Extra Curricular Opportunities

Sport

The school’s philosophy is to encourage the development of positive attitudes of good sportsmanship, fairness and a spirit of teamwork. Each student is assigned to a sporting team and participates in the annual Cross Country and Athletics Carnival. The school is a member of the Tableland District Primary Schools Sport Association. The school also participates in Netball, Rugby, Touch Football & Soccer in inter-school competitions throughout the year.

Excursions and Camps

Teachers plan for ‘real life’ learning experiences beyond the school environment. These include excursions and, when in Years 5 and 6, students experience a camp. Excursions and camps provide the students with rich and diverse learning opportunities as well as important life skills. They enable students to connect with each other and make life-long memories. All excursions and camps have a curriculum/learning focus and compliment the learning being done in the classroom.

Swimming

St Joseph’s offers a swimming program according to the Health and Physical Education Curriculum for students in Years 2, 4, 6. It is co-ordinated by our staff in conjunction with swimming instructors at the Atherton Public Pool. All programs are funded through the activities levy as part of school fees.

Readers Cup

Each year, students in Years 4-6 are invited to participate in a school-based competition that aligns with Readers Cup which promotes quality literature, fosters in-depth reading and focuses on students’ understanding of three pre-selected picture books.

The Readers Cup is an exciting competition that promotes reading and provides an opportunity for our great readers to really shine! Teams of four students read a set of books and then compete with other school teams to answer quiz questions from the books. Teams are awarded points and the team with the most points wins the Readers Cup trophy. The teams are made up of students from Years 5 and 6.

St Joseph’s are currently back-to-back winners of the Regional Readers Cup competition and have been fortunate enough to travel to (or participate via Zoom) in the State Readers Cup competition (2019, 2021).

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the First Nations peoples of Australia, the traditional custodians of the land, seas, skies and waterways on which we reside, work, travel and meet. We pay our respect to First Nations elders past, present, and emerging, and support the Uluru Statement From The Heart. We acknowledge that the land, seas, skies and waterways of Australia were, are and always will be, that of the First Nations peoples.

This School is an entity of the The Roman Catholic Trust Corporation for the Diocese of Cairns and is operated on behalf of the RCTC as the registered school authority by Catholic Education Services.