Dear Families,

Grandparents and Special Persons Day

We are looking forward to hosting our Grandparents and Special Persons Day on Friday. Our Prayer celebration will start at 10.30am in the courtyard. By having the prayer celebration outside, we will be able to have a larger number of people attend. While we have not set a limit on the number of special people per student who can attend, we do ask that you be sensible with this number given we can only have a maximum of 500 additional adults on site (which is less than 2 adults per student enrolled). We understand that some grandparents will not be able to attend because they are in Sydney or another restricted area. Many of our families will be in this position so please do not think that your child will be the only one without a grandparent present, we will do our best to make them feel special too.

Director of Catholic Education attends our Leadership Meeting

Yesterday, Mr Ross Fox, Director of Catholic Education attended our leadership team meeting to discuss a book we are currently reading. The book, Why Knowledge Matters, examines the impact of a knowledge-based curriculum versus a skills-based curriculum (some of you may have seen Mrs Myles cheekily talking about how she is persevering with reading this text in the recent video on facebook). Mr Fox joined in on a discussion on how this book was challenging the way we were thinking about teaching and how it aligned with the work we were doing with Initialit and COGLearn in Mathematics. The leadership team spoke about the change in learning and student engagement we were already seeing in our students, and how teachers have been excited to take on these new ways of teaching. We also spoke about how lucky we are at St Thomas Aquinas, to have such professional and enthusiastic teachers who were willing to take this evidence-based teaching to benefit student learning.

Parent Portal

Next term will be introducing a Parent Portal. 

The Compass Parent Portal is an online portal that will let you access important information about your child’s school and their progress, including school reports. 

The portal will be accessible via the web and the Compass School Manager App (via the App store on your device) and will make engaging with us as a school faster, easier and more secure.

The Parent Portal can be accessed to:

• Receive relevant messaging through the app or desktop
• Submit absence notes
• Give consent for excursions/events
• Communicate with teachers
• Academic reporting
• Attendance records
• Quick access to school website

More information will be available in our next newsletter.

Preparation for Remote Learning

As we closely watch the numbers of COVID cases in NSW, we are hopeful that ACT schools will continue to function at full capacity. If however, we do need to move to remote learning we are ready. All students have access to Teams as well as Google Classrooms or SeeSaw and teachers are ensuring students can log in or parents have access to the login codes. Information regarding access to these platforms will be provided later in the week. At this stage, our mantra is that we are ‘Alert but not Alarmed’. If we do have to move to Remote Learning, we are ready.

 God Bless

 
Leah Taylor
Principal