Dear Parents and Caregivers,

I hope the beginning of the 2020 school year has been smooth sailing for you and your family! The children and staff have all settled in well, and have been actively engaged in our Wellbeing Week activities. These lessons have all been built around developing safe and respectful class structures and expectations, establishing sound peer relationships and engaging the students in activities centered around some dispositions - or ‘competencies’ for learning. These dispositions are those skills that our children will need to productively participate in the learning process, and ultimately be prepared for the worlds they are inheriting! These dispositions for learning are characterised around the Acronym GROWERS which stands for Gritty, Reflective, Optimistic, Wondrous, Engaged, Risk takers, Self aware.

I hope that you hear and see evidence of your children exhibiting these dispositions in their learning as the year progresses!

Another important aspect of the work we have been doing at the beginning of the year is learning about and expressing Gratitude. Gratitude is our emotion that relates to our ability to feel and express thankfulness and appreciation. There is strong research that in dictates that developing the capacity to show and exhibit gratitude can significantly improve our well-being. Some of the benefits of gratitude include:

• Improved physical, emotional and social wellbeing
• Greater optimism and happiness,
• Improved feelings of connection in times of loss or crises
• Increased self-esteem
• Heightened energy levels
• Strengthened heart, immune system, and decreased blood pressure
• Improved emotional and academic intelligence
• Expanded capacity for forgiveness
• Decreased stress, anxiety, depression and headaches
• Improved self-care and greater likelihood to exercise
• Heightened spirituality -- ability to see something bigger than ourselves

This year, our school is committed to showing gratitude wherever we can! I hope that you will hear a lot about gratitude from your children throughout the year.

The final and very important work we have been doing these past two weeks is diagnostic data collection. This information will assist us to target our teaching to each child’s needs, moving forward.

At the beginning of every school year, our community welcomes many new faces! This year, we welcome:

Last Friday’s Beginning of the Year Mass was a great way to start our year, and it allowed us to formally install our student leaders for 2020. We congratulate the following students who are undertaking leader roles this year:

I trust that all families enjoyed our open classrooms and Welcome Gathering last Friday night. Thanks to the P&F for serving drinks from the Bar, and all who purchased - funds have been donated to SA Bushfire Appeal.

We will be hosting regular “Learning Walks” this year – the first of which is on Thursday 20 February. These dedicated times have been put aside for students to showcase the learning they have been doing in their classes with their family/special people. 

My sincere thanks to Chris Greene from Cybersafe Families for hosting a parent session on Thursday 31^st January. There were only a few families in attendance, however those who did attend thought the session to be very worthwhile. We will be hosting a session like this for parents and for students each year from now on, and hopefully we can get many more families coming along to hear this really relevant and important information.

Have a great week everyone,

God bless,

Phil

Hi everyone and welcome to a new school year. I can’t believe it’s 2020! But starting a new decade brings many new opportunities. We all have New Year’s Resolutions but I feel that when we have a new ‘Zero’ year it’s time to plan and make goals for what you might be doing in 10 years’ time. It’s a good idea to make goals about where you would like to be as then you can break down the step to help you get there. A big welcome to our new families in our Reception classes as well as our new families coming from other schools. It is great to see so many new faces eager and happy to start their learning process. We also have two new staff this year, Elizabeth Bello who will teach Year 4/5 and Lidia Saccone who will teach one of our Reception classes. Both are excellent, experienced teachers and have fit into our community seamlessly. It’s been great to get to know them better and I am sure that you will value their contribution to our student’s education and our school.

This year we welcome back Matt Richards. We call him Apple Matt because, one he’s an Apple Specialist and two, because our IT support person from the CEO who works with us on Fridays is also called Matt. To avoid confusion, we call him IT Matt! Apple Matt is back to help us make the most of our Apple products and continue our development and learning from the past two years. Matt works with staff and students, and has made a positive contribution to how we think about and use IT. Matt and I have some exciting experiences planned for our students so stay tuned.

Our school has now rolled out our planned hardware classroom integration. As it stands now, we are 1:2 iPad in Rec-Year 2, 1:1 iPad Year 3-5 and the Year 6s are using Macs. These iPads have added keyboards so that students can still learn important typing skills with the added flexibility of being portable. This year we will add typing skills to the curriculum to help the students become more confident and faster at typing.

This year I have joined the Ecology Committee at the Catholic Education Office. The committee is full of teachers and leaders from other schools as passionate as I am about caring for the environment and our common home. The Catholic Education team is looking for ways make our schools more sustainable and have the goal of developing moral, compassionate and ecologically aware students.

It was great to see everyone at our Picnic on the Green last Friday evening. We have a wonderful parent community and I love seeing families enjoying each other's company and making connections through their children. I know of many families that have made life-long friends after meeting each other at school. A warm welcome to our new parents who have joined us this year. We hope you have a great time at St Joseph’s, Kingswood and that yours and your child’s experience here is a positive one. As you would know from time to time things do occur that might be less than ideal. If there are any issues or concerns or you just want to chat, please feel free to see Phil or myself at any time. We are here to make sure you and your children have the most rewarding time at school possible and love working with parents to make sure this happens.

