30 May 2018

Newsletter Articles

School Calendar

PRAYER

O God, bless and unite all your people in Australia and guide us on the pilgrim way of the Plenary Council.
Give us the grace to see your face in one another and to recognise Jesus, our companion on the road.
Give us the courage to tell our stories and to speak boldly of your truth.
Give us ears to listen humbly to each other and a discerning heart to hear what you are saying. Lead your Church into a hope-filled future, that we may live the joy of the Gospel.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord, bread for the journey from age to age.
Amen.

Our Lady Help of Christians, pray for us.
St Mary MacKillop, pray for us.

Principals Report

Dear Parents, Caregivers and Students,

The Plenary Council of 2020 calls for our Church to honestly embrace cultural change. A Plenary Council is the highest formal gathering of all local churches in a country. Our Plenary Council 2020 is being held so that we can talk about the future of the Catholic Church in Australia. What are we called to do? Who are we called to be? How do we need to change?

Perhaps the conviction of Archbishop Wilson last week is the most poignant reminder of this urgency. Like all accused people he has been afforded and will continue to be afforded the rights of law. It goes without saying what a difficult time it has been for all. That he has finally stood aside is what any of our accused Church Leaders, including any of our teachers are compelled to do and for most it is instant.

This week has been a difficult one for our Catholic community, especially our priests, leaders and staff of Catholic schools with the verdict handed down from Archbishop Wilson’s trial and the media releases that have followed.

There is an important message to all our communities about this outcome from the South Australian Catholic Education office. ‘First and foremost, our concerns are with all the survivors of abuse and their families. We want to reassure all parents that our schools are vigilant regarding the protection of children and to assure you that we have thorough processes in place to ensure that students in the care of our Catholic schools are safe.’

Personally, another message I would like to convey to our community is a message of hope in darkness. I recently heard these lyrics; from Canadian poet and singer, Leonard Cohen’s song, ‘Anthem’.

“There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in”.

The words reveal to us in his song that there are cracks in everything that can be put together but that’s where the light gets in, and that’s where the repentance is. In dark times, we need to interpret painful events in a wider context and look for beautiful and hopeful moments to appease the difficult period.

On Saturday, in St Mark’s Cathedral, Port Pirie, at the end of a difficult week, was a timely reminder to me of hope, joy and praise as I witnessed the welcoming of Deacon Hau Le, into priesthood. Hau Le had recently spent three months as a deacon working in our parish and school in practical training for his service and ministry in the Catholic Church. He is now our newest ordained priest to the Port Pirie diocese, which is a sign of light through the cracks and hope for us all.

There were over 40 priests from the Port Pirie diocese, some from Adelaide and others from NSW, where Hau Le attended his six years of study in preparation for the sacred order of the priesthood.

The ceremony was also attended by a large number of people from our Riverland Parish community, as well as a cathedral full of parishioners from our diocese, distinguished guests, members of the Filipino community and Hau’s family and friends.

Bishop Greg O’Kelly spoke eloquently in his homily to the congregation about the importance of service. He spoke of service from those who have come before us, especially the Saints and what we are called to do today in service to God and to others. He praised Hau Le’s generosity of a young man committing himself to ministry and the service of others in our community.

So, in closing my thoughts about the events of the past week, I will share with you the wise words from Bishop Greg O’Kelly SJ, extracted from the June 2017 Witness, ‘Let us pray that the Church continues to learn to care for victims, but also thank God for the encouragement given to our diocese by the lived Gospel example of so many of our parish people.’

Mrs. Oates, Fr Hau Le, Miss Roberts and Mrs Hunter. Jack and Adam Hunter also attended the ordination of Hau Le.

CATHOLIC EDUCATION WEEK 2018

This week is ‘Catholic Education Week’ across South Australia and the theme is, OPENING OUR HEARTS AND MINDS. The Diocesan theme for 2018 draws on our call to bring to life, and explicitly name, how Catholic Social Teaching is lived out in each of our communities and how we need to have hearts that are open to future possibilities. By opening our minds we develop a greater understanding as to how these teachings can be a lived experience in each individual community. It is hoped that every member of the school community will experience an opportunity to open their heart and mind to a loving God so they can develop and foster a relationship with God in return.

This is what we have been up to so far…. and what’s on for the remainder of the week.

Monday – Reconciliation Week Focus.

