Covid-19 updates

Please note that we continue to have staff and students testing positive to Covid-19 who are then isolating for the required time. We currently have about 50 students across the school who have Covid-19 or are isolating because they are a close family contact of someone else who has Covid-19. Please continue to monitor symptoms within your own family and keep children home if they have symptoms. We are finding many children are starting with headaches and/ or some sore stomachs before actually getting the flu-like symptoms we expect with Covid. We all want to get through this wave of the pandemic as safely as possible. Children from Year 3 -6 are encouraged to wear masks and all adults on site at school should be wearing masks too.

Pedestrian Crossings

Please use the pedestrian crossings yourself when walking around the carpark as we are all role models for our children who are still learning the road rules. If a young child sees you walking across the carpark, the temptation for them to run to you is very high. If you are on a crossing this increases their safety if they do take off. Please avoid calling children across the car parking areas.

Run Club

It has been so great seeing how many new students, especially our Preppies, are joining in each morning for Run Club. It has been a great way for students to burn off any excess energy they have at the beginning of the day and to build their confidence. Many children are making new friends simply by forming walking or running groups. A few parents have been roped in too. While we won't be having assemblies this term, our teachers are tallying up all these laps and we will present prizes for this next term.

Class Newsletters

I hope you are all enjoying your class newsletters from your teachers. They are an excellent source of information for the coming fortnight, giving you information about different events coming up but also detailing some of the learning happening across the fortnight. There are often suggestions for how you can engage your children in discussions about the learning that is happening at school and these can be highly valuable in making connections between school and home.

Have a fabulous weekend.

Cheers

Penny

Welcome to the end of Week 2/4.  It’s great to see our students starting to get into the year, with specialist lessons starting this week, and routines starting to get more familiar with everyone.

St Benny’s Way of Peace

You may have noticed your child come home