Dear Families,

I hope everyone has well and truly settled into Term 1. As I made my visits to classrooms last week, it was wonderful to see students engaged in their learning and Initialit in full-swing in infant classes.

You may remember last year, I wrote about changes to the way we are teaching reading at St Thomas Aquinas. This change is part of a nation-wide implementation of phonics-based programs in K-2. While our teachers had introduced students to some phonics knowledge, the main way we taught reading was using what we call ‘predictable texts’. These texts are leveled and encourage early readers to ‘guess’ the words based on the pictures accompanying the text, meaning or rhyme. There has been a great deal of research over the past decade or so on the Science of Learning. This research shows that good readers use decoding skills to work out unknown words, rather than ‘guessing’. Given this knowledge St Thomas Aquinas elected to trial Initialit for the Archdiocese of Canberra with the intention of seeing whether this would be a good program for schools within the system. The trial was very successful and as a result over 20 schools across the Archdiocese have started to implement Initial across K-2. Because of these changes to the way we now teach reading, we have noticed that a large number of students are not confident in decoding and we have had to go back to build foundational phonics knowledge. To do this, we are implementing phonics-based programs across K-6 and withdrawing a significant number of students for small-group intervention.

Some of you may have received a letter from Deb Griffin and Susan Magyar letting you know that your child will take part in a literacy intervention program. This year St Thomas Aquinas will be running four intervention programs, all of which fall under the Multilit banner. These programs are: Prelit; Minilit, Macqlit and Reading Tutor. This intervention will be an intensive program aimed at boosting student’s phonics knowledge. Your child may have presented as a good reader when using whole language approaches, but we now know that unless children also have a deep knowledge of phonics, they will often stagnate in their reading and not progress at the same rate as students who do have a deep understanding of phonics. Please do not be alarmed if you do receive a letter informing you of this intervention, research has shown that intensive phonics intervention is highly effective in bringing students up to speed so that they will be able to progress at the same or similar rate as their peers once the intervention is complete. More information about Initialit and the intervention programs can be found here. https://multilit.com/.

The year 5 students seemed to have a wonderful time on camp. Teachers reported that the students were very polite and cooperative, and while some missed home on the first night, they all enjoyed being with their peers for the three days. A big thank you must go to Mrs Megan Thomas, Mr Peter Collins, Mrs Susan Magyar and Mrs Carmen Myles for giving up time with their own families to ensure the Year 5 students could attend camp.

Tomorrow morning, I will join principals and student leaders across the Archdiocese as well as senior officers from our central office to celebrate 200 years of Catholic education in Australia. This celebration is an acknowledgement of the remarkable commitment of catholic leaders and teachers in providing quality education in a faith-based environment. Students back at school will be able to join in the celebrations by watching a live stream of the mass or highlights following the mass.

Restrictions are continuing to ease across the ACT. We have been informed that we will now be able to have up to 1000 people attend events. This means that at this stage, parents will now be able to attend the upcoming Cross Country and the Athletics Carnivals. We ask that parents sign in using the CBR app, you can download the app at the apple or google store. At this stage, ACT Sport will not be allowing parent spectators to attend their events, we will let you know if this changes. While we are very pleased about the current situation, we know that things can change very quickly and while we will endeavour to keep you informed, please understand that we do not always have a great deal of notice ourselves.

CE have posted the video of the PFAS meeting into our webpage. The video can now be viewed here https://staquinas.act.edu.au/meetings. The ACT government is compiling responses to questions asked on the night and taken on notice. I will post these responses as soon as they are available.

With the increase in information, we have decided to return to weekly newsletters. We believe the weekly newsletter will make it easier for parents to stay informed about what is happening and make it easier to remember when the newsletter will be released.

God Bless