Celebrated our Spiritual Connections through stories from our local Riverland area. Students learnt about the importance and value of Dreaming stories, being one of the most important aspects of Indigenous culture. The Dreamtime is the Aboriginal understanding of the world, of its creation, and its great stories. The Dreamtime is the beginning of knowledge, from which came the laws of existence. For survival these laws must be observed. Dreamtime Stories are the 'Sacred Scripture' for Indigenous culture a bit like our own bible.

Tuesday - Get Kozy and Komfy for Kiribati.

OLOR raised awareness and funds to support the families of Kiribati.

Students and staff attended school dressed in their Kozy and Komfy pyjamas for a gold coin donation.

Kiribati is one of the world’s smallest and lowest lying countries, located in the central Pacific Ocean. Quality of life in Kiribati has been greatly impacted upon by the effects of climate change. Many families have had to relocate due to extreme weather phenomenon like king tidal waves.

Wednesday – Combined Catholic Schools Day

We will join together with our sister Catholic Schools in the Riverland region to celebrate Mass at the Berri Stadium, followed by a day of celebration and fun. Mass will begin at 10.30am.

Thursday – Switches off Day

‘OLOR Switches Off’, supports our precious world and attempts to reduce our carbon footprint on the environment. Throughout the day the classes will be ‘switching off’ all electricity to experience what it is like without this resource in our daily lives and to help save our world by using less energy.

Friday - Walk to School Day & Gratitude Gala

We are hosting a Gratitude Gala to show our Gratitude to our loved ones. This will be a fun way at the end of our week of celebrations to express our gratitude to our nearest and dearest loved ones and friend. Please join us.

8:00 am: Meet at the Riverland Plaza - in front of Subway for an 8:10 departure.
9:00 am: Gratitude Liturgy – Senior Classroom Year 6/7.
9:40 am: Gratitude Gala — We would love for you to join us in a range of activities hosted by the students of Our Lady of the River School.
10:30 am: Gratitude Gala Morning Tea / Close of Day.

Fundraising

We are hoping to gather a group of interested parents to join together as a sub-committee of the School Board to organise and assist with fundraising activities for the school. ' O L O R Helping Hands' is a group that will co-ordinate school fundraising events including our catering, cabarets, movie nights, raffles and future chocolate carnivals etc.

The aim of the ' O L O R Helping Hands' group is for parents and friends of our community to join together and have fun being involved in;

• Assisting in the planning and organizing of functions associated with the social, sporting, cultural and educational life of the school community.
• Fundraising for particular projects which assist or enhance teaching aids and equipment, or improvements to facilities within the school grounds, buildings etc.

We would aim to have a parent representative from the group provide a report to the School Board when needed and for the group to have a small executive that would communicate regularly with the Principal. If you are interested in taking part in this group, please return the reply slip sent home in student diaries.

OLOR School Board

Our next general meeting will be held on Monday 18th June.

Religious Education News

St Vincent De Paul Society

Please help to support those in need in our community by participating in our OLOR ‘Vinnies Blanket Appeal.’

Donations of good quality blankets, winter linen and pillows would be most appreciated. All donations can be brought to the school front office. At our final assembly for Term 2, we will present our donations to our local ‘Vinnies’ volunteers.

Vinnies 2018 Inaugural Primary Schools Art Competition.

Students are also encouraged to participate in the 2018 Inaugural Primary Schools Art Competition. There are categories in Reception – Year 2, Year 3 – Year 5 and Year 6-7. All interested budding artist need to see Miss Kayla Jones for entry details. The competition opened on 14th April and close on Friday 20th July.

SACRAMENTS 2018

There is a parent information session for Reconciliation and Eucharist on Monday 4th June at 5.30pm till 6.30pm for students and their families in Saint Mary's Church. Please come along to receive more detailed information about the Sacrament services to be held on Reconciliation on Tuesday 7th August and Eucharist on Sunday 19th August. There will be quite a lot of information at the meeting, about the expectations of parents to assist their children to prepare and participate in the respective Sacraments.

The latest edition of the Southern Cross features all the latest news and information on our Catholic community. Click on the following link below.

SCHOOL NEWS & EVENT

School Canteen News!

This Friday if your child would like to try a small tasting of lasagne, please put a note on your lunch order bag today. It’s a free sample.

Growing with Gratitude

Random Acts of Kindness

Random acts of Kindness are powerful, because they can make others feel great as well as yourself. They can be a small act like saying something nice to someone or simply smiling at someone, or they could be a larger act like doing jobs around the house to help.

