Week 8 Term 2 2024

News from the Principal

Dear Rosary School Community

All our Year 6 children are involved in an aspect of Leadership at Rosary School. We have Environmental Leaders, Community and Wellbeing Leaders, Sports Leaders, Faith and Social Justice Leaders and Digital Technology Leaders.

Our Faith and Social Justice leaders are currently supporting our Parish St Vincent de Paul charity by encouraging children to think about how we can care for others who require support to feed themselves and their families. This follows their very successful appeal for the Sr Janet Mead homeless centre.

We thank families for their response to these student led initiatives that are expressions of our faith in action.

One of the Environmental Leaders’ initiates has been to establish a vegetable garden. The leaders identified a space in the school yard, calculated the amount of soil and investigated the vegetables that could be grown through winter. Following a trip to Bunnings the students then worked with Joe D’Angelo to establish the garden. The creation of a vegetable garden, provides a meaningful, hands-on learning experience that deeply connects with the teachings of Pope Francis’ Encyclical Letter, "Laudato Si'," encouraging students to become thoughtful and active stewards of the earth.

Last Friday we welcomed 35 Mid-Year Reception children. Eighteen of these children are siblings and seventeen are new families in our community. I thank Franca Notarangelo, Erica Brigden and Millie Lane, our mid-year Reception teachers, for the work they have done to prepare the new teaching and learning spaces and for warmly welcoming the children to Rosary School.

Following our Circle Time professional learning, some of our teachers have begun implementing Circle Time in their class. This is a 20 minute activity that creates social capital and gives children the opportunity to connect and build positive respectful relationships.

Some reflections from our Year 6 children:

“We get to learn new things about each other and see our similarities and differences.”

Ilijana

“Circle Time is a great way to communicate with people you don’t usually communicate with. It opens up opportunities in your learning by knowing other’s thinking and ideas.”Leonardo

“Circle Time is fun. It allows us to be ourselves and understand more about our peers. It brightens up the day, motivates us as learners and creates positive relationships in the classroom”. Melissa

This week we have our Parish Family Mass. You are all very welcome to join us on Sunday morning at 10.00 am at Our Lady of the Rosary Church.

Kind regards

Susan

News from the APRIM

Rosary School Family Mass

A reminder that we will celebrate our next Parish Family Mass at 10am this Sunday at Our Lady of the Rosary Church. Our students are invited, as always, to be actively involved in the Mass, reading the Prayers of the Faithful and being part of the opening/offertory procession. Please message me to let me know if you are able to join us and if your son/daughter would like to contribute to our Eucharistic celebration.

Classroom Crosses

We have always been conscious as we have navigated the build and the recent movement into our new building, that we would maintain the crucially important connection with the history of our school and its heritage.
One example of this was to preserve the wooden floorboards from our original school hall which was built in 1918.

The process having preserved the wood, was to utilise the services of the Nailsworth Men's Shed to transform the floorboards into crosses for our classrooms.
We have ended up with twenty-four beautiful crosses which will grace the walls of our new classrooms and many other classrooms across our community.
We are very happy that we are preserving links to our history and we will provide further examples in upcoming weeks of how we have sought to do this.

Resilience Project

In previous newsletters, I have taken the opportunity to outline in a little detail the main elements of our Resilience Project at Rosary School. In this edition, we will continue with Empathy and I will suggest some ways that families can build on the work that we cover on empathy at Rosary School.
Working on empathy helps us to identify, understand and feel what another person is feeling. When we show empathy or we do something kind for someone else our brain releases oxytocin. This leads to increasing our self-esteem/confidence, energy levels, positivity and overall happiness.

Suggested Whole Family Activity

Neighbourhood Kindness Challenge

As a family, choose an act of kindness from the list below that you would like to do for a neighbour or family friend. Each family member can select one to commit to, or you can choose to do one together.

Cook them something delicious like a cake, hot bread, or cookies.
Write a note to put in their letterbox thanking them for being a great neighbour or friend.
Design them a Thank You card.
Pick or buy some flowers to deliver to them.
Choose a little plant from your garden to give them.
Make them a gift from things around your house.
Offer to do a job for them, like wash their car or water their garden.
Offer to take their pets for a walk.
Invite them over for afternoon tea.
Invite them on a walk.
Recommend one of your favourite books to borrow and read.
Ask them if they need anything from the shops next time you buy groceries.
Say hello next time you see them, and ask them how their day is going.

As a family, feel free to do more than one and spread the kindness in our family and community even further!

Stephen Campion/APRIM

2NP News

In Hass this Term, our focus is the interconnections of our First Nations people to a local Country/Place. In addition, we have been learning about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures. To consolidate our leaning, we attended an excursion to the Living Kaurna Cultural Centre.

The Living Kaurna Cultural Centre promotes and nurtures reconciliation and cultural respect towards First Nations people within Australia. Located at the sprawling and culturally significant grounds of Warriparinga, this Cultural Centre offers a range of authentic experiences to celebrate and explore Aboriginal culture.

We began our excursion with a Welcome to Country and smoking ceremony to acknowledge the Kaurna people as Traditional Owners and Custodians of the Adelaide Plains.

The children then rotated between two experiences that celebrated Aboriginal Culture and stories. The experiences included a guided bush walk and bush tucker explanation and weaving with Aboriginal Elder, Auntie Janice.

The children drew pictures and wrote about their experiences at our excursion.

"We did the bush walk and saw the water holes. The water hole is the hole where the water goes and they pick the fish out and eat it. It is important to Aboriginal people so that they can find food and eat it "-Amahlia

"I got to smell and eat lots of herbs. I learnt that a coolamon is used for shields. I also got to hear a dreamtime story about a boy who went out hunting without permission and his uncle was looking for him. By the time the uncle found him, he was dead and he cried so much that he made water holes"- Charlotte

'"Yesterday, my class went to the Living Kaurna Centre and Kalitha took us on a walk. He gave us plants that you could eat; a salty one and a lemon one. There was also an aloe vera one that you rub on your skin. The bush tucker is important to Aboriginal people so that they have food. I learn that the Aboriginal people made small houses to stay away from animals"- Jack

Aboriginal Art has survived for over thousands of years and continues to be one of the oldest art forms practiced today. Aboriginal Art consists of symbols. These symbols were used as a means of communication; communication of their lives on earth, their rituals, food, customs and also to show constellations and for ritual decorations. The students used Aboriginal symbols to tell a story and to create a line art work in a map of Australia.

In Visual Arts this Term, we have been learning about warm and cool colours. Colours can be separated into warm and cool colours. Warm colours can give us feelings of warmth and joy or even anger. Warm colours include reds, oranges, yellows Cool colours evoke feelings of calmness and serenity, as well as sadness. Cool colours include blues, greens and violets

For this activity, the children chose a warm or colour colour palette to paint the background for their landmark artwork.They then chose an Australian landmark and used primary and secondary colours to draw their own hot air balloon.