Dear Parents and Caregivers,

Welcome to Week 7! This year is positively flying along at a cracking pace and before you know it we will be filling out tax returns and heading into the back end of the year. Our prayer this week is so relevant in the hectic life that we lead. As parents and teachers, it is essential that we ‘slow down’ enough to recognise the ‘God Moments’ we have with our beautiful children and to remember to thank God for the wonderful gift that each child is to both family and school community. Let’s all try this week to make some time each day to feel the presence of God in our lives.

Finding Personal Strengths

Identifying children’s strengths, and encouraging them to use these strengths boosts their self-esteem and can act as a protective buffer against challenging situations. Like superheroes, strengths look different for everyone. They can be:

• Personal strengths: kindness, curiosity, creativity, resiliency, thoughtfulness, and empathy.
• Social strengths: being a good listener, a good friend, being truthful, following rules, resisting peer pressure, respecting personal space, and comforting others.
• Language strengths: captivating speakers, attentive listeners, humourous, and expressive. They will have strong vocabulary and can communicate their thoughts with clarity and structure.

• Literacy strengths: vivid imaginations, strong memories, advanced vocabularies, and they love to read and/or write.
• Maths and logic strengths: they can solve puzzles and word problems, can count, sort, and organize, can do math in their heads, and enjoy disassembling and reassembling objects.
• Other strengths include music, art, sport, love of nature….

Have a discussion with your child about what went well for them each day and why. Did they use any of their own strengths to assist them achieve success?

Semester 1 Report Cards

These will be uploaded to the Parent Portal in the last week of term. Please check that you have access to the Parent Portal to view your child’s report card. If you are unsure of how to access the Parent Portal, please see the instructions in the Curriculum matters section of the newsletter or the ladies in the office. A reminder to parents that if school fee payments are not up to date or a payment plan in place, report cards will be withheld until this matter is discussed with the principal or finance officer.

With Semester 1 reports being finalised over the coming weeks, students will naturally be completing several assessments, allowing the teachers to communicate with parents where each child is up to on their learning journey. Please notice that I have referred to the reports as a point in time assessment and not ‘a final destination’. Contemporary research on brain plasticity has moved educators away from viewing assessments and grades as a type of quantification of inherent intelligence and more towards viewing reports and assessments as informing the ‘Where to next?’ conversations. With the only summative (final) report of a child’s learning being the one that the child exits school with, it is important that parents and their children utilise the feedback within the formative (ongoing) reports to better understand how learning can be improved for their child. As the reports will be available in the first week of Semester 2 holiday period, I encourage parents to sit with their children to discuss their reports, with an optimistic eye towards improvement.

As evidenced by the research I have previously shared with you, attendance at school has the greatest impact upon a child’s ability to learn and therefore succeed in life. Student attendance is related directly to academic success, which in turn is related to employment opportunities, income, health and a myriad of other quality of life indicators. 

I do understand that there are many valid and not so valid reasons behind student non-attendance and my aim is to reduce student absenteeism to the bare minimum, thus driving up the opportunities for each child to learn and succeed. In an effort to lift our overall attendance,

World Turtle Day was held on Thursday 23rd of May, where people appreciate and support the beautiful turtles that are struggling off our coast.

Over 100 million marine animals, which includes turtles, die each year from plastic, which is a huge issue for us and our environment. Due to this we have put together some challenges for all of us to participate in to help save our environment.

Parent Challenge: Parents can make their child's lunches as plastic free as possible by using reusable Tupperware and avoid using plastic wraps and zip lock bags around food.

Student Challenge: For students, they have a challenge to put all of their rubbish in the bins and if they see any around the school, to pick it up and put it in the closest allocated bin.

Although these may be seen as little tasks, if we can work as a school community, we can take action against pollution, we can keep our beautiful reefs and their inhabitants safe. All great challenges start with small steps, and this is our start to make our school an improved plastic free zone by the end of the year. So please get involved with our mission and keep our reef safe and healthy for generations to come.

God bless

Mrs Megan Pearce