Dear Parents,

Over the last few weeks we have started to see some progress with our Stage 2 building works. We had a site meeting today and the current project completion date is 28^th March 2023. This completion date is likely to extend out further.

School Start/Finish Time
A reminder that students are not to arrive at school before 8.30am each morning and need to be collected by 3:20pm in the afternoon. We encourage all of our families to sign up for after school care in the event that you may need this service if running late or get held up at work etc. Details to register for this service can be found at the following link  https://www.extend.com.au/school/st-angela-of-the-cross/

School Concert
As previously advised our school is excited for our upcoming school concert on Wednesday 14^th September titled ‘Around the World’. We can now provide you with further details of this event as listed below;

Date: Wednesday 14^th September
Time: 6:30pm Start (Students to be dropped off at 6pm)
Venue: Marist-Sion College, Marian Theatre
Tickets: $10 each and Strictly Limited (2 per family due to venue capacity)
Bookings: Available via Try-Booking in due course

Consent Forms for rehearsals and costume requirements will be available via PAM next week.

Father's Day Breakfast

Our Father's Day Breakfast will be held on Thursday 1st September. Students will have the opportunity to have breakfast with their Dad/Special Person at school. Breakfast will be served between 7:15am- 8:30am. We will be cooking bacon and egg rolls, for catering purposes please complete the below web form for attendance. 

Father's Day Breakfast RSVP

The Victorian Premiers’ Reading Challenge is open and St Angela of the Cross Primary School is excited to be participating.

The Challenge is open to all Victorian children in recognition of the importance of reading for literacy development. It is not a competition, but a personal challenge for children to read a set number of books by 2 September 2022.

Children from Prep to Year 2 are encouraged to read or ‘experience’ 30 books with their parents and teachers. Children from Year 3 to Year 10 are challenged to read 15 books.

All children who meet the Challenge will receive a certificate of achievement signed by the Victorian Premier and former Premiers.

To read the Premier’s letter to parents, view the booklist and for more information about the Victorian Premiers’ Reading Challenge, visit: https://www.vic.gov.au/premiers-reading-challenge

Our school currently has 10 students registered who have collectively read 298 books. Congratulations to these students on their achievements so far! 

If your child would like to participate, please contact their classroom teacher.

Our school is taking part in the Wonder Recycling Rewards campaign this term.

Help us collect bread bags so we can earn points to redeem on new RHSports equipment. 

We are collecting ALL bread bags, not just the Wonder brand

The more we collect the more points our school earns.

Yesterday, the students in Foundation and Grade 1 celebrated the feast day of St Mary MacKillop. On this day we remember that Mary was a person of action who loved the underprivileged and worked hard to care for them in any way she could. St Mary MacKillop inspires us to open our eyes, ears, hearts and minds to the needs of others.

We pray in thanksgiving for the life of Mary MacKillop and for her influence on our lives. We pray that we may have the respect for the marginalised and abandoned that Mary MacKillop showed in her life.

Loving God, we ask you to hear our prayers and the hopes held in our hearts. We ask this in the name of Jesus, friend of the marginalised, and of the Holy Spirit who draws us together as one. 

Amen

Comforting the afflicted, afflicting the comfortable

As Jeremiah relates (Jer 38:4-10), prophets generally discover that challenging people, particularly powerful leaders, out of their comfort zone is thorny. Jesus’ teaching of his Father’s Kingdom was viciously rejected by the powerful and comfortable of his time too.

Famously, in the twentieth century, Dom Helder Camara, known as “the archbishop of the poor” remarked, as those in church and civil authority became more and more hostile to his support of the oppressed in Brazil: “If I give alms to the poor, they call me a saint. If I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.” Similarly Archbishop Saint Oscar Romero of El Salvador, a prophetic sign of possibility to the poor, was such a threat to oppressive powers that they had him assassinated in his own cathedral while he said Mass. Our prophetic Pope, applauded for charitable action, is frequently disparaged (even by some Catholics) for his challenging prophesy.

Jesus’ message in today’s gospel (Luke 12:49-53) is that prophetic messengers demanding change to out-dated ways will always disrupt the comfortable. Just as Jesus’ prophecies were rejected by authorities and those resistant to change in his time, twenty one centuries later, adherence to Jesus challenging message creates fire and division in our society and in our church. As in Jesus’ time and in the time of the apostles, some are inclined to favour the complacent path, clinging to old ways and rules, even shunning Jesus’ core teaching of open hearted love.

“As the poet Charles Peguy warns us, “We must always tell what we see. Above all, and this is more difficult, we must always see what we see.” When we fail to recognise the injustices of society – to smell them and to bind them, to carry the lame and shelter the homeless, we will never bend our hearts to hear them and shout out their cries for all to hear. And change!”[Sister Joan Chittister p36]

Deacon Mark Kelly               

During our Numeracy lessons our Foundation students have recently been introduced to using ‘Think Boards’. Think Boards are an effective visual learning strategy used to encourage students to explore and deepen their understanding of numbers. Take a look at how our clever students have used their thinkboards to represent the numbers 11 -19. They have experimented with using tally marks, number words, before and after, number busting and collections. Amazing work superstars!

One of our Maths focuses this term is Multiplication and Division. We have been learning to share objects equally, find how many in each group, how many groups we have and how many objects altogether. We have found that counting by ones is not the best way to find out the total and that if we skip count it is more efficient. To really challenge us, we had to try and find the total number of objects when we could only see 1 group! Here is some of our fantastic work......

Numeracy

HG L and TP have been learning different strategies to add and subtract large numbers including using the jump strategy on a number line which involves breaking a number into parts e.g. tens and ones, and then jumping along the number line in increments. This is an effective method because it gives the children the tools to visualise the calculation. A lot of the time, the barrier to understanding Maths operations is that they can seem quite abstract. However, by incorporating a number line, your children can trace the numbers to the left as the number decreases in a subtraction calculation or to the right as the number increases in an addition problem. 

The students have also loved exploring location and direction concepts using programmable robots called Bee Bots. The students have been learning to use vocabulary such as north, south, east and west, as well as forwards, backwards, right and left to demonstrate directions. They have been learning to write a clear algorithm to get from point A to point B and have been learning to program the Bee Bot to follow their algorithm.