What an eventful week this has been with Shrove Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, our Adopt-a-Cowboy visit and the Mad Food Scientist. The wet weather has been a continued blessing for the environment, not necessarily for stir-crazy children and teachers. Let’s hope everyone can burn off some energy over the weekend or have some relaxation time; maybe both. 

Thank you to our P&F for getting a working bee together to make all the pancakes for Shrove Tuesday and for coordinating our seniors to do the deliveries. Our seniors did a fantastic job and it is always great to see them take on the responsibilities of being the student leaders of our school. Big thanks to Mr Christie as always for preparing our prayer service for Ash Wednesday. As we are now in the season of Lent, we look forward to seeing how our community can make choices to be the best that they can whether that is through being prayerful, being more helpful to our friends and family or making a sacrifice of some kind. We certainly advocate for financial donations to Project Compassion during Lent to support communities that are in need .

Mad Food Scientist

From most reports many of our children thoroughly enjoyed the session with Kirsty as our Mad Food scientist and most students loved taste testing a few smoothies. For  more information please see this link.- https://therootcause.com.au/mad-food-science-bonus/

Early Years Testing

As you may have been aware we have had a number of teachers out doing one-to-one Early Years testing over the last couple of weeks. This is a diocesan assessment that has been developed by diocesan Speech Language Pathologists and a Numeracy Specialist Teacher. These assessments assist in giving us a baseline of information around where each child is academically in Literacy and Numeracy and supports the planning for our learning and teaching approaches. Along with the professional development that teachers are expected to do for students with disabilities at the beginning of each year and the planning time they need each term, it means that our teachers are out of the classroom for a considerable amount of time during the first term. This can be quite frustrating at a time when we are trying to settle new class groups and I do commend many of our students who have been able to manage this well. Please note that we do do our best to ensure consistency as much as possible and as always I am happy to review how we approach these changes so that we can maintain a positive and productive learning environment as possible. There is always room for improvement and I am happy to reflect on slight adjustments we could make going forward.

School Board

Our School Board had their first meeting for the year on Monday night and we have set some priorities for the year around developing our Community Engagement Framework and developing a number of policies. Please feel free to email our school about any questions you may have for the school Board or with any suggestions you may have for Policy Development. We have our Board Formation Day tomorrow where we meet with all other Schools Board members from our Townsville Diocese. The Formation Day is led by the Bishop and generally outlines some diocesan priorities for our schools as well. I look forward to sharing this with you next week.

Have a fabulous week ahead. I’m off to see Elton John on Saturday night and I can’t wait.

Cheers

Penny