Click here to view the June 17 Schoolzine eNewsletter!

REMINDER: Book Club orders are due Thursday 11th June. Place orders via LOOP. See newsletter for details.

Click here to view the June 4 Schoolzine eNewsletter!

To assist with traffic congestion please consider delaying your pick up time in the afternoons @ the Stop Drop & Go zones from 3:15 - 3:30

Click here to view the May 21 Schoolzine eNewsletter!

Click here to view the May 7 Schoolzine eNewsletter!

The changeover date for the winter uniform is set down for next Tuesday 5th May. Any students in attendance are required to wear the winter uniform, however due to the current circumstances, a 2 week leeway will apply to allow parents time to ensure their children have all the correct winter uniform requirements. 

Click here to view the April 23 Schoolzine eNewsletter!

Welcome to an extremely unique Term Two! We hope you have had an enjoyable Easter break and are keen to begin a new journey of learning.

Thank you for the positive praise many of you have forwarded our teachers. As you can imagine, teachers have been working hard to guarantee continuity of learning and have encountered a steep learning curve using technology to ensure this continuity.

By now you would have received communication from your child’s class teacher regarding the learning students will encounter throughout the upcoming weeks. All year levels have access to a ‘Team’ in Microsoft Teams. This is where you will find communication, activities and resources for learning. Students can communicate with their class teacher(s) in this digital environment.

A Class Notebook is connected to the Team for Years 1- 6 where students will find content and will be directed to upload evidence of learning in their own sections of the Notebook. If using an iPad for at home learning, it is advisable that the Microsoft Teams and OneNote apps be downloaded.

Preps will have take-home packs so please look out for communication from your class teachers for when to pick up these from the school.

To access Teams, your child will need to use their school login which will look similar to this:

Username: ABCSmithJ@twb.catholic.edu.au

Password: Monkey37

Teachers will have student login details if you need assistance. Our teacher librarian has also uploaded ‘How To’ videos to assist with the login process which can be located on our school library AccessIt site https://au.accessit.online/ORL13/. This site also contains direct links to required or optional online activities relevant for your child’s year level. You can also login via office.com.

If you have siblings enrolled in the school, please ensure you logout of one child’s account before trying to access a sibling’s account. Each student has only been given access to their own year level Team so if a student is denied access, it is because they have tried to access their sibling’s team.

Thank you for your patience with any tech issues when trying to login to your child’s Microsoft Office 365 account- there will no doubt be some issues when first using these new platforms. For technical support, please let the class teacher know that you require support and they will contact the school Information Services Support Technician.

Teachers will be communicating with you when they are available and will send schedules for any times that students will be expected to be online, within normal school hours. Each year level will have a suggested timetable of offline and online as well as interactive and independent activities. Teachers will direct students to ‘Must Do’ activities that need to be completed for assessment of learning. There will also be ‘Optional or Challenge’ activities.

Please provide feedback to your teachers about the amount of content and progress of learning at home. The parent’s role is to support the learning but there is no requirement for you to supervise your child the whole time they are learning at home. Your child’s teacher is responsible for teaching and assessing the learning.

If you and your child are unsure of how to complete an activity, please contact your child’s teacher. However, it is important that parents are being mindful of the number of requests or messages sent to teachers. The teachers need to communicate with all families in the class and as you can imagine this is a very time-consuming task. Being bombarded with non-essential messaging restricts their ability to provide assistance to all students and to offer further learning opportunities in the weeks to come.

More communication will be forthcoming. We trust that your child will learn many new skills throughout this new journey of learning.

As you would already be aware, The Queensland Government has decided that, in order to reinforce social distancing across the community and slow the spread of COVID-19, Queensland school students will move to a home-based learning model from 20 April 2020 until at least 22 May 2020 (end of week five) when the position will be reviewed. These arrangements will also apply to kindergartens.

Essential Workers

During this period, all students who are able to be supervised and learn from home are to stay home, except for: 

• Children of essential workers on days when they are not able to be supervised at home and no other arrangements can be made. Essential worker means any worker who must continue to attend their workplace for essential business during this time. 

• Vulnerable children. Vulnerable children include children identified by schools as vulnerable (i.e. at risk) or who:
• are currently receiving services from Child Safety, including children who are subject to a child protection order
• are subject to a youth justice order. 

If you are classified as an essential worker and require for your children to attend school, please ensure to inform your child’s teacher or the school office by this Friday (17 April). 

For those who attend school, no additional teaching and learning will occur other than what has been provided by the individual Year levels for home based learning. 

Attendance

Attendance rolls will still be maintained but adjusted to reflect the current situation. If your child is sick and is unable to complete home based learning, please contact the school, as this will be recorded as per normal procedure. 

It is vital that students continue learning remotely and access the content provided for them by their teacher. These learning activities have been taken from units of work which students would have been taught if they were at school. They are directly linked to the Australian Curriculum and evidence of their learning will be collected for future assessment requirements. It is important to know that teachers will be monitoring student access online and parents will be contacted at the end of each week if students fail to access a sufficient amount of home learning. 

Home Learning

Teachers will be forwarding suggested timetables and home learning activities for Week One by this Friday afternoon. You will then receive each following week’s timetables and learning tasks every Thursday afternoon. Please note that the timetables are just that…suggested. We know that there are a variety of issues and variations in each household that may affect the timing of access for students. There is no requirement for students who are learning from home to replicate normal school hours. Learning from home can be accessed at any time of day or any day of the week. You need to make it work for your family. I will send home some further information tomorrow which hopefully will assist you in setting up an effective home learning environment and routine.

As you know, there is an enormous amount of online resources for children and parents to access. To provide you with further clarity of what needs to be done, you will notice that the teachers have divided home learning tasks into “Must Do’s” and “Optional or Challenge”. The “Must Do’s” speak for themselves and it will be these activities that the teachers will assess and kept as evidence of learning. Correction and feedback of Optional tasks will also occur. 

Feedback

This is new ground for all of us. We are all on a steep learning curve and the school is endeavouring to provide you with the best possible learning experiences. For this to occur, your proactive feedback is most welcome, especially in relation to ease of navigation around online learning. 

Other School Routines

• The Newsletter will still continue to be emailed home every fortnight. You all should receive the first newsletter of the term next Thursday.
• I know that you all will be sorely missing our weekly assemblies, so a weekly assembly will be available to be viewed online each Thursday. Be sure to keep an eye out for that special treat each week!

The school admin is open, so please feel free to contact us if you have any queries in regards to the next five weeks. 

I trust you all had a peaceful break over Easter and hope you all remain safe and look forward to catching up with you all as soon as possible.

Regards

Chris Golightly

Principal