Term 2 Week 5 2023

What a busy time at St Monica’s during the last two weeks! This edition of the newsletter is going to be filled with lots of sharing about some of the amazing events that our students have been involved in over the last two weeks.

Our Year 4s went off to their camp at the Adelaide Zoo on Monday and Tuesday this week. For the first time we had a team represent our school at the Da Vinci Decathlon. As a school community, we gathered for a buddy activity, assembly and mass to acknowledge and raise awareness of Reconciliation Week. We are all encouraged to ‘Be a Voice for Generations’. Our youngest students had a special visitor who worked patiently with them on learning how to tie their shoelaces. Year 2s went to the Art Gallery to have an interactive art session. Students in Year 3-6 participated in the Lacrosse carnival and put into practice the skills that they have been learning during their PE lesson. Finally, the excitement level was very high as the school disco was held Friday night along with the Wine and Cheese night for the parents.  Please enjoy our students reflections about all these events.

Last week I attended the South Australian Catholic Primary Principal’s Association annual conference. The theme for this gathering was, ‘Building our Leadership Capacity’ and we were extremely lucky to be able to interact with Kurt Fearnley AO who explored Leading Through Adversity. His powerful stories about his own personal experiences of great adversity that didn’t stop him but rather challenged him to strive for more and push himself to his absolute limits had a room full of leaders inspired to do more and be more. The important life lessons of resilience, persistence and perseverance were strong and clear messages from Kurt. His words and stories will certainly stay with me.

Have a gentle week ahead,

Emily Sayer

Principal

ICAS is an online academic competition that is designed to assess students’ higher order thinking and problem-solving skills. St Monica’s will be offering supervision of: English, Mathematics, Science and Writing for any Year 4-6 students wanting to participate. 

How to participate in ICAS   

If you wish for your child to participate in ICAS this year, please:   

Read about ICAS subjects and prices here: (icasassessments.com/products-icas)   
Read the terms and conditions here: (icasassessments.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/2023-ICAS-Assessments-Parents-PPS-TsCs_final.pdf)  
Go to Parent Portal to purchase tests here: (shop.icasassessments.com/pages/pps)   
Enter our school’s access code –  YQB948 
Enter your child’s details, select the tests you would like to purchase, then proceed to payment.   

After payment is made via the Parent Payment System, you will receive an order confirmation email, please keep this for your records.   

Test Dates: 

Writing: Thursday 10th August, 9am 

English: Thursday 17th August, 9am 

Science: Thursday 24th August, 9am 

Mathematics: Thursday 31st August, 9am 

Closing date for parent portal: 28th July, 2023 
 

Regards

Sarah Morris

Last week students in the Sacramental Program participated in our parish retreat with students from St. Martin's Catholic Primary School Greenacres. The purpose of the retreat was to gain a better understanding of the gifts and fruits of the holy spirit, which they will recieve at their up coming Confirmation.

We wish to inform our community about St Monica’s new system of borrowing take home texts (readers) for our R-2 students that has been implemented this term. Thanks to the outstanding work from Pat Patience, we have recently added the school’s stock of take-home texts onto the Library database. Students are now borrowing these books via this online system just as they have always done for their weekly Library book borrowing.

Borrowing “readers” via the online Library system provides the following benefits:

1. It allows the school to track the location of the take-home texts and provide parents with reminders as necessary about text titles not returned.
2. It makes the annual take-home text stocktake process more streamlined through being able to generate reports of outstanding loans.
3. It assists us to identify which reading levels need to be replenished to maintain good book stocks for the various developmental levels.

All levelled take-home texts are now housed in baskets and stored on our lovely new shelves in the Library, to make the selecting and borrowing system accessible. Students will be returning their take-home texts into the blue box in the Library, prior to borrowing new ones. Families will be informed if they have too many outstanding books for their child to borrow any more prior to returning them. Take-home texts that are not returned may be billed to the family whose child borrowed them. We feel this will help increase student’s responsibility for the care and whereabouts of each book they borrow.

We trust that the new system will enable us to reduce the numbers of text losses and enable us to track our existing stock to keep a wonderful range of texts for our students to engage with parents in their home reading program.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact Mrs Sayer. Once again, we would like to acknowledge the dedication from Pat Patience our Librarian for supporting staff and students in adjusting to the new system and we look forward to our families joining us in this transition.

On Thursday 1 June, the years 3 to 6 went to a Lacrosse Carnival. Each team played around 7 games each.  Everyone had a really good time and all the teams from other schools are really friendly and kind. We built a really good relationship with some of the schools and the two student teachers, Miss Aloisi and Mr Caruso joined us for the day. Mr M was floating around to all the teams, cheering us on and giving us advice and tips.

In conclusion, we all had a really good time. We would like to thank Mr. M for organising this excursion and to all the teachers and parent helpers that participated on the day.

By Alexia , Annabelle in Year 6.

Congratulations to Xavier Turner who proudly represented our school and district at the State SAPSASA AFL Competition in Week 3.
 

The parent community has established a private group on Facebook that facilitates the trading of second-hand uniform items.

Please visit www.facebook.com/groups/stmonicasbuyswapsell and request to join the group if you are interested.

The page is ideal for selling items in good condition that your child has outgrown, or to sell items if your child is moving on. Simply post images and your contact details. Alternatively, you can join the group to take advantage of the pre-loved items that become available.

For those of you who are not on Facebook, please contact the P&F pandf.stmonicas@gmail.com and they will assist you with the sale of items.

Please note the sale of old-style uniform items is not allowed. St Monica's Parish School does not manage this page and takes no responsibility for any private sales.

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We acknowledge the Kaurna people as the traditional custodians of the land upon which St Monica’s learn, work and play.

May we walk gently on this land acknowledging the Kaurna people's deep spiritual connection with their country.

We pay our respects to Kaurna elders past and present and commit to the ongoing journey of Reconciliation.