Good morning families,

Welcome to Term 2!  We hope you have had a wonderful holiday break.  This Friday 6th May, students will be able to purchase gifts from the Mother’s Day stall here at school with cash only.  Gifts range between $1 and $6.  If you would like to give your child the money before Friday, we are happy to collect it over the next few days and give it to our students at the stall.

A reminder of upcoming events and dates:

Week 5 – Mission Week (more details to follow soon)

Week 6 – 1NP and 1SD assembly (Friday 10th June)

Week 8 – 1NP and 1SD Mass (Thursday 23rd June)

We are looking forward to a busy and successful term with our students!

Ms Pinneri and Miss Dowsett

Last week we were very fortunate to visit the MUDLA to see Mr McCarthy.  He recently published his own book titled ‘Gus the Purple Spotted Gudgeon’.  Mr McCarthy read the book to us and discussed his inspiration behind creating it.  The Purple Spotted Gudgeon is a native Australian fish.  This species is endangered and we are so proud to say that we have successfully bred these fish here at Holy Family.

We explored other animals in the MUDLA.  It was a fun and educational afternoon!  Check out the photos of our experience:

As a part of our unit on loving others in Religion, we have been discovering stories of Jesus and the many ways that he showed love to others.  Jesus showed people how to love God and love everyone.  We have discussed ways that we can show love to others too, just like Jesus did. Here are some examples of love from our students:

We took part in an activity where we explored the ways that people show love in the community and created our own ‘hearts filled with love’.

To finish our unit, we celebrated on the oval to create a heart filled with love for you all!

On Monday 21st March, we shared a successful Harmony Day 2022 here at Holy Family.

As a whole school, we were lucky enough to have a shared lunch on the oval in open spaces.  Thank you to Susan and Sue from the canteen who provided pumpkin soup and orange jelly as a special on the day.

In class we took part in a shared reading session of the book titled ‘My Two Blankets’ about a young girl who had to learn another language from a young age.

Using Microsoft Teams, we engaged in a whole school online assembly to celebrate Harmony Day.

The results came in for our school Harmony Day poster competition – special mentions to the following students from our class who received a small prize:

1SD – Arianna and Alice

1NP – Helena, Olivia F and Aarav

Congratulations to our year 1s on a fabulous day to celebrate that we all belong 🙂

Dear families,

Harmony Day will be held this coming Monday 21^st March. Harmony Day is a day to celebrate Australia’s diversity. It is a day of cultural respect for everyone who calls Australia home. The ongoing theme of Harmony Day is “everyone belongs”. Students are encouraged to wear traditional cultural clothing or orange clothes.  

By participating in Harmony Day activities, we can learn and understand how all Australians equally belong to this nation and enrich it. At Holy Family each class will be involved in activities leading up to and on Harmony Day. These could include celebrating and informing others about their cultural practices, teaching peers a new language, and/or creating a poster around the theme of belonging. Creations will be collated to show the school community on Harmony Day and will be used to celebrate the many cultures we are fortunate to have at Holy Family.

To suit the orange Harmony Day theme students will be able to order a special Harmony Day lunch of pumpkin soup with a roll and an orange jelly through the canteen.  The normal canteen menu for lunch orders will not be available on Harmony Day however the canteen will still be open at recess. Order and payment may be completed through the QKR! App.

We look forward to a day of cultural celebrations on Harmony Day!

This week our Year 1s have been learning Los Saludos – greetings in Spanish.

Here are some of our students singing the greetings and also the Spanish greetings song for children to listen to and perform for you at home!

This week in bookmaking, we are learning about the Australian author and illustrator Nick Bland.  Today was our immersion lesson where we explored Nick Bland books and noticed the ways he writes and illustrates.  Children named and noticed crafting techniques that Nick Bland uses such as BIG AND BOLD and onomatopoeia.

The video below shows us who Nick Bland is through a short clip of him accepting a children’s book award:

Check out our students reading Nick Bland books.  We then had a discussion and brainstormed what the students noticed about his books.

As a part of getting to know each other and building positive relationships with our students, we have shared a ‘teacher newsletter’ with the children of 1NP and 1SD.

Please feel free to have a read:

This week our focus in numeracy has been on representing and recognising numbers up to 100. Children were given a random number between 11 and 99 and had to show the number value in numerals, words and one visual representation.

We have also explored subitising, which is the ability to immediately recognise numbers and their value.  Children have practiced this skill using dice, dominoes and playing cards.  They have recorded numbers and used simple addition. Keep up the great work Year 1s!

Our focus this week has been on reading and bookmaking.  Children start each day in the classroom reading books they have chosen and have the opportunity to take part in our ‘Come Read With Me’ sessions.  We also explore shared reading experiences each day.

This morning the Year 1s were able to visit our class ‘Book shop’ where each child chose 4 books to add to their classroom book box.  These book boxes act as a class library for each student. These books are in addition to the books that each child borrows during our library sessions.  We love reading!

Bookmaking has been quite a success so far in our classes.  The children enjoy creating their own books as authors and illustrators.  Our focus has been on book orientation, including the features of a title page, writing tools we can use and how we read and write books from left to right.  Watch this space for some amazing book creations!