Term 2, Week 6 2021

Dear Community Members

It is hard to believe that we are in Week 6 of this term.

Pupil Free Day

Last Friday the whole staff engaged in our IDEAS initiative (Innovative Designs for Enhancing Achievements in Schools). This day gave us the opportunity to begin to align our school structures and processes for ongoing learning. We were inspired to engage in journeys of self-discovery to  ensure that we achieve sustainable excellence. It was a rich day of learning for all of our staff here at Dominican. We look forward to sharing the IDEAS journey with you.

Way2Go

This Term Dominican School begins their engagement with the Way2Go program.

We are very excited to be undertaking this new initiative. Way2Go is a state-wide South Australian program promoting safer, greener and more active travel for primary school students and their  communities. It uses a whole school approach built on a partnership between local councils, school communities and the Department of Infrastructure and Transport.

Why Way2Go?

• To increase the safety of students during morning and afternoon kiss n drop
• To ease congestion and build up on Military road
• To increase student health and encourage students and families to be more active by walking/riding to school.
• To be environmentally friendly

To find out more about this fantastic program, check out the Way2go website:

To begin this program, we need your help. Please complete the short survey below to support us in our journey of making Dominican School the best that it can be.

Click here to visit Way2Go Parent Survey

Early Intervention Programs - Literacy

I am delighted to announce that we will be introducing two new intervention programs across the school commencing in Term 3 and the necessary training and purchasing of resources is well underway. I would like to acknowledge the work of Mr Nick Ryan, our Pedagogical Coach, for his initiative, drive and leadership in managing this significant change for our school. Nick will be sharing further information about these excellent programs in the very near future. Watch this space!

We are LIVE!

You are now reading our newsletter for the first time via our new school website which was launched and went LIVE yesterday! This has been a work in progress for quite a while and it looks fantastic and extremely professional. Many people have contributed to the success of this work and I would especially like to acknowledge and thank Siobhan Evans for all the work she has done behind the scenes. Thank you Siobhan! I strongly encourage you to visit our new site and I would welcome any feedback that you may have.

Director of Catholic Education visit

I am pleased to inform you that the Director of Catholic Education South Australia, Dr Neil McGoran has accepted our invitation to visit Dominican School on Wednesday 23 June. This is an exciting  opportunity to showcase our school and for our Director to see our school in action. The Director will also have the opportunity to speak with students, staff and members of the School Board. I look forward to sharing this important occasion with you.

Have a great week!

Kind regards,
Phil Holmes, Principal

Congratulations to our Justice Leaders who have been successful in their application for a grant of $500 to fund an Ecological Conversion & Action Project.

Please see below for their proposal to compost our organic food scraps into natural fertilizer for our school gardens.  This is an exciting initiative for our school to continue to work for the justice and care of our world.

We commend Alissa, Charlotte, Coco, Connor, Cooper, Dylan, Holly, Georgia, Holly, Izla & Mia for their passion and commitment to making a positive difference to care for our common home.

LIVE, LEARN, LEAD for the world that God desires

We are the Year 6 Justice Leaders at Dominican School and we are passionate about working for Justice for our Earth. Part of our role is to work with our school to care for our environment. At Dominican, we are committed to caring for our common home.  We are inspired by our Pope and his letter, Laudato Si, to work together to make a positive difference to care for creation and reduce our environmental footprint.  We have nude food lunchboxes, class indoor and outdoor environmental responsibilities, butterfly, flower and veggie gardens, and Friday whole school yard clean-ups after lunch.  We have also reviewed and developed our waste management processes to dispose of our waste better using recycling, organic, paper and landfill bins… and have less of them.

An area we’d like to GROW is in COMPOSTING.  Currently we put our food scraps into our green organic waste bins kept in our school corridors. We tip the food scraps into our large green bins and once a fortnight the council collects them. We want to change and improve what we’re doing here so that we reduce, reuse and recycle our food waste to compost and put back into our gardens.

As a group, we are keen to learn more about how to compost, so that we can develop a process for us to recycle our food scraps to use in our garden.  We want to educate all our classes so that they can get involved and invite our parents and families to help out. We’d really love to see our herbs, fruits and veggies grow so that we can use them to cook in our school kitchen.

Our HOPE is that we can get this started and promote this with our school community so that together we can learn and act to make positive change for our school environment.