St John the Baptist Ferntree Gully Newsletter

Dear Students,

We hope you are all doing well. Congratulations on an excellent first couple of weeks of home learning. It is certainly a very different way of schooling and we are sure everybody misses seeing their friends in person. Hopefully things will get back to normal soon and we will be able to see each other back at school. We all have lots of challenges with working at home but there are also some fun parts. Here are some of our experiences with learning from home.  

The fun parts: The fun parts of learning from home is, you can have a break if it’s necessary, learning to be self independent and being able to spend time with family.

My challenges: My challenges are, not being able to socialize with friends, handing work in on time and trying not to get distracted. In my opinion, I think most people prefer normal school instead of virtual school.

The fun parts: The fun parts of home learning are that you get work that is a lot easier and you are able to wear warm clothes and stay in your warm house. 

My challenges: Some of my challenges I would say that with the work the teacher doesn’t explain it as well as she would in a normal classroom therefore the work can get hard at some points. 

The fun parts: The fun parts of virtual school is to be able to have an easy way to learn at home.

My challenges: The challenges of learning from home is not being able to have face to face support from my friends and teachers.

The fun parts: The fun parts of virtual school are the new experience learning from my desk at home.  

My challenges: The challenges of learning from home is not being able to see my friends and teacher’s face to face.

For me the fun parts of learning at home would have to be the new experience. It is so fun to try something new and in a way this gets us prepared for our futures when we might have to be doing work from home.

The challenges of virtual school are all the distractions at home. Also not being able to see my teacher in person is hard, as it can be harder to understand new things without the face to face support of my teacher.

We hope you all have adjusted to school from home. Don’t worry if there are any things not going to plan, as a community we are all still here even when we are at home. 

Yours truly

Year 6 school leaders

This year was a very different experience with no gathering for ANZAC day services. Thanks to our Religious Education Leader Mrs Mandarino who provided the children with a virtual ANZAC day service.

We also had many children making a wreath out of nature. What beautiful art pieces they created!

"We are living in a time of many wars. The call for peace must be shouted. Peace sometimes gives the impression of being quiet, but it is never quiet. Peace is always proactive and dynamic. “ (Pope Francis)

Let us remember as we reflect on ANZAC day to be a people who spread peace and love to all.

To support the welfare and wellbeing of our staff I have organised for them to be mostly working from home. I will be onsite each day supported by a skeleton teaching team so that we can teach the few children who need to attend school onsite. Our office staff will also be mainly working from home. Our office phone will not always be staffed so the best way to contact us would be via email :-

cmason@sjferntreegully.catholic.edu.au

Please note that the day your child's teacher is onsite they may not provide as frequent feedback to their learning as the days when they are off site as they will be teaching at school. Your child’s class teacher will let you know the day they are working onsite.