ST JOHN'S... INSPIRING
STUDENTS FOR LIFE

WEEK 2

A MESSAGE FROM THE PRINCIPAL

Our Student Learner Profile has been in action for a few years and frames very clear goals about what we value for student growth at St John’s.

At the beginning of this year, I shared with staff our new Staff Profile. The purpose of this new document is to set clear expectations and clarity around professional standards. Our Staff Profile articulates what we value as a St John’s staff member. It connects all staff towards a common goal of school improvement and doing all we can to support each other as colleagues and more importantly, support our students.

We will unpack each pillar of our new Staff Profile in the upcoming newsletters.

Building Project Update
Our first classroom is getting closer to completion! It is very exciting for the 3/4V students to be the first class to move into their fully refurbished rooms. We can't wait to have our first opening ceremony later in the term. We will keep families informed of when and look forward to seeing you there!

Yours in Christian service,

Brad Moss
Principal

Farewell Mrs Kellie Kimpton
It is with sadness that we inform our school community of Kellie's departure as Learning Coach from the St Johns team. Kellie has an exciting adventure planned as she travels around the stunning Australian countryside in 2024. Kellie's last day here will be Thursday 28 March.

We welcome Shane Laracy and Christine Lashbrook to our Learning Coach Team in replacement of Kellie.

From the Deputy Desk

School Carpark
A reminder for all students to not walk through our school carpark in front of our office. If you are dropping off or picking up students, please park on Adams St so students can walk on the school footpath. Thank you!

Absences
Please notify our school office of student absences via our school app, Parent Orbit, or Parent Lounge.

Returning to School After Illness
Please refer to the following link regarding what to do when students have various illnesses/infections and when students should return to school. We would like to avoid prevent the spread of illness at school as much as possible. Thank you!
Stopping the spread of childhood infections factsheet - Fact sheets (nsw.gov.au)

School Uniform
At Assembly last week, we reminded students to wear correct school uniform. Please provide students with white socks with no logos, hair accessories in school colours or neutral colours and earrings that sit on the ear or are ‘sleepers’.

Swimming Carnival
Last Friday we had a fantastic Swimming Carnival for our Years 3-6 students. There was a wonderful atmosphere of encouragement, team spirit and giving events a ‘red-hot go’. The novelty events were a great hit too, providing everyone with the opportunity to have water fun regardless of swimming abilities. Thank you to our parents who helped with set up and pack up, St Paul’s College students who assisted with events, Felicity Habermann, our PE Specialist for planning the day and our staff and students who made the day such a success.

Year 6 Leadership Day
This Friday, our Year 6 students will be joined by Year 6s from other Lutheran schools in Henty, Wagga and Wodonga at our school to participate in a Leadership Day led by Emma Graetz from Lutheran Education Australia. What a wonderful opportunity to build connections between our schools and develop those important skills that reflect our Christian values.

Gould Swimming Years 3-6 Week 5
Next week, our Year 3-6 students will participate in swimming lessons at Gould Swim Academy. This is an annual program led by professional swim instructors. All families have received information about this on Parent Lounge.

Student Led Clubs
We are excited to share our Student Led Clubs for Term 1! These clubs have been initiated by students and are led by them at lunchtime, providing servant leadership to their peers.

Alison Jafari and Anna-Marie Bothe

FROM THE CHAPLAIN

It was great to see some new faces at our Friday Night Service last week!

Next week is our first Café Church for the year. This is a laid-back service where we talk about life and faith over a meal and hot beverage.

We’ll be looking at the story of Abraham and Sarah to discuss what it means to have faith when life is tough. Abraham and Sarah were promised a large family a land of their own, and yet decades later they remained childless and homeless. Their story can speak into or own lives today!

To find out more:
Follow us @ stjohnschapeljindera on Facebook or Instagram
Click here to subscribe to the chapel newsletter

SWIMMING CARNIVAL

STUDENT INFORMATION
WHAT'S HAPPENING IN CLASS

KINDERGARTEN

Kinders have had a great start to their school life. They have settled into the school routines well and have been busy making new friends. The climbing frame in the junior playground has been a favourite place for them to play. They are learning how to get on and off the top of the monkey bars.

In literacy we have started our story book sessions. The Hungry Bear is this week’s book and today the kinders made hungry bears out of dough.

Small white boards are regularly used in the classroom to help with learning so the students are starting to learn the correct procedure when using these boards. Today we drew a picture of our weekend on the white boards.

Maths has been a hive of activity with lots of hands-on activities. Shapes and patterns are the topics we have been learning about.

YEAR 1

The Year 1 students are continuing to settle positively into the routine of school.