Did you know that your brain is very good at believing what you tell it? So, if you tell yourself you’re not good at maths! Guess what? Your brain will believe it and you won’t be good at maths. But the reverse is also true! Studies have shown that even if you’re not feeling happy, if you tell yourself you are happy, eventually your brain will believe it. With this is mind we want your students to believe positive things about themselves that will eventually be so ingrained that they enter their sub-conscious and students will always believe it. Emma Begg and I have developed 5 affirmations that cover a number in scenarios and will help students be successful in school and in life. We will practice these each day in the hope that students will eventually memorise them. Here are the affirmations:

• My mistakes help me to learn and grow
• I can achieve anything with effort
• I can make a difference
• I am perfect just the way I am
• All of my problems have solutions

Good luck everyone for the remainder of the year. I hope you have a fantasic 2020 with many lasting positive memories.

Take care,

Jamie

Dear Families, 

Welcome back to the school year and all of the excitement that 2020 will bring. We have had such a wonderful and positive start to the year and it has been great to see all of the children engaging positively during Wellbeing Week. Last Friday 31^st January, we celebrated our Beginning of Year Mass as a whole school. It was a great opportunity for all of the school community to come together in the Church and celebrate our faith and impending learning journey together. Fr Michael led the Mass and supported the children through prayer and reflection to walk in the shoes of Mary MacKillop by ‘Never seeing a need, without doing something about it’.

Congratulations to all of the school leaders who received their Leadership Badges at Mass – we look forward to working with you and supporting you to be the best leaders that you can be for our school community. 

Well done especially to our School Spirit Leaders who have engaged positively and productively during the planning and implementation of Monday Morning Prayer and eagerly assisted with the Beginning of Year Mass. It is great to work with a group of students who exhibit such wonderful leadership skills and a strong desire to support our Catholic Faith.

Looking forward to the year ahead and the many wonderful opportunities we have to continue to enhance the strong sense of community that we have at St Joseph’s, Kingswood.

Emma

Dear Families

This year your child will be participating in a new specialist STEM program. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. The main goal of STEM is to provide students with real-world problem solving opportunities, allowing students to think outside the box with their learning.

Your child will be working on many exciting STEM projects this year!

Below is a list of household materials that we will be using to create our STEM projects. If you are able to donate any of these items, please send them to school with your child or place them in the yellow bin in the STEM room.

SAVE these items for STEM!

• Cereal boxes
• Cardboard tubes
• Tissue boxes
• Shoe boxes
• Plastic tubs
• Milk bottle/soft drink lids (washed)
• Hardware (such as nuts, bolts, screws)
• Small pieces of wood
• Material

If you are able to donate other items that are not on the list, please contact me. Thank you in advance for helping our STEM program.

Kirstie Wicks

Missed Assembly last week? No worries - our Year 6 class worked with Apple Matt and created a podcast. Either search or scan the QR code below. 

Welcome back to 2020 and especially a big welcome to our new families joining our OSHC program this term.  I hope you all had a relaxing break and feel refreshed!

Term 1 has started off smoothly and the children are getting back into their routines easily.  The Sun smart station is working well with the new mirrors and the children are encouraged to apply their sunscreen at the beginning of the session and waiting 20 minutes before we go out in the sun.  We are still doing the Cooking Club this term and if anyone would like to volunteer their family recipes for us to try feel free to do so as we would love to try them.  Our Library Club is up and running.  A large variety of books are available for the children to borrow and take home.

This term we will be enforcing a hat fee of $3.00 if your child does not bring a hat to the session.  You are welcome to keep a hat in our hat bag for your child but it need to be a broad brim hat.  These will be kept separate for your child only.

Also if you haven’t enrolled your child/ren can you do this urgently on SZapp as this needs to be done yearly enabling us to keep all information up to date and correct. 

If your child/ren will be sick from a session could you let us know via a text message or on the cancellation form in SZapp. 

This term we are working on Group and Individual Observations and you are most welcome to ask to see them as they are kept at the front desk.  We are also displaying a weekly Policy on the front desk and all policies are available in our SZapp for your perusal.  I would also like to thank the parents that have commented in our Parent Book but I would love more comments.  The book is on the front desk in the OSHC room. 

We also are still taking donations for our Cat Adoption box which is located in the OSHC room so if you could donate an item or two for this very worthy cause it would be gratefully received.

Vicky Wilson – OSHC Director

Thanks to everyone who came by to chat and purchase a drink on Friday night at the Welcome Gathering. It was great to meet some new people as well as raise some funds for the SA Bushfire Appeal.

Everyone is invited to come for a drink and a chat at our first P&F catch-up for 2020 on Monday 24th Feb. We have such a lovely, social bunch of parents, it would be great to see lots of people there to help us figure out what events people want to arrange for this year!