St Francis of Assisi | eNewsletter

From the Principal

Dear Families,

Great Start to the Term

Term 2 gives us the perfect launching pad for growth—both academically and socially. The calendar is clearer than Term 1 in a deliberate manner to allow us to tackle big concepts in teaching and learning.

Attendance

School attendance prior to COVID used to average around 92% across South Australian Schools. Over the past few years following the major years of the COVID pandemic attendance has hovered closer to 85-89% at this school and across schools in South Australia. I’m pleased to report that this year our attendance average is currently sitting at 92.57% ! This is a fantastic achievement by this community and is a great indication of the wellbeing of our school community. Let’s do everything we can to keep that up moving forward in 2025.

I know it can be challenging sometimes in the morning. Sometimes when I get to work in the morning after school drop off and it’s like I’ve already lived a day. It’s even harder through the colder months when there may be more regular coughs and colds that can limit attendance. But keeping routine and keeping consistent practices with our students is vital to their wellbeing.

What are we working on this term?

Each week our staff meet on Wednesday for professional development, and once a fortnight in our learning teams for formal learning meetings. In staff meetings over the past few weeks, we have been working on:

Creating clear, attainable assessments for our children: What we want is our children understanding exactly what they need to do to be successful. To do this we have begun to use a school wide assessment template that helps students understand what is required of them as they move up grades.

What separates a C from an A? Probably the biggest difference from when many of us went to school is that a C is an acceptable standard. The difference between a C and an A often comes down to the actions we are asking students to do with the information they have learnt.

For instance, to achieve a C, students asked to do more simpler actions such as identify, list, and describe the information they have learnt. At a B or an A level, they are asked to use more sophisticated cognitive actions such as analyse, interpret, and evaluate information. As teachers we need to design tasks that allow students to achieve this.

Implementing The Writing Revolution strategies: The Writing Revolution focuses on building strong sentences, ensuring consistency and coherence in writing instruction across all subjects. I thought I’d share an example of three different sentences that we teach children that are extremely important to their writing across all grades. Perhaps you can try it home with your child.

We teach students about using because, but or so in their writing. Each of these conjunctions allows their writing to take a different form. I’ve given you an example below:

A because sentence - Combines two ideas using "because" to show cause and effect.

The plant died because it didn’t get enough water.

A but sentence - Shows contrast between two ideas using "but."

She studied hard, but she didn’t pass the test.

A so sentence - Shows a result or consequence.

He forgot his umbrella, so he got wet.

A simple exercise you do with your child at home (no matter the age) is give them a topic and ask them to write (or say)three sentences a because, but or so sentence. Give it a try!

Election BBQ Thank you

Thank you to all those who assisted with our Election BBQ and Bake Sale, and those who came along and enjoyed a snag, a coffee, or a cake from the school. Overall, we sold over 300 sausages, plenty of cakes and made over $1500 for the school. More than that though it was a great day to be out in the sun and chatting to people in our local community. I’d like to publicly thank our staff who contributed all the cakes and biscuits for the cake sale. We thought we’d give the parents a rest after the amazing contribution for the Sports Day Bake Sale, and it’s just so pleasing to be at a community where everyone is willing to chip in for the betterment of the school community.

We had many of the MP’s come through the bake stand as well as old scholars, previous parents in the community and other people who had never been to our school before.

Gala Sales

We will be holding the price for the Gala tickets for another couple of weeks. Ticket Sales have been promising, and we have some incredible footage that we’ve pulled from old VHS tapes from the 90’s that we can’t wait to show on the Gala night. Make sure you tune into the podcast series over the next few weeks to hear from many significant people in our school’s history.

Please use the link in the post in this newsletter for tickets.

Scott March

Principal