Friday’s Athletics Carnival was a real highlight as far as community spirit in our school goes. It was absolutely sensational seeing so many parents, families and friends come along to enjoy the day. We were very proud of the students for having a go and participating to the best of their ability and I was particularly pleased with how they encouraged and supported each other. We have much to grow with our Athletics carnivals in the future but this one was a great start. Many thanks to Nick Christie and Stevie-Lee Rowe for their organisation of the event, to our P&F for the sausage sizzle and coffee van and also to parents who helped with set up and pack up on the day. Many hands certainly made light work.

Next week we are looking forward to promoting Book Week with Mrs Whalley planning lots of creative ways to celebrate the joy of reading in the library along with our Book Week Parade on Thursday afternoon at 2.00pm. Students are welcome to wear costumes to school for the day so long as they can function- ie. sunsafe, easy to move around in etc. and/or parents are welcome to come in before the 2.00pm parade to assist with costumes if need be. This is a fun opportunity to acknowledge a favourite book or favourite character though we are perfectly fine with costumes this year that are not purely book related if that is easier. There are no prizes for best costume (just a prize drawn out of a raffle for each class) so please don’t put yourselves under any pressure. We also have another author, Matt Zurbo, visiting on Wednesday, this time for our students from Years 3-6.  

We were very happy to open up our oval, cubby house, boat, swing sets and new sandpit play spaces this week with much excitement from the students. We do have some shade sails to come for the swing sets and cubby house area and we are in talks for more landscaping in the Early Years Precinct especially in terms of working with more sensory options that we know expand their gross motor development and promote creative play. Over the next few weeks however our landscapers will be working on improving some of our unbuilt areas like around the ovals and between the classroom blocks and the oval. The mound behind the oval will be turfed and we will see a number of trees and shrubs going in across the school. By the end of this term, we should see the result of some real progress.

Finally, I have found some articles from Michael Grose’s Parenting Ideas that may help you with a few things that have come up recently. The first article discusses how to approach things when something has gone wrong at school and the second article may help with getting some conversations started at home.

I hope you all have a fabulous week.

Cheers

Penny