hope that eventually
they can rebuild their lives and start afresh.

We give thanks for the emergency flood workers
and all those who are heroes in helping those
in distress during the floods.
May they continue their missions of mercy.

Be with those who are caring for flood victims
that their compassion and presence
may be life-sustaining.
May they continue their missions of mercy.

May those who serve others
inspire us to do the same.
May healing begin swiftly.

Amen

Project Compassion

Please remember to give what you can to Project Compassion to help those who do not have enough to live life to the full. There is a Project Compassion box for donations in each classroom.

We are asking for any volunteers who might be able to assist on the day in the following roles:

• Recording
• Checkpoints

If you can help, please email me directly at rachael.croker@cg.catholic.edu.au

Save The Date

Book Club

Book club was distributed to all children today. Orders must be completed online through LOOP only, by Thursday 10 March.

We are NOT accepting CASH payments.

The web address is:

scholastic.com.au/LOOP

LOOP enables parents to order and pay for your child’s order online using a credit card or voucher if you have one. Catalogues will still be handed out at school and books will be distributed at school. The school will continue to receive rewards.

• For a quick start, just click on ORDER
• OR Register first to save your details for next time
• Select your school and your child's class 
• Add your child's first name & last initial (so the school knows who the book is for) 
• Enter the item number from the Book Club catalogue
• Follow the instructions for payment and submit
• All orders are sent directly to the school for submission to Scholastic. Books will still be delivered to your child's classroom if you order by the close date.
• Afterwards, there's no need to return paper order forms or payment receipt details back to your school! 

Please contact me if you experience any difficulties.

Talking to kids about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

It’s normal to feel anxious about the news emerging from Ukraine, and children can pick up on this too. So how can you reassure your child and explain what’s happening if they ask questions? There’s no ‘one way’ to go about it, and you know your child best but hopefully these tips will help.

Firstly, check in with yourself. If you’re feeling anxious it’s ok to say that you don’t have all the answers and to share your concerns with other adults, like grandparents, teachers, and school counsellors, who can help you talk to your child.

Secondly, go at your child’s pace. If they ask you about what’s happening or seem scared or worried, ask your child what they’ve heard or what they’re worried about, rather than giving lots of information which may overwhelm them. Consider the language you use and try to keep it age appropriate and reassuring. Let them know that they’re safe and the conflict is happening far away (maybe show them where Ukraine is in relation to Australia on a map). Acknowledge sadness for those who are being directly affected and suggest finding out ways to help. If your child has questions, consider asking them if they’d like to research the answers together with you, or tell them you’ll find out answers to their questions and let them know later.

It’s also a good idea to monitor what children see on TV and hear on the radio as much as you can, and limit discussing worrying details when children are around. Depending on the age of your child, resources like the ABC’s Behind The News can help to explain what’s in the news in a kid-friendly way – see https://www.abc.net.au/btn/newsbreak/btn-newsbreak-20220224/13769874 and https://www.abc.net.au/btn/features/upsetting-news/10500572 for examples. Watching these together and then talking about it can help children feel safer and know they can talk to you if they have questions.

Additional resources:

1. Talking About Ukraine with Our Children - Dr. Aliza Pressman
2. How to Talk To Kids About Ukraine - NYTimes/Melinda Wenner Moyer
3. How to Talk to Kids About Difficult Subjects - Common Sense Media

Tips on How to Have the Conversation

1. Take a deep breath, so you are calm and regulated. It can help to physically put your hand on your heart to soothe your nervous system.
2. See what they know. “You may have heard about what is happening in Ukraine. I’m curious what you know and I’m here to answer questions.”
3. Be honest and clear. “Russia has invaded Ukraine, and as with any war, people will be hurt and killed. That’s why you’re seeing so many grown-ups who are so sad. You are safe, we are safe, but we care about the experience of people even when they are far away.”
4. Let the information land. See what your child has to say.
5. Make room for any reaction. Your child does not need to be interested, or sad, we just need to tell them so that they don’t pick up on unspoken cues of our collective distress.
6. Describe the age-appropriate facts. If your child has questions, look up answers together on child-friendly news sources mentioned above. If your child is repeating misinformation, help them to think through more reliable sources. Answer only the questions they’ve asked and resist going into longer explanations. This is not one conversation, but unfortunately an ongoing discussion.
7. When you can’t answer a question, acknowledge it. These are complicated questions that are an opportunity for critical thinking, investigation, and the acceptance of a reality where we don’t always have answers. Get comfortable with the idea that we can’t solve these problems for our children or ourselves, but that we can help make peace with the discomfort and uncertainty.
8. Stick to routines. Whenever things in the world feel uncertain, even far away, it’s important to lean on routines to keep things as stable as possible for your child. This is also helpful to manage your own emotions and be present for your family.
9. If you notice your child is having anxiety around current events, after this discussion or at any point, let them know that you are there and strategise ways for them to remain informed while also taking care of their own emotions. Reassure them that it makes sense to feel anxious right now, and that we all feel similarly.

If you’d like to talk about any of these tips or have any other concerns about your child, you can contact me via email Madelyn.burns@catholiccare.cg.org.au.

Madi Burns

Student and Family Counsellor

Class Awards

The Student of the Week Award recipients this week are..

Kindergarten: Ivy Hewitt, Jack Lowe and Hannah Whittle

Year 1- Baylee Cox, Lucinda Fannin and Bridie McCormack

Year 2- Charlie Beath, Vinnie Moloney and Payton Selmes

Year 3- Billie Garnham and Flynn Reeves

Year 4- Alice Frost and Sophie Kilborn

Year 5- Noah Edwards and Lara McCulloch

Year 6- Amelia O'Brien and Jack Peden

School Spirit Award:

Briana Blowes for seeing a need and doing something about it

Noah Edwards  for exemplary manners and behaviour

Sophie Kilborn for demonstrating our school value of Respect to the environment

Jack Peden for demonstrating responsible behaviour and for always being ready to      help our younger students

Maddie Strode for demonstrating our school value of Respect to the environment

Tuckshop 

Volunteers needed!

Tuckshop is a great way to get involved and contribute to St Mary’s and we are always in need of volunteers.

Once a term would be great – twice a term terrific! Mondays or Fridays – whichever suits you best.

Let us know if you would like to team up with someone in particular and we will put ‘newbies’ on with someone experienced.

Fridays are in particular need of volunteers as we really need 3 people to get the orders out on time. In the future, if we are unable to have 3 people on Fridays, we will be forced to cancel tuckshop for that day.

If you have any questions we are happy to help.

If you cannot do your date, please organise your replacement yourself and advise Belinda of the update to ensure we have a correct copy of the roster. 

2022 Sacramental Dates

Sacrament enrolment night Wednesday 9 March at the St Mary's Primary School Hall.

If you cannot attend this meeting you are able to attend the session in Goulburn on 16 March. Attendance at one of these meetings is compulsory for sacramental enrolment. 

Sacramental Program dates

Parish Office

For Parish and Sacramental matters please forward your enquiries to Goulburn Parish Secretary, Sharon Cashman, via email or call into the Parish Office at the Old Convent Building. Sharon is available in Crookwell on the 1st and 3rd Thursday of the month from 11.30am-3.30pm

Email: Crookwell@cg.org.au

Website: http://cg.org.au/crookwell/Home.aspx 

Phone: 48321 633 

Address: 55 Wade Street (the Old Convent Building)