Dear Parents and Carers

First Eucharist and Transfiguration Feast Day

Last night at 6 p.m., an information night was held for parents of children who are making their First Eucharist this year. I joined Fron Garrett-Rumba, our REC, as well as Fr John Woods. Philippa Brierley and Emily Capper, from Holy Trinity, Curtin, both joined the meeting too. I wish our students and parents the very best as they undergo this sacramental journey. My thanks to the families who are hosting the home groups.

Still in the area of Religious Education, we are celebrating the Parish Feast of the Transfiguration on Friday of Week 4. Holy Trinity students and staff will be joining us for the day, and classes will be attending Mass together as well as joining for activities. It will be an excellent day and is a great way for the two schools to collaborate. My thanks to Fron for all of her work.

School Works

A number of minor but important school works began in the recent holidays and reached fruition recently. The wooden walk board outside the STEM building that leads to the Grade 5 classrooms required some repairs and has been fixed, and a number of uneven tiles around the carline pick-up and drop off area have been mended. New concreting has also been put in at a seating area near the blue top. My thanks to Sean Rutledge for coordinating the works.

Behaviour Management Trial

The school is currently looking at the way it manages (the very infrequent) occurrences of behaviour which are the result of less than ideal choices. This may include incidents of hands on, swearing, ostracising and the like. We are adopting a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to any incidents of hands on or swearing. Students will have consequences including time off the playground and their parents being contacted. After a certain amount of incidents in a term, consequences that are more serious are triggered, such as in-school suspensions or out-of-school suspensions. At the next Community Council meeting in Week 8, I hope to have a draft of the policy to share with the CC for their review and comments. Following the review and comments, I will publish the policy to the parent community.

Catalyst Initiatives

Catalyst is the educational initiative of the Archdiocese, and currently there is a great deal of Catalyst activity in the K – 2 grades, especially in the area of literacy. This year, Kindergarten have been trialling InitiaLit, which is a very prescriptive and detailed phonics based program that provides a very good platform to enable children to learn to read. One of the benefits of the program is that there is frequent assessment of the students’ progress, and so the school is in an even better position than normal to identify students who may be finding learning to read difficult. Year 1 have just completed their own two-day PL course on InitiaLit and will be soon introducing it into the classrooms. I too completed the course. Year 2 will undergo professional learning at the end of this term and Sean Rutledge will be joining them. K – 2 have also just been learning about a new assessment tool, which is being implemented across the Archdiocese, in all primary schools, called Dibels. Again, like InitiaLit, it is designed to assess students’ progress in literacy, and affords a very good snapshot of children’s learning, thus far.

Further to these initiatives, this term we are trialling in some classes a pedagogical approach called ‘Daily Review’. We are using this approach specifically in Maths. It seeks to ensure that children have particular knowledge and understandings stored in their long-term memory.

The educational understandings that underpin Catalyst are based on an understanding of learning that can be defined as changes to a person’s long-term memory. That is, when learning is effective, certain skills and pieces of knowledge are more likely to be stored in a person’s long-term memory, rather than their short-term memory. This in turn means that students are in a position to learn complex or more sophisticated content, because they are able to retrieve what they already know from their long-term memory, thereby freeing up their working memory, for a new task or piece of information. This focus on memory is called ‘cognitive load’, and refers to how much of a load a person is carrying when performing a new task. This understanding falls under what is called ‘the Science of Learning’, and the research around this understanding of human learning is what is guiding much of the current approach. It is very valuable and we can learn much from the research.

Have a wonderful week with your families.

Best wishes

Cameron Johns

Principal