Dear Parent/Carers,

Being a parent is the greatest and the most challenging thing we will ever do in our lives-  thank you to all our parents, particularly our mothers, who give love unconditionally everyday.  Tomorrow our community celebrates together the gift of our mothers in our community.  We will begin with a family breakfast, then a Prayer Assembly hosted by Kindergarten at 9:30am. Throughout the day, our students from ELC to Year 6 will also be given the opportunity to buy a gift from our Mother's Day stall.  Thank you for your donations for this and to Mark Bauer, Rob Shiner and other parents who have helped organise the activities for our mothers.  Donations for the stall are still gratefully accepted please, and also a reminder to RSVP to our breakfast-  we would love to have as many of our community here from 7:30am.  As we are having a Prayer Assembly at 9:30 in the hall, we will distribute weekly awards outside at line up as soon as the bell goes, rather than assembling in the hall straight away.

Thank you again to all the staff who gave of their time last week to ensure our year 5 and 6 children had a wonderful opportunity at the Broken Bay Camp.  It was great to hear of so many of our children being risk takers, open-minded and caring during the four days-  attributes of our Learner Profile that we encourage each day at school.  Camp gave them the opportunity to extend these attributes in a differing environment together. For those parents who are wanting to find out more about the learner profile and the PYP program at Holy Trinity we have an information night coming up on Tuesday night the 22nd May, facilitated by our three PYP Coordinators. 

Last night at the P and F meeting we talked again about our fundraising  and social events for the year. These have all been placed in our school calendar that you can access through our App or website.   I encourage you to please vote on your three preferences for the fundraising money presented to you yesterday through our school App.  This is particularly important as we have two major fundraisers in 2018 with our Cook Book and Fete .  This term our focus is of course, on raising money for our Global Partner School in Kenya.  In Weeks 4, 6, 8 and 9, different Year groups will be organising activities for this, beginning with a teacher dunk in Week 4-  Let's hope it's not under 10 degrees that day!!!

Next week our Year 3 and 5 children participate in NAPLAN. It is the first time this will be administered online.  Please remember this testing is mandated at a national level to gather data and patterns in learning across Australia.  It is also one tool each school uses to identify  strengths and areas for development in teaching strategies.  In our school that focuses on inquiry based learning, we know  that standardised tests are limited in determining what a student actually knows or has learnt, and thus, we use more extensive, rich, ongoing assessment tools that enables each student to show their learning effectively.