Despite sudden wild, wet, windy weather on day 1, we have had a great start to the term. The children are settled, happy and engaged in learning. Here are some video snippets I took on Tuesday afternoon. Of course the children have been focusing on academic learning but they are also enjoying creating and playing outdoors and its wonderful to see children cooperating with each other, exploring and having fun.
Achievement at St Joseph's
We are in the third year of our strategic charter and we are achieving the things we set out to achieve three years ago. I have recently done some analysis of student achievement over the last six years at St Joseph's and we are consistently highly achieving and improving. Our staff have recently had training in rich learning contexts and we are looking forward to further investigations in Enviroschool learning which will give us more rich contexts for the students to develop inquiry investigation.
Enrolments for 2019-2020
We will be doing enrolments on 14-15th May for children turning five in 2019 and 2020. If your child is turning five in 2019 or 2020 please contact me to organise a time. I am happy to have a conversation with any of your family or friends to determine whether they would be eligible for a place at St Joseph's.
Learning about God
The first half of this term we are specifically learning about God the Father and Creator. Our key ideas for understanding God are:
God created the world
How can we know about God? - God is revealed through Jesus
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| jpl.nasa.gov labelled for resuse |
God loves us individually (he has made a Covenant with us
Both the vastness and the minutiae of the universe tell us something about the Maker. We can imagine our solar system as a mental picture. When we look up into the night sky and see the Milky Way we know that each speck in that is a star - a sun like our own - probably with satellite planets, with their own satellite moons. And there are so many they overlap and we can only see the closest. When we see a shooting star we are seeing an event that happened millions of years ago and even though the speed of light is 299,792,458 metres per second its taken that long to get to us. And not only that - the Milky Way is just one of an (estimated) one hundred billion galaxies. Then we begin to realise the universe is way beyond our imagination. For more information see "God for parents"
Kindness Reward
The whole school is going to the Botanical Gardens on Friday afternoon to celebrate our kindness reward. There will be no celebration assembly and we will be back by 3pm.
All children to wear PE kit all day tomorrow
All children to wear PE kit all day tomorrow
Friday 10 May
The teachers have a union meeting in the afternoon that they have to attend and I am away at a principal's meeting in Winton so can't help to look after the children. We encourage parents to make arrangements to pick children up at 12.30 pm directly from their classes and please sign them out with the teacher. If you pick them up during the afternoon after that please sign them out at the office. Thank you and we apologise for the inconvenience.
Celebration assembly on Friday 10th May will be at 12.00pm.
God bless and aroha.
Lorraine Frances-Rees
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