We have had a busy couple of weeks with the beginning of our PBL unit. They have been exploring weather and the impact this has on our environment by exploring weather websites, watching weather reports, and sharing personal observations of the weather they have experienced. We have also planted seeds and discussed what these need to grow.

Maths has been very hands on as the students explore place value. They have been working with partners a lot and demonstrating their ability to share thoughts and listen to others. It has been great to see this collaboration.

In English, we have begun our initiaLit program and the students have enjoyed the engaging nature of this. Especially the songs! We have had a focus on sentence structure in writing. Ensuring we have a capital letter at the beginning, a full stop at the end and that we have the words in order so that it makes sense.

YEAR 2

InitiaLit
Our mornings in Year Two are very busy but a lot of fun with the InitiaLit Literacy Program. The students particularly love the songs and rhymes to help them remember spelling rules and the grammar. Next week we will be sending home readers on their library day to help support the concepts taught in the classroom.

Mathematics
Students have been enjoying hands-on experiences and daily recall of numeration in mathematics. Over the last couple of weeks we have been learning about place value and counting forwards and backwards from any given number and skip counting too.

PBL
Wow what a fun filled opening event for our PBL unit this term. Students and our awesome learning coaches too loved participating in an obstacle course with the highlight being two slip and slides. A big thank you to our Year 6 School and Vice captains, plus our House Captains that helped run the event. Thank you too to Mrs K’s ¾ class that cheered our year two students on. It was such a wonderful way to exercise our bodies in a fun way, which is one of the main focuses this term.

Spiny Stick Insect
Last Thursday we had a special visit from Rebecca Chang and Stella the Spikey Stick insect, which is Sophie’s new pet. Sophie shared with the class about how to care for Stella and she shared some interesting facts about Spikey stick insects. For example:

They eat eucalyptus leaves.
Females are bigger than the males and have smaller wings.
They are usually found in Queensland, in tropical areas.
They sway back and forth as a defence mechanism resembling a leaf in the wind.
They do not need a male to reproduce.
The eggs look like tiny seeds and can take up to two years to hatch.

Thank you so much Sophie and Rebecca for teaching us all about this amazing creature.

YEAR 3/4 PV

We have settled into the term, becoming familiar with routines and expectations in our class. Mrs Gordon has started her MacqLit and MiniLit groups and all students are settling in well. In class, we are enjoying listening to our class novel ‘Matilda’ by Roald Dahl. During our work in English, a lot of our sentence-level writing, grammar and vocabulary is based around the novel.

In maths, the Year 4s have been playing number games, using mini whiteboards, working with partners, exploring Place Value by reading numbers up to 6-digit and explaining their thinking.

We have been looking at what it means to be Australian and discussed our heritage. We are certainly a melting pot of many different backgrounds. In PBL, we have explored the difference between a celebration and a commemoration and looked at the significant events on our calendar.

This week we are taking a peek at our new furniture that is arriving for our new classroom. We must be getting closer to moving in!

YEAR 3/4 LK

The students were terrific during our swimming sessions and at the carnival. We saw many students gain greater confidence and try distances they hadn’t attempted before. During English students are developing their fluency while they do partner reading. They also share what they are reading and why they are enjoying it. Year 3 Maths has been all about Place Value using lots of hands-on materials and possibly some fun activities.

YEAR 5/6

Kindergarten Buddies
The year sixes have been enjoying spending time and getting to know their Kindergarten buddies over the past couple of weeks. Together the students have been completing a range of hands-on activities, as well as helping them get to know their surroundings at St John’s during play time. It has been great to see many of our year sixes display and develop their leadership skills during this time. We look forward to the year ahead and getting to know them better.

Chinese New Year
Along with the whole school celebrations, our class celebrated Chinese New Year. We are lucky to enough to have Mrs Mary in our class this year, who not only shared about her culture and this event but also organised some art for our classes to do.

PBL Entry Event
To begin our first PBL of the year, Years 5 and 6 were tasked with quite a challenging creation to make. They were given paddle pop sticks, sticky tape, blu-tak skewers and rubber bands and asked to create a catapult. Their catapult had to be able to launch a marshmallow as far as possible.

Some catapults used very intricate bases with intertwining rubber bands, while others were very simple and used the tension of the paddle pop stick to launch their marshmallow. With plenty of trial and error, we had some big successes from very different designs. Ava, Darcy S, Meggie and Isabel’s set the record after a few tweaks to their prototype. Thomas, Xavier and Jaxon trumped the record with their complicated design; however, soon after, Daigan accepted their challenge and managed to launch his marshmallow well past the measuring grounds.

What a great way to start off our journey exploring the different types of forces!

