Dear St John the Apostle Families and Friends,

Yesterday I was reminded of how much I love St John the Apostle Primary School and the families, staff and students of our community. While I will always love our school, yesterday it was much more conscious to me because:

• Every morning I get a big hug from some of our Kindergarten students (even though we try to encourage a social distancing alternative, I still enjoy it).
• I was able to hand out 35 brag tag stickers to various students that I just happened to see or walk past and were doing a beautiful job of our school focus for the week to 'look after our equipment and belongings' without being asked.
• A parent of a younger child rang this morning to tell us how one of our Year 6 students helped their daughter walk into school this morning given that they needed to drop them at the gate. The Year 6 student was just so helpful and caring.
• I took a prospective Kindergarten family around for an out of hours tour and it was so very, very easy to say wonderful things about our school and the learning that happens for every student throughout the day.
• I watched Year 4 excitedly conduct tests for their Science experiments about building a sturdy chair out of just paper. It had to hold up a teddy for a minimum amount of time! They were so proud and encouraging of each other.
• I learnt about how one of our students had experienced an extremely traumatic event and watched how staff knew how and deeply wanted to help them and their family. The care and professionalism was amazing.
• I witnessed children in Year 6 work through two hours of Daily 5 literacy practices completely focused, engaged and productively reading and writing. Students were supporting each other, working independently, engaged in a conference with a teacher or working individually with an Inclusion Assistant.
• I saw parents, in the midst of our currently busy pick up regime be patient with each other, smile and help each other stay safe.

The list could keep going on.

It is for these reasons that I come to school each day. This is how we can all 'be on earth the heart of God' for each other. I am thankful each day for these and many other experiences that help us grow and we can celebrate.

Changes to End of Semester Reports

The time of remote learning brought an opportunity to learn many new technological and independent learning skills we are all looking forward to continuing to develop. It also brought some challenges, including in the area of reporting on student achievement for Semester 1.

Some of the implications include that:

• not every student had the same opportunity and resources to fully engage in the remote learning programme equally, hence it is difficult to use many of the tasks from the program for assessment;
• not all of the intended curriculum for the end of Term 1 and beginning of Term 2 could be quickly translated into an online environment, hence the curriculum plan that was initially intended for the Semester needed to be changed and so not all curriculum areas will be covered enough to assess;

So Catholic Education have changed their systemic approach for reporting on student progress this Semester. To reflect the learning that has taken place this Semester you can expect the following.

1. The Semester report will still look the same as previous years (this is a system decision and not a school based one). Each curriculum area will be on the report as per usual.
2. English, Mathematics and RE will all be reported on. Reporting on the remaining curriculum areas will be based on the curriculum covered in the inquiry units taught during face-to-face teaching weeks. This will impact on Health, Science, History, Geography, Physical Education, etc. Teachers will only assess in these areas when sufficient content has been taught to assess students' understandings and skills.
3. There will be no large general comment. This will mean that teachers will not have to provide drafts of their reports to the Executive Team as early as usual and can spend more time face-to-face teaching and then assessing.
4. All students who have Personal Plans will receive an additional Personal Plan report to comment about their achievement against their Personal Plan goals (did you know we have 96 students on Personal Plans in our school? We have an amazing team that supports their learning).

These reports will be sent home in the last week of school this term. An opportunity to have a Parent-Teacher interview and Learning Journey with your child will happen early in Term 3.

The next two weekends are well deserved long weekends for everyone. I hope you have a lot of rest and recuperation time with your families.

Thank you for always working together to achieve as much as we do.

Matthew Garton, Principal

It's enrolment time!

Just a reminder that it is enrolment time for 2021! We already have a number of enrolments with a few new families looking to join the St John the Apostle Community. Just a reminder if you have a child looking to start Kindergarten in 2021 to jump on our website and complete an enrolment form. 

Please spread the good news about our school. The best marketing a school can do is through their current families. Word of mouth is very powerful when it comes to families choosing a school for their child. Please recommend us and basically, talk us up please. I will be starting to do personal zoom meetings with new families, taking them for a virtual tour and answering any questions they have. I am happy to do this for any new families’ wanting to know more about St John's. I can't talk enough about how great our school is. It's very easy for me to sell the school in the best light possible. 

A great way to share about us would be through our social media sites. Please click on the following to visit them.