Dear Parents and Caregivers,

As we approach the very special time of Easter in our religious calendar, it is the perfect time to stop and reflect on what has been a wonderful first term.

NAPLAN

Our NAPLAN window has officially closed, and we congratulate our Year 3 and 5 students who completed the tests.  A special mention to our Year 3 students who engaged with this for the first time.  It was great to see them excited to give it a go, as well as persisting through any issues that arose.  A NAPLAN individual student report will be provided later in the year. We will contact you once we receive these with some further information on how to interpret this.

STEM MAD

This year some of our students have been selected to participate in the STEM MAD project (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) which is endorsed by Catholic Education.  The focus of the program is to participate in the STEM MAD Showcase in August. This showcase is designed to acknowledge and promote STEM learning initiatives that address real-world problems and demonstrate how students in Catholic schools take action that matters. Student teams are asked to design a product, service or innovation to Make A Difference (MAD) to others or the environment.  We look forward to sharing the journey of our two registered teams, stay tuned!

Inclusive Education:

I am continuing to meet with parents regarding personalised learning plans as well as addressing any other queries, concerns or successes.  By the end of the week all families would have had the opportunity to meet with their child’s teacher, view their plan if required and discuss this further.  These plans have been sent via email with a letter briefly outlining their purpose and our endeavour to continue to work in partnership with you.  A huge thank you to all of our teachers for their continuing hard work and dedication in this space, we are wholeheartedly committed to each and every student here at St. Joseph’s Kingswood. I look forward to having ongoing conversations and meetings with you as I continue to build my relationships with both the students and families here.

Leaving with a Literacy Tip: Can your child your child hear, identify and say the separate parts of words?

Phonological Awareness is the ability to hear, identify and say the separate parts of words.  This has been shown in numerous studies and over many years of research to be one of the best early indicators of reading success.  As a staff, we are looking to engage in some further professional learning around this and would like you to come along on our journey. 

I have adapted the following from the Five from Five (2024) website to give you some further (and very brief) information. Phonemic awareness is a sub skill of phonological awareness.  It is the ability to identify, say and manipulate the smallest sounds in words (phonemes).  A simple example, being able to identify that the word 'cat' has three sounds (/k/ /a/ /t/) and being able to change the /k/ sound to /b/ to create the word 'bat'.  Children with good phonemic awareness tend to learn to read more easily.

It is important for beginning readers to develop an understanding that spoken words are made up of individual and distinguishable sounds.  Students need to be able to combine individual phonemes to construct a spoken word and when given a spoken word be able to break it down into phonemes.  As they progress, the phonemic awareness skills become more complex through deleting and manipulating sounds in words.

By encouraging your child to engage in some simple phonological and phonemic awareness tasks, you can set them up for every success as confident readers. Below are some websites with some great tips and games that can help at any age.

Five from Five: https://fivefromfive.com.au

Video: https://youtu.be/iIoZoh7EpGo?si=1own2ZjVhviMyU5J

Ideas:

https://www.readingrockets.org/classroom/classroom-strategies/blending-and-segmenting-games

https://www.hearbuilder.com/demo/phonological-awareness-demos/

As always, my door is always open if you would like some more information or to chat further.

Until next time…

Vanessa Saccardo

Assistant Principal