Dear Parents, Carers, Boys and Girls,

Welcome back! We are really excited for this year's journey of learning with our students and families!

Spelling Mastery

We at St Mary’s are delighted to inform you of Spelling Mastery, a program we’ve invested in to improve spelling abilities at our school. The children from Year 3-6 will be involved in this program and it will be happening from 9:00am - 9:25am each morning, Monday to Thursday.

Spelling Mastery is a fully scripted Direct Instruction program that has an extensive research base and is teacher directed. The program helps students understand the relationship between sounds, word parts, and spelling patterns. Spelling Mastery encourages students to learn strategies to spell correctly rather than rely on memory alone. There are three approaches within Spelling Mastery, phonemic, whole-word, and morphemic. 

• Through the phonemic approach, students learn the sound-symbol relationship between letters and sounds that help students spell using predictable patterns. For example, words like map, tap, fog, fan.  
• The whole word approach teaches students high frequency words and irregularly spelled words that do not follow a predictable pattern. Examples- ‘answer’ ‘the’ and ‘people’. 
• The morphographic approach teaches students that all words are made of one or more morphograph or word parts. They also learn rules that apply when combining morphographs to form words. Examples: ‘re’ as a morphograph has meaning. It means ‘again’... (repack, return, rerun) ‘-est’ means ‘the most’... (lightest, happiest, friendliest).  

Your child will learn to spell using all the above methods through lessons delivered in small groups. Please do not be concerned if word lists aren’t being sent home on a regular basis, as the focus of Spelling Mastery is for students to understand how to spell rather than spell ‘by heart’.  

We also recognise the need for practising the skills learned in class, so when there are word lists sent home it would be mainly when added practice is called for or if words are related to a topic being taught in class.

Please talk to us if you have any questions about this.

Save the Date - Saturday 11 March

Moruya Celebrates - Mardis Gras - Riverlights

On Saturday 11 March our town will be holding a community celebration with a street parade followed by activities in the park and then Riverlights on our beautiful Moruya River at dusk.

St Mary’s has been invited to be part of this year’s street parade. We would love as many of our students as possible to participate in this event. We will be taking the Moruya community ‘Back to Neverland’ and plan to have a float with that theme. Students would participate by wearing their Peter Pan costumes from last year's musical and walking as a group in the parade.

We will have more specific information for you in the coming weeks. We are really excited to be part of this community event.