Next week is the most important week in the catholic calendar with Holy week commencing with Palm Sunday this weekend and culminating in the Easter Sunday celebrations of the Resurrection. The four day weekend will always be gratefully received but it is important that we remember and connect with the significance of the Holy Week experiences. Our Year 9 students are busy preparing the traditional Passion Play pray service for the school community (Thursday 28 March at 10am) and for the Parish Community (Friday 29 March at 10am). All are most welcome and I was lucky enough to have a sneak preview yesterday, and like always, our students are reverently rehearsing under the expert guidance of Mrs Maxwell and Ms Wade.  

The Colour Run last Friday night was enormous fun and a wonderful fundraiser for our P & F. The weather held and it was a lovely autumn evening where our school community were joined by many from the Cootamundra community to enjoy a fun-filled family night. Thank you to our P & F and our staff who supported and ran the event.  

The Parish BBQ was also a lovely community time where our 2024 School Leadership Team were presented to the Parish. We then shared a BBQ lunch with Parish numbers.

NAPLAN is almost at an end and we are finalizing the last of the catch up tests for our students who missed the original scheduling of the test. Thank you to Ms Marsay and our staff for the smooth coordination and management of the tests. Hopefully they will reflect the fine work that has been happening in our classrooms and also give us future directions for consolidation and revision.

A reminder that our enrolment period has been opened and we are busy taking enrolments already for 2025. Thank you to the parents who have already submitted their enrolment forms online for the 2025 intake into Year 7, Kindergarten and any other class that has vacancies. Please let any parents who are interested in enrolling their children for 2025 to log onto the school website www.shcoota.nsw.edu.au and click on the large enrolment tab or they can contact the school during office hours. We will begin interviews later in Term 2. The information session for the 2025 Kindergarten intake will be on Tuesday 21 May. We will advertise the details of the Year 7 2025

On one of the early days of Term One our Leadership team travelled to Yass to participate in a professional learning program to implement a new school wide behaviour program that looks to explicitly teach behaviour skills, expectations, routines, protocols, and appropriate social skills. Below is a short summary of the initial phase and explanation of the program that will be instituted in Term 2. Already the staff have begun discussing what this could look like for our school. It is aimed to make the transitions between classes smoother and safer and will build more productive class time.

Thank you to all the parents who made the most of the opportunity to meet with K-6 teachers last night. It was a very well attended evening and the teachers also appreciated the opportunity to keep you up-to-date with all the important developments and progress of your children. There is another session next Tuesday evening for K-6 parents and we will be offering a similar program of interviews for all secondary students and parents when we return in Term 2.

This coming Monday 25 March will be the Easter Hat making afternoon extravaganza. It is a hectic but special time where we invite family and friends into the break out space in Infants to help their children construct their Easter hat for the parade on Thursday 28^Th March.

In last Week’s newsletter we introduced the changes we were looking to institute at Sacred Heart and explained why. This week we will do a brief review and look at some specifics.

CLASSROOM MASTERY: Change is coming: Student Engagement Protocols: Part 2

What you might have missed.

Classroom Mastery is a program being trialled by Sacred Heart and number of diocesan schools. It is patterned on the very successful use of school-wide behaviour protocols that have been instituted at schools like Rosebud High Schoo in Melbourne, and in a great many high performing schools in Western Australia. Classroom Mastery is a program aimed at teaching both staff and students consistent and targeted classroom learning and behavioural expectations. We begin the process with our students in Term 2. 

Before we begin

Classroom Mastery builds on the work we are already doing with the Canberra Goulburn Archdiocese’s Catalyst program and High Impacts Teaching Practices that are already being widely used in primary classrooms and is the focus of development now in Secondary. The focus of both Classroom Mastery and HITP is to focus on Student Engagement and Teaching Expectations

Our Student Engagement Protocols are simple and the following are terms that staff, students and parents alike are now commonly hearing.

• Eyes Front, Face Forward, asks the students to be attentive to where instruction is coming from.
• Cue to Start is a specific and consistent way to check students are focused before beginning any new task
• Full Participation is the expectation that every student is engaged in learning and discussing their learning
• Pronounce with me is aimed at developing mastery of taught vocabulary through direct instruction on how words sound as well as how they look and what they mean.
• Choral Responses involve the whole class reading and responding aloud to short texts and is aimed both at language development and at keeping student focus on learning
• Complete Sentences is the expectation that teachers model correct language and expect students to answer in full sentences both orally and in writing.

Primary and Infants classes also have:

• Track with me helps students to concentrate on developing their knowledge by reading and following
• Gesture with me involves students in learning kinaesthetically through movement while being involved in listening and speaking

Keep reading next week for a review of Teacher Protocols for best learning.

There is never a reason not to be kind.

God Bless

Ms Nicky Trinder