THEIRCARE
BEFORE & AFTER SCHOOL CARE

05/02/24 – 09/02/24

This Week:
We got back into the swing of things this week! Most of the children have retuned and we have well and truly started rolling into 2024. This week’s program was once again influenced by the children, they shared ideas and expressed what they would like to see here, so through this and observation, we were able to come up with lots of cool cooking and craft that was programmed for the week! A big hit here lately has been a three-marker colouring in challenge. Lots of kids participate and we have now been colouring for a prize! As much as some get a bit competitive, they are all respectful and happy for the winner which is great to see! On Tuesday afternoon we got hands on assembling our own rice paper rolls for second snack, it was a texture thing for some, but others wanted more and more! We baked on Wednesday once again, making a delicious clinker slice that I knew would be loved the same as it was in term 4 2023. Along with this, there was craft, like our DIY monsters and squishies as well as gorgeous suncatchers that are now displayed.

Next week:
The theme for next week, in honour of valentine’s day, will be self-love and kindness. We will spread it to others and very importantly to ourselves! Next week’s program is heavily based around creating and crafting, as I would love to start redecorating the room and display all our wonderful work for 2024. Some of the programmed activities will include making rainbows for friends that have nice words written to describe them. We will attempt to make groovy sunglasses that display all our strengths as well as self-love flowers. We are going to bake something sweet on Wednesday, some beautiful heart sugar cookies to eat and share with loved ones. There will also be another colouring competition taking place on Friday morning for the children that keep asking! We can’t forget about group games in the hall, please bring along some new ideas so we can shake things up in 2024! 😊

Reminder:
Strict no hat no play rules apply at here at ThierCare, so remember to bring one along just in case and we can enjoy the sunshine together outside.

12/02/24 – 16/02/24

This Week:
In honour of valentine’s day this week, the program was themed self-love and kindness. It is so important to treat others with respect and be kind, but equally important to express this love to ourselves! We focused on that this week, doing different craft, cooking, and creating. We got cutting and pasting Monday afternoon, our goal was to make rainbows that have drops of rain falling, written on these are words of kindness to describe ourselves. They now look beautiful displayed on our window! We spent Tuesday morning creating hand cut outs that were shaped like love hearts, these were very cute and something that we will make again someday. Wednesday our goal baking was to make love heart sugar cookies, this we did do! But unfortunately, they will be remaining uncooked in the freezer until next week as we had difficulties with the oven. But the children took this in their stride, and we attempted to make some homemade edible cookie dough instead! Not Wednesday afternoon If we don’t eat what we cooked. The rest of the week was spent creating and playing, the kids love imaginary play here, teachers is very popular at the minute. And of course, we were running around in the hall every chance we got! 😊
Next week:
Next week on Tuesday, it is annual love your pet day! This special day has made me think about the program and decided to base it around our fury friends! I want to learn all about your four-legged loved ones, so be ready to tell me all about them next week. We will be very busy crafting and creating all week, some things to look forward to would be making our own cat and dog door hangers, bobble head paper cats, slinky sausage dogs, and we will test our patience and folding skills when we attempt origami puppies. Of course, we will cook on Wednesday, but this week I have decided to switch from sweet to savoury! We are going to have a go at making some fried rice…yummm. There will of course be group games in the hall, and on Monday morning we will have a 3-marker colouring challenge, the kids are loving these at the moment!
Reminder:
Strict no hat no play rules apply at here at ThierCare, so remember to bring one along just in case and we can enjoy the sunshine together outside.

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PRAYING FOR YOU

At St John's, we pray for our students and their families and staff members.
This week, we are praying for:

Week 3
Darcy Wright
Ava Terlich
Eloise & Lewis Schilg
Charlotte & Beatrix Phelps
Hudson Chettleburgh & Lincoln Steeper
Aiyana Eames

Week 4
Grace Allan
Jim Berry
Mannix & Ava Dowell
Delilah Harrington
Jax Marshall, Elsie Carey & Lucille Harb
Kerrie Gordon

MERIT AWARDS

Kinder
Soraya Valente & Darius Stretton
Maxton Marshall & Ava Jones
Year1
Stevie Thies & Anthony Yong
Piper O’Grady Moll & Emilia Baird
Year 2
Kayla Bowditch & Paige Whelan
Sophie Chang & Chloe Oates

Year 3/4 LK
Mackenzie Smillie & Mannix Dowell
Lily Knight & Thomas Hancock
Year 3/4 PV
Evie Noordam & Tyler Perdon Pipper Groenewald & Coby Miller
Year 5/6 GC
Archie Kerkow & Deon Byers
Ryder Reid & Scarlett Barber
Year 5/6 DB
Matthew Kalina & Kael Jervois
Poppy Ley & Luke Schulz

ST JOHN'S... INSPIRINGSTUDENTS FOR LIFE