St Finbarr’s Student Protection Contacts
Genny McNair & Prue Bodkin
St Finbarr’s Parish School
Jabiru Street, P.O. Box 34 Quilpie, QLD, 4480
Phone: (07) 46561412—Fax: (07) 4656 1306
Email: [email protected]
Newsletter Checklist
Tuckshop Envelope
Charleville RAFS
Playgroup flyer
Important dates
2nd November All Saints & All Souls Liturgy, St Fin-barr’s Church 10.30am
11th November Remembrance Day
22nd November Quilpie District Swimming Carni-val
26th November Mass
28th November Awards Evening
30th November Last day of school
1st December Travel Day for teachers.
Volume: 7
Issue: 18
Date: 1st Nov 2017
Dear Parents and Friends
Last week I attended the final Principals Forum for 2018. It is inspiring to work with leaders who are so experi-
enced and passionate about their work – that is high quality teaching and learning in our schools. The Toowoom-
ba Catholic Schools Office has a clear vision for the schools of our diocese and have completed a mountain of
work this year in the areas of Teaching and Learning, Strategic Resourcing and Faith and Mission and they have
given us, as Principals, the tools to do this and the leadership capacity to lead the learning in our schools.
One topic of particular interest was Visible Learning. At the end of Jim Midgeley’s visit earlier this year, I did ask
him what his advice was to make our school great. His response was to make the children take ownership of their
learning; to know their purpose to come to school is to learn; and to understand the purpose of their learning.
Visible Learning has been derived from the work of John Hattie. ‘Teachers see learning through the eyes of their
students. Students see themselves as teachers of their own learning’. The teacher’s role is to facilitate learning,
to help students become their own teachers. This can be realized as teachers and students set learning goals
which include learning intentions for each lesson eg. We are learning to listen for a particular purpose and this
learning will be measured by the success criteria written in child’s language eg. I will be successful if I can listen to
my classmate’s ideas carefully and contribute some of my own. Students will develop metacognitive strategies to
assist their learning – this is where they have inner conversations such as – I have heard that word before or I read
about this in another book and it also said… They are conscious of connecting new information with past learning.
When reflecting on their work students are encouraged to think about ‘What went well?’ What was tricky? What
could I do about it? If students can become drivers of their own learning they are learning with purpose – not just
‘doing’ learning becomes exciting and students are motivated to learn. A number of our students are doing this
well already but our goal is to enable every student to become active in their own learning.
Parents can have a big impact on their children’s learning too, through their engagement in the educational de-
velopment of their children. It was very pleasing to see all of our parents meeting with the teachers during the
recent parent teacher interviews. Many of these I was able to sit in on and was impressed with the types of ques-
tions parents were asking of the teachers and the discussions these prompted. Our parents are really interested
in understanding and promoting their children’s education.
The Reading Strategy has been a focus of our teacher professional development last term and is now being em-
bedded in our school literacy blocks. Jim has produced a series of short clips to provide more information on
these for schools and parents. These clips can be found at http://twbtandl.weebly.com/reading-strategy.html.
Congratulations to all students who participated in the University of NSW ICAS Maths and English competition.
Charles was awarded with a Merit for Maths, Charles and Lace for Credits in English and Ardie and Hayden for
Merits in English. These tests are designed as a competition, with a high level of difficulty and therefore are not
completed by all students in Australia. Any student who completes the test or receives an award is to be congrat-
ulated.
A final P&F/Board meeting will be held Monday night at 6.30pm to finalise plans for the upgrade of our tennis
court. Other discussions will include school fees, and plans for 2018.
Warm regards
Genny
“The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.’’ (Mark Van Doren)
IMPORTANT NOTICE! - Change of Dates
Swimming – Wed 22nd November
Speech & Awards Night—Tues 28th November
Important Music Notice
Music lessons are being held
on Wednesdays this term.
Please remember your instru-
ments and music books.
Date Claimer!
Quilpie ICPA Holiday Camp Tues 5 – Fri
8 Dec
Circus skills, swimming, music, leather-
work, craft, boxing
FOR ANY STUDENT PREP – YEAR 10 IN 2017
MORE INFO? [email protected]
ICPA Members & Non-members welcome
(Members of other branches please
contact Branch Secre-
tary for discount)
The feasts of ALL SAINTS and ALL SOULS will
be celebrated with a Liturgy at 10.30am on
Thursday 2nd November in St Finbarr’s
Church. All Welcome.
Reminder
No holiday for Melbourne Cup day 7th No-
vember. School will be as normal.
Final P&F Meeting
P&F Meeting will be held on Monday night at 6.30pm
6th November. Everyone is welcome to attend.
Library Stocktake & Overdue Returns
Lists of borrowed Library books have been sent home
with students. These Library books have not yet been
returned. We would appreciate if all library books could
be returned by the end of
this week as Mrs Haylock
and Miss Belinda will be be-
ginning stocktake next week.
If you would like another
copy of outstanding books,
please contact the school.
Kerri and Joce got super creative
for this weeks Tuckshop and pre-
sented a wonderfully weird wacky
watermelon face with sharp teeth
and open mouth with watermelon
and grapes inside.
