LOVE

 Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you. — Psalm 63:3

As we move toward the feast of St Valentine or Valentine's Day on February 14, love will be spoken about and become a focus for many. It will certainly be a focus for many companies as they look to benefit from the commercialisation of Valentine’s Day. This is not a bad thing. Why shouldn’t we focus on love?

What we probably will not talk about are the origins of Valentine’s Day. St Valentine was a Roman priest who suffered martyrdom during the persecutions of Christians in the 3^rd century by the emperor Claudius II. According to legend, he defied the emperor’s orders and secretly married couples to spare their husbands from war. He was imprisoned in the home of a noble where he healed his captor’s blind daughter, causing the whole household to convert to Christianity. Valentine continued to marry couples for the love of God, the Church and humanity.

Thank you to everyone who attended the Parent Information Night on Tuesday evening. It was lovely to come together to welcome new people, talk about learning and reconnect. Several new parents stated that their child/ren (or the parents), “love coming to school”, “love their teacher” or “love the playground”. It is humbling that our children acknowledge their love for their school as love is a common value shared by our children, our parents and our staff. Put simply, St Bede’s is a loving school.

This verse above references the time where David was in the desert. He spoke of his desire for the LORD. He realised that life would be meaningless if he had to live it without the love of God. At St Bede’s we show our love for God and others through action and word. It is present in the way we speak with each other, care for our environment and engage with each other. As this newsletter is prepared and shared with our community, I was visited by a kindergarten student to share some of his writing. It was a perfect representation of St Bede’s in relation to love. This is how we show our TRUE COLOURS, this is how we show LOVE.

Regards

Andrew

James C (Kindergarten)

In 2023 we have much to celebrate. We have 41 kindergarten students, our highest intake for many years. We have officially 210 students for our February Census. This is slightly lower than expected as we have had some families not return or commence at St Bede's for a number of reasons.

With an additional K-2 class and smaller 3-6 classes, we need to continue our enrolment efforts throughout 2023. I ask that you continue to promote St Bede's and the community to other families, especially those within our catchment area. Our catchment area includes: Red Hill, Kingston, Forrest, Deakin, Barton, Yarralumla, Griffith and Hume. Please ask families to contact the office to organise a conversation and tour.

Our current class sizes are something to celebrate and benefit from, however, are not sustainable long term. We need to grow a little more to allow our structure to be consolidated into the future.

Our Year 3-6 teachers were trained in Spelling Mastery during our PD week. We are excited to advise that Spelling Mastery lessons will commence on Monday 13 February. These lessons are 15-20 minutes per day and will involve students moving across classes within their stage.

Spelling Mastery is a fully scripted Direct Instruction program that has an extensive research base and is teacher directed. The program helps students understand the relationship between sounds, word parts, and spelling patterns. Spelling Mastery encourages students to learn strategies to spell correctly rather than rely on memory alone.

There are three approaches within Spelling Mastery; phonemic, whole-word, and morphemic.

Through the phonemic approach, students learn sound-symbol relationship between letters and sounds that help student spell using predictable patterns. For example, words like map, tap, fog, fan.

The whole word approach teaches students high frequency words and irregularly spelled words that do not follow a predictable pattern. Examples- ‘answer’ ‘the’ and ‘people’.

The morphographic approach teaches students that all words are made of one or more morphograph or word parts. They also learn rules that apply when combining morphographs to form words. Examples- ‘Re’ as a morphgraph has meaning. It means again. (repack, return, rerun) ‘-est’ means the most. (lightest, happiest, friendliest).

Your child will learn to spell using all the above methods through lessons delivered in class. Please do not be concerned if word lists aren’t being sent home on a regular basis, as the focus of Spelling Mastery is for students to understand how to spell rather than spell ‘by heart’.

We also recognise the need for practising the skills learned in class, so when there are word lists sent home it would be mainly when added practice is called for.

Please talk to us if you have any concerns about this.

Catholic Education have organised to fund a photographer to visit St Bede's on Tuesday 14 February. The photographer will visit classrooms and take candid photographs of students throughout a 2hr session. The photographs will be used for promotional purposes for St Bede's and Catholic Education only and names will not be associated with the images.

A Compass notification will be sent to parents to give permission for their child/ren to be photographed. Please choose to opt in or out of this event.  

St Bede's continued to be transformed over the school holiday period and early this term. I would like to thank everyone who contributes to the building fund. This enables our system to support our school with maintenance and improvements.

The following work was undertaken and completed:

Year 6: new carpet, pinboard, blinds, paint, new wall, vinyl and interactive screen, wifi

Year 2 Gold: new lighting, extension of room, new windows

Kindergarten Blue: new pinboard, interactive screen

Courts: resurfacing, posts, etc.

Carpark: extension completed (20 additional parks)

K-2 courtyard: retaining wall, fence (not completed)

Other: maintenance of lights/globes, new guttering and downpipes, additional seating in courtyard

In the April holidays, we will look to refurbish the staffroom and undergo a network remediation project (new WAPs and switches).