Dear Sacred Heart families,

I hope you had a relaxing break over the Easter weekend and the holidays. It is good to see the teachers and children revived after some time away from school.

As we enter into Term 2 we will hopefully see successful progress from all our students in their academic studies. It is a term where we expect that students will engage fully in their learning in order to achieve the outcomes for their stage and class. At our staff development day on Monday (led by Nick Brierley and Martina Petersen) we looked at the process of engagement of students. We looked at levels of engagement and factors that can produce and prohibit engagement. There are two distinct factors to engender engagement. One is that the materials to be learnt are sufficiently stimulating and gauged at the level of learning of the students and the other factor to consider is the capacity of students to engage with the learning. Our teachers are well trained to do both.

Our new Deep Learning units based around Science are exciting and geared to the children’s level - they are based around sustainability, indigenous studies and social justice. Some classes will be involved in building and planting a sustainable garden, others will be building solar resources for underdeveloped countries and others will be looking at what we can do about our dwindling bee population. All of these units of work have been co designed by a team of teachers in order to engage our students. The other factor of engagement is whether a child has the skills and capacity to cope with the work. This is another area our teachers manage for the children in enabling them to do the tasks associated, by either extending the scope of the work or by scaffolding the work in order for every child to be ensured of success. As engagement is one of the key factors in our learning at Sacred Heart we take fostering engagement very seriously.

One of the areas we would like to improve on as a school is the parent and school partnership in engaging in each student’s learning. We currently have a set process of communication of formal achievement and progress that gives parents progress reports throughout the year. We would like to supplement that with a further “window into the classroom” through the use of Seesaw in all classrooms.  This will give parents an informal view of their student’s progress, work habits and give parents an opportunity to discuss school work especially with those children who don't share much of their school day with parents. Why are we doing this? There is a large body of research that shows that when parents  are engaged with their child’s school work the child’s academic achievement levels are higher. This can be as simple as a conversation about how the science experiment they did looked interesting, that they must be proud of their social justice initiatives or a comment on their Seesaw page. What I am most interested in is the benefits that parents being engaged in their child’s learning can bring to the wellbeing of a child and their sense of belonging to the school community. We would really appreciate parent feedback on this initiative over the course of the year as to how it helps you understand what your child is doing at school and if it helps with your family's connection to the school.

Congratulations to our families who have enrolled in the Confirmation program which began this week. The Confirmation Retreat Day is being planned at the moment and will be in the calendar.

The Mother’s Day Breakfast will be held this year on the morning of Friday the 7th May. We hope to see all mothers there to celebrate with us. Please see the Compass notification that went home today and the flyer in this Newsletter. 

Enjoy your week.

Regards

Julie Caldwell

QKR!

ENROLMENT DOCUMENTATION 

EXTENDED LEAVE APPLICATION