Of course of all the fruit on the
tray, the first type of fruit to be
eaten was the watermelon!
SCHOOL OUTING THIS FRIDAY
This Friday 3 November, our school will walk down to the
Combined Schools Art Exhibition to see all the different
entries. Students will be accompanied by Mrs Moran, Mrs
Haylock and Miss Janell. If you have any questions about
this outing, please contact the school.
Students of the Week
Congratulations to our Students of
the Week for weeks 3 and 4 of Term
4. In week 3, the students from the 3-
6 class were Darcy for asking for help
when he needs it and Millie for her
hard work in technology. From the P-
2 class the student was Ava for
writing fantastic sentences. In week 4
the two students from the 3-6 class
were Lace for taking her time with
graphs and Cody for working hard in
Maths. In the P-2 class the students
were Elroy for working hard in read-
ing groups and Stuart for always try-
ing his best. Well done
to these students for
their positive efforts.
P-2 News
Hello and welcome to week 5!
In English this term we are learning about characterisation in regards to how an
Author develops characters to engage their targeted audience. The students
are exploring how the language used can present and develop the characters
and how they can influence the reader within the book of George’s Marvellous
Medicine by Roald Dahl.
The Preps have been
working extremely hard
with learning to identify
and use the indigo sight
word ‘what’ and ‘come’.
This week the Prep’s focus
sound for spelling is ‘ee’
and ‘or’. I have been very
impressed with the Preps
writing their words out
each night for homework
and I can see the results on Friday with their spelling test…Well done Preps!
This week in Mathematics for year 1 and 2 we are identifying a Question of in-
terest to gather data to the relevant question. The students are then classifying
the data to create various displays using lists, tables and graphs to represent
and interpret the information. The Preps this week are participating in learning
activities to compare and count groups to 20 and beyond using the language of
less, more, smallest and largest
to explain their reasoning. The
Preps are also rearranging groups
to 20 and beyond to create and
match equal groups.
In Science this week the students
have worked in collaborative
groups to investigate a variety of
objects to determine whether
they sink or float in water. They
explored how the forces of pull and push act within water and have identified if
each object changes shape or size.
Have a fantastic week!
Thank you, Mrs Moran
ALL SAINTS AND ALL SOULS
Today, 1 November, Christian churches celebrate the feast of ALL SAINTS when we recognise all those who have been named ‘Saints’ by the church. The day also reminds us of St. Paul’s words that we are all saints because we strive to live as Jesus lived.
On 2 November we celebrate the feast of ALL SOULS when we recall with love and thanks those from our families and com-munities who have died. It is a long tradi-tion in the Church to pray in thanks for those who have gone before us.
We will celebrate these special days on Thursday 2 November in St. Finbarr’s Church at 10.30am. To honour those who have died each person is invited to light a candle and name the one they are re-membering e.g. “I light this candle in memory of _______”.
To help our students with this, please talk to them about someone from the family community perhaps known to them and write the name for them on a card.
The candle lighting is not just for the stu-dents. All present may light a candle if they wish.
Please come along too, and celebrate with us.
REMEMBRANCE DAY
Remembrance Day, 11 November, falls on a Saturday this year.
St Finbarr’s students are encouraged to participate in the Service at Bob Young Park. Please assemble at the park at 10.30am in prepara-tion for commence-ment at 10.45am.
Students are asked to be in full uniform, in-cluding hat.
Best of Brass
Last week the town of Quilpie was visited by BoB from Music Viva. Our instrumen-
tal students began the day by
having band practice with Mr
Sloan along with all five mem-
bers of Best of Brass as coaches.
The rest of the school then ar-
rived at the Shire Hall and en-
joyed a performance by the five
Brass players.
With trumpets, trombones and
a French Horn, BoB played mu-
sic written by composers from
across the world: tango legends, Australian waltzes, classical masters and Kazakh
folk music. It was an amazing
performance during which the
men explained to the stu-
dents how the various instru-
ments worked and about vari-
ous melodies, harmonies and
rhythms that combine togeth-
er to make the beautiful mu-
sic.
Later that afternoon, Graham
(who is touring with the BoB)
visited the school. He is a mu-
sic teacher as well as a professional Guitar player. He also spoke with the students
about getting into music and his
experiences.
The school bands performed
that evening during the Best of
Brass community show and
were highly complemented by
the Brass players saying that
they had never heard such a
wonderful band play together
for their size and experience.
Day for Daniel
Friday, 27th October was the Day for Daniel. Everyone dressed in red to show support and raise awareness for kids safety. Thank you to every-one for your donations. Money raised will be sent to the Daniel Morecombe Founda-tion which has two main aims, to educate children and young people safe in a physi-cal and online environment and to support young victims of crime.
Pen Licences!
We are proud to announce
that Millie and Marcus are
now fully qualified pen opera-
tors. Miss Jaeger has issued
each with a “Pen Licence”
due to their careful hand-
writing. Congratulations to
Millie and Marcus.
WELCOME!
We welcome Diesel
to St Finbarr’s
School. Diesel is a
new student and
has joined the P-2
class as a year 2 stu-
dent. He is already settling and making friends
and we welcome him warmly.