1. Principal's News Term 1 Week 4 2020

Our Learning Inquiry - The Future Can be Determined By Exploring the Past

Our year 7s are tying in their learning inquiry at St Joseph's with their technology learning at St Kevin's.  They are going to be making a digital resource for storing history.  This will show historical events from our school and parish.  To prepare for this the year 7s are needing to do some social studies research.  They spent the morning at the parish centre researching in the parish archives.  They were fascinated by the information and pictures they found there.

Goal Setting - Parent/Teacher Interviews

Most of our families were able to make it to the goal setting interviews this week and the teachers really appreciated the opportunity to connect with you about your child's learning.  

Investigating Oamaru's History

We have two trips planned, one for the senior school on Wednesday 3rd March and the other for the junior school - date to be confirmed.

The trip will be divided into three groups doing each of the three parts of the trip - the Waitaki Museum - the Forrester Gallery - and the old precinct walking tour.  We need parent helps to come with us.  Please let your child's teacher know if you can help.  The trip will be a full day.

Swimming Sports

Our swimming sports are next Friday 5th March in the morning.  Please let Paula Brien know if you are available to be a parent help as we need lots of adults to help on the day please.

Touch Rugby

The touch season has started up again.  We are really pleased to have an intermediate team.  Well done to St Joseph's teams - you have had a strong start to the season and every child I've spoken to has been positive and excited about their games.

Congratulations Year 8s

Congratulations to the Year 8s who received their leadership badges at assembly last week.  We thank them for sharing their role plays about peer mediation and how they propose to help children positively sort out playground disputes.

From left to right: Sandrene (Guzman House Captain & Cultural Leader), Lilly (Technology Leader), Dorothy (Lima Cultural Leader & Librarian), Jack (Head Boy), Freya (Librarian), Stephanie (Librarian), Ivy-Belle (Head Girl Special Character), Mazvita (Siena House Captain), Kacymea (Head Girl & Siena Cultural Leader), Lachlan (Physical Activity Leader), Kenton (Siena House Captain , Tommy (Guzman House Captain & Physical Activity Leader).

Absent: Isaiah (Head Boy Special Character & Lima House Captain), Willow (Lima House Captain)

Please note: for the sake of the privacy and protection of children,

Our school policy states that we should only use first names in public media.   The media agreement on enrolment refers to first names only.  The newspaper likes to print surnames and I always run this by parents before publication.

WITS

We use the WITS system which means:

Walk away

Ignore

Talk

Seek help

This is a way to help children on the playground or in the classroom deal with everyday issues or other children's actions or words which annoy them.  Some of our children are very good at walking away and ignoring things which means those things then usually don't blow into big things.  Most annoying behaviour stops when it's ignored.  If that doesn't happen then the Talk option means speaking to the person and saying you don't know like what they are doing and how it is affecting you and that you would like them to stop.  If none of that works then it's time to seek help from an adult.

A Message from the Diocesan Attendance Dues Office

‘Dear Whanau – You will receive in the mail this week your first invoice from the Attendance Dues Service. Along with this invoice is a letter explaining the new payment methods. The two options for payment in 2021 are either to set up a regular payment plan as per the amounts on the payments table included or to pay the full amount before the end of March. If you could please see to this in a timely manner that would be much appreciated. For families, that are having difficulty in meeting the ongoing costs, we would encourage you to make contact with either your school principal or Parish Priest, and not the Attendance Dues office directly.  – Kind Regards The Attendance Dues Service.

A Learning Provocation

Here is an example of one of the "learning provocations" we are using to start children questioning about our history and how we find out about, record and make sense of history.  It shows an old school tunic and a newspaper article about National Catholic Education Day from the 1996 newspaper.

Charlie is enjoying Hoiho's before school knitting class.

God Bless and Aroha

Lorraine Frances-Rees