In their Week 3 assembly, the Foundation class shared some ideas on how they can show kindness throughout their day. Please refer to the photos to see the Foundation Ideas of Kindness.

Kindness certificates were also awarded to students who have been spotted showing kindness in our school. Congratulations to the following students on receiving a Kindness certificate. Macey Eleftheriadis, Bode Gates, Siri Gudipati, Archie Kent, Charlie Kregar, Miss Roberts, Kiana Rundell, Claire Strong and Mitchell Strong.

Over the last couple of weeks our detectives have been on the lookout for students showing gratitude and Gratitude certificates will be awarded at our assembly this week.

Please take the time to read our OLOR, Growing with Gratitude flyer. Thank you Mrs. Rosie Perre for all her work in this important area of the school curriculum.

Playgroup

Come along to B.O.P.P.E.R.S. (Berri OLOR Planned Playgroup Early Readiness for School) on Tuesdays 9am till 11am. There are a lovely group of young children and their carers enjoying our opportunity for free play, structured games and craft activities. Please let friends and family know in the community.

Year 1

The year one class have been learning about the celebration of Pentecost. They spoke about how they can bring love, peace and joy to others, just like the Holy Spirit.

Year 1 and Foundation Excursion to Berri Library

National Simultaneous Storytime (NSS) is held annually by the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA). Every year a picture book, written and illustrated by an Australian author and illustrator, is read simultaneously in libraries, schools, pre-schools, childcare centres, family homes, bookshops and many other places around the country. Now in its 18th successful year, it is a colourful, vibrant, fun event that aims to promote the value of reading and literacy, using an Australian children’s book.

This year Our Lady of the River School was invited by the Berri Library to participate in their Simultaneous reading day, our Guest Reader was ‘The Honourable Peter Hunt’, Mayor of Berri and Barmera.

Budding Engineers Yrs. 6/7

Our students have been given a series of challenges when they finish their work ahead of schedule or if they need an extra challenge to their daily routine.

Here we have Abby and Meg design a tower to hold an apple. They had to allow for the bendy bits in the straw as well. As is the case with all learning, this slight set-back meant they redesigned their tower and had a successful outcome. Their good work inspired other students to attempt their skill at tower design as well. I can see a new tower looming over Berri one day, designed by our budding engineers and architects.

Cracking the ABC Code for Parents

In terms of language, morphology is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language.

Rastle (2018) argues that the acquisition of morphological knowledge may be an important element of the ongoing development of reading expertise and this blog is a summary of the key points in her article.

‘Morph’=shape/form and ‘ology’=the study of. It includes the identification and analysis of stems, root words (often of Latin or Greek origin), prefixes (added to the front of words) and suffixes (added to the end of words), as well as parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjective, adverbs, etc.), intonation, stress and the influence of context on the pronunciation of words and their meaning.

Rastle (2018) argues that the acquisition of morphological knowledge may be an important element of the ongoing development of reading expertise and this blog is a summary of the key points in her article.

There is a large body of evidence showing that learning to read requires a sound knowledge of the alphabet code (the letters and letter combinations we use to represent the different sounds in English). However, research shows that skilled adult readers routinely use morphological knowledge in addition to knowledge of the alphabet code to recognise words.

A morpheme is the smallest grammatical unit in a language. A morpheme may or may not be a word. A word by definition can be used in isolation, whereas a morpheme may or may not ‘stand alone’. Every word contains at least one morpheme. For example, ‘jump’ is both a word and a morpheme. The words ‘jumped’ contains two morphemes: ‘jump’ and ‘ed’. The morpheme ‘ed’ indicates past tense, but it cannot be used in isolation.

Rastle argues that because parts of words (prefixes, root/base words, suffixes) occur regularly, these morphemes help the reader map meaning to the words as we are able to use prior knowledge of these morphemes to decode other words containing similar morphemes. For example, if we know the meaning of ‘trust’, then we can surmise the meaning of ‘trusty’, ‘trustworthy’ and ‘distrust’. Similarly, if we know the suffix ‘ist’ means a ‘person who’, as in ‘artist’, this assists in our interpretation of ‘physicist’ or ‘antagonist’.

This type of morphological knowledge is particularly useful in spelling. The classic example is the representation of past tense using the suffix ‘ed’. When spoken, this morpheme can be pronounced as /ed/ (painted), /d/ (sawed), /t/ (barked). However, a speller with a good understanding of this knowledge can easily determine whether a word ends with ‘ed’, ‘t’ or ‘d’ just by establishing whether the word being spelled is the past tense of a verb or if the /d/ or /t/ sound is a part of the word.

There is growing evidence that skilled adult readers are sensitive to morphological structure when recognising and comprehending the printed word. For example, how quickly morphologically complex words are recognised depends on how frequently the stem occurs (so ‘darkness’ with the stem of ‘dark’ would be recognised more quickly than say ‘recede’ with the stem of ‘cede’) and the size of the word’s morphological family (i.e., the number of words that can be constructed from the stem). Similarly, a word is recognised more quickly if the reader is presented with the stem prior to the whole word (i.e., the reader is shown the word ‘dark’ before being shown the word ‘darkness’). This is true whether the primed word have a genuine morphological relationship to the target word (e.g., dark-darkness) or a pseudo relationship (e.g., corn-corner), but not when there is no possibility of a morphological relationship (e.g., broth-brothel, ‘el’ is never used as a suffix).

The available data suggests that morphological analysis of printed words may be associated with processing in the ventral reading pathway. Beginning readers are more likely to rely on the dorsal pathway (spelling-to-sound-to-meaning), while skilled readers are more likely to use the direct ventral reading pathway (spelling-to-meaning).

There is evidence that young children already possess explicit morphological knowledge. This has been measured in oral tasks. For example: ‘Teach’. He was a very good …..). There are also studies showing that within the first few years of reading instruction, children have some level of morphological knowledge of printed words, although the effect is more pronounced in older adolescents.

Rastle contends that morphology provides a bridge between the form or structure of a word and its meaning and therefore the explicit instruction in morphology is beneficial at some point in the learning to read process. However, there is currently insufficient research to suggest that morphology instruction should take the place of systematic phonic instruction in the first stages of learning to read, but rather perhaps should be an integral part of the teaching of reading process.

For information on incorporating morthology into reading instruction go to the General Knowledge page or for practice activities go to the Editing page.

Reference

Rastle, K. (2018). The place of morphology in learning to read in English. Science Direct, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2018.02.008

OLOR Sports News

Friday 25th Riverland Soccer Carnival

23 senior students participated in a round robin soccer carnival in Renmark on Friday 25th May. They were a credit to themselves for their cooperative and sporting attitude to the game of soccer, to the organisers and supervisors.

Our students played their hardest in all games and showed a wonderful spirit filled with laughter, grunt, determination and a great team attitude.

The boys won all but one game and came 5th over-all. They were third in their division. Their ability to co-operate and do their best was most impressive. Their style of play was inspiring and I heard one onlooker describe the wonderful agility and speed the players possessed.

The girls won all their games and came first for the whole carnival. Their wonderful spirit, laughter, as well as the skill and enjoyment they showed in the game was uplifting to watch. The games didn’t lack hard work and gritty determination either. They scored their winning goal just minutes before the final signal and claimed first prize. Their joy, relief and exhaustion was most evident as they came off their field.

Congratulations to Amelia Morgan who won the player of the carnival for the girls! All umpires had her top of their lists for every game!

Our thanks to Mr Cross for his responsibility of the girls team and help with all students throughout the day.

Paul Forde

SAPSASA Football and Netball

This week we have a number of students playing in the netball and football Riverland SAPSASA teams in Adelaide. Good luck to Macey Eleftheriadis (football) Charlie Gates, Ella Kassebaum and Marley Minchella (netball).

Schoolzine Newsletter and Calendar

A reminder that the calendar is only available online through the School App ‘SZapp’. Having it online will ensure that it is current and always up to date. The Newsletter will continue to highlight upcoming events to ensure that parents and families are fully aware of what is on. The newsletter is every fortnight on the odd weeks, e.g. 1, 3, 5 etc. and will come to your email inbox or ‘SZapp’ on the Wednesday of those weeks. I encourage all families to install the ‘SZapp’ on your smart phone or Tablet. To ensure you receive the newsletter in your inbox each week, please ensure the front office has your correct email addresses. If you do not have an email address, please let the front office know (this week) so that we can send paper copies home with your eldest child.

Policy Documents

School Uniforms

UPDATE! The new tracksuit pant will be available very soon. The older style tracksuit pant is still available for those families who prefer that particular style. If your child is waiting upon the new tracksuit pants, children are permitted to wear navy tracksuit pants (plain) from home until they arrive. Other news! The Year 7’s now have their new ‘Year 7’ jumpers and they look great. Thank you to Mr. Kelly for all his organisation.

Fortnight Reminders

Community News

Happy Birthday!