School Newsletter

Happy Birthday 

Class awards 

Mini Vinnies 

Year 1 and Year 2 have been learning about Food and Fibre during Science and Technology lessons. This week Mrs McCollough demonstrated how yarn can be made using a spinning wheel. We also looked at food hygiene and started an experiment to find out which surfaces carry the most germs to emphasise the importance of washing hands when preparing food or before eating.

Safety Procedures in the School Carpark

Please familarise yourself with our pick up procedures and safety guidelines when entering the school carpark. 

Please ensure you are NOT performing a U-Turn near the crossing. You must drive to the end of the street and turn around. 

Parents with trailers are permitted to turn around in the bus bay. These guidelines are put in place to ensure the safety of our students. 

Thank you for understanding. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us if you require any clarification.

Drink Bottles

Please ensure your child is bringing a water bottle to school every day.  As the weather is getting warmer, it is extremely important they are staying hydrated. 

This is vital on sport days as well as school excursions where students are leaving school grounds and water bubblers aren't available. 

NRL 9’s

Today St Joseph’s Laurieton joined with St Joseph’s Wauchope to enter two teams in the NRL 9’s. The students had a great day, learning some new skill along the way. We may have some new footballers in 2023, with plenty of talent shown on the day. 

Both teams scored plenty of tries and came away 3rd place in each division. What a terrific achievement!

Diocesan Touch Footbal Trials

Congratulations to Hardy Fletcher and Jayla Jolley who represeted the Hastings Zone at the Diocesan Touch Football selection trials today in Lismore. We are super proud of you both.

Jayla made the Diocesan team and will now travel to Parkes to trial for the Polding team early next year. Good Luck Jayla! 

Elective Sports 

Swimming

Kindergarten Reading with Year 6

We have been working hard on our narrative stories over the last few weeks. The students read them to Year 6 and took them home on Monday.  The kids have loved being authors and illustrators of their own stories.

Joeys Juniors

We had another successful Joeys Junior Session on Thursday! It was wonderful to welcome our 2023 Kindergarten students once again with their families. The children are settled and are already forming such beautiful friendships with their peers. Nerrine McGrath presented a great parent information session. Next week is the final week of the program and Mr Galvin will be presenting some information about our school and answering any questions you may have.

P&F Dinner

Last night, the P & F met for the end of year Christmas dinner, reflecting on the year’s successes. Thank you to our wonderful P&F for the support you give the students and school throughout the year. We had so many wonderful events, and implemented lots of new ideas. We are looking forward another wonderful year next year.

ALADDIN

This week we had the pleasure of being an audience in St Agnes Parish schools production of Aladdin Junior at Regional College. All students in years 3-6 were invited along to watch their first performance. The cast were students from years 5-8 from across the Port Macquarie parish schools. We enjoyed watching the theatrical special effects, sets, props, costumes and singing, dancing and acting. Our students certainly had a sense of appreciation for the student performers having just had our recent experience of our very own production. The Production is a joint venture between the St Agnes Parish schools Creative Arts nest and Got-Ya-Back Productions. There are still tickets available to the community. We look forward to hopefully partnering with the initiative on other projects in the new year.

New Uniform Announcement 

We are excited to announce that the new school uniform will be available to order from Term 2, 2023. The current uniform will continue to be used and phased out until the beginning of 2025 when all students will be expected to have transitioned to the new uniform. We entrust this 18 month transition period provides families with adequate planning time to implement the change.

Positive feedback for the new uniform concept was overwhelming and we would like to thank all families who completed the final feedback survey online and visited our uniform display.

We can also confirm the following additions to the uniform concept:

*Socks- Generic, all white socks, covering the ankles.

*Shoes- Must be all black and include black laces or velcro straps and black soles. EXCLUDING slip-on shoes and canvas shoes.

*Sports Uniform- The current sports uniform will continue with any changes to be considered in early 2023. Any coloured sports shoes will be accepted for sports days. (Pied Piper still have in stock larger sizes of the current sports uniform for those people who need it).

St Joseph's would like to welcome Mid Coast Uniform Solutions as our wholesale provider. We are still finalising the specifics on how our school will retail the new uniform but can confirm that this will happen 'in-house.' We would like to thank Helen from the Pied Piper for supplying our current uniform and for her support during this transition period.

If you have any queries, please do not hesitate to contact the office.

Best wishes from the leadership team 

	Principal Rick Galvin
	Assistant Principal - Mission Maria Wilson
	Assistant Principal - Learning and Teaching  Jessica Koenig

Happy Birthday 

Class Awards 

All $20 Boss payments and receipts have been handed in and refunded! Thank you again to parents for your patience and support for this program.

We are proud to announce that after each student was able to return their initial $20 loan and payback $1 interest to Young Change Agents, the company that sponsored our school for this program, our students have raised enough money to self fund the program for 2023 and then donate a whopping $746 (a much higher figure than the initial projection of $130!) to our Mini Vinnies team to support the less fortunate in our community around Christmas.

It was lovely to see our Joey’s Juniors return this week with big smiles on their faces. They all enjoyed the classroom activities with Mrs Dedal, Mrs Toole, Mrs Hayward and Mrs Border. The parents were also involved in an information session with Mrs Koenig and Mrs Nichols. This week’s focus was on Literacy and Numeracy and ways to be ready for school. 

We are looking forward to seeing our Joey’s Juniors next week for some more exciting classroom activities. Next week’s parent information session is with Nerine McGrath, our school Speech Therapist.

Today our Year 6 students joined with all the other Year 6 students from the Catholic Schools in our region. We sang with Wildfire, who also lead the music in a beautiful mass. The rest of the day was filled with making friends and playing games led by our Year 9 and 10 CSYMA classes at both Regional and Mackillop College.