St Benedict's Catholic School Shaw eNewsletter

This semester we have been working towards ways to acknowledge and celebrate student success while maintaining our Benedictine values. Benedictine tradition suggests that we should learn to appreciate the dignity of hard work and develop a sense of pride and intrinsic value in knowing we have done our best because it is the right thing to do; not necessarily for the reward of doing so. Knowing we have done our best and having respect for the dignity of hard work should be reward enough.

At St Benedict’s we have made deliberate choices round a number of things we do and don’t want to do like not having the generalised ‘Student of the Week’ award that many schools do at Assembly time. Our Foundation Committee (staff and parents) felt that these awards became more of a case of ‘who’s turn is it for the award this week?’ as opposed to something that students actually strived for or were motivated by in any way. We don’t hand every child a Participation ribbon at Athletics or Swimming carnivals as there is a time for competition and there is a time where participation or engagement as we prefer to call it, is the goal.

Therefore as a school we are developing other ways to acknowledge good behaviour and student success in other ways including our Peace stickers, Green Slips and showcasing positive student engagement through a variety of channels including Assembly class showcases, Facebook posts and newsletter articles. We are well aware that these approaches are still developing and are not as consistent as we’d like but would love to hear your feedback. Please feel free to email me directly if you have anything you’d like to share - either how well you think this approach is developing and the value you see for our kids to not only be motivated by rewards or to share your concerns about how this is developing. Communicating with parents about student behaviour and school success is an important element to what we are building and your sense of how this is going is important for us in determining our future focus.

Best wishes to our students who participated in Reader’s Cup this week and to Mrs Whalley and Miss Durnford for supporting their preparation over the last few weeks. It is fabulous to see our students having a go at these competitions.

Have a fabulous weekend. I am away with the leadership team for a Professional development opportunity for a couple of days next week but will be back by Wednesday. Miss Smit and Mrs King will be in charge for those couple of days.

See you all next week.

Cheers

Penny Collins

Welcome to the end of another week. We started this morning with the Year 2 Curlews leading us on assembly celebrating the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. They reminded us that God’s love is for each of us. They reflected how this love is constant, can fill us with peace and faith, helps us to be just, compassionate, generous, honest and kind, and finally, reminded us all that we are called to love others and treat them with dignity and respect.

The assembly was also filled with beautiful singing and dancing, the Curlews should all be very proud of the way they presented themselves to our school community.

200 Years of Catholic Education

Thanks to those who have already bought in items for a display for 200 Years of Catholic Education. I plan on putting some of these items up next week, but it’s not too late for you to make a contribution with pictures or items of your own Catholic schooling experience as we celebrate 200 years of Catholic Education in Australia.

Pax

Nick

P&F News

Another busy week is coming to a close. This week our school community hosted our June P&F meeting. It was wonderful to see some new and familiar faces present. There was some great discussion and feedback provided. There is excitement building for the Athletics carnival on the last day of term, with preparations underway for a Sausage Sizzle. More information will come out about this next week so keep an eye out. A link to the meeting minutes has been uploaded to our parent page and can also be accessed via this link (here). The next meeting is Tuesday 13th July and all are welcome.

School Holidays

With the end of term coming up fast, planning what to do in the school holidays is a great idea. There are several activities put on by the City Council that are low-cost and no-cost options. You can check out the link here.

Screen Time - Is it really downtime?

In today’s busy world, technology is all around us. We find that kids in particular are drawn to screen-based technology and often see this as a form of downtime. Whilst it is true that many kids can focus for lengthy periods of time on screens, the mental stimulation and processing required by the brain means it's not true down time. There can be huge benefits to turning off and getting outside. This blog (link) outlines some of the benefits of getting outside to play and gives some ideas on how to support this at home.

In Year 2 Kingfishers we have been exploring money! We have been participating in many hands on learning tasks to learn about the value of coins and notes and how to count different amounts of money. We have also discovered there is more than one way to make an amount of money. For example we can make $1.00 using a two 50c pieces or five 20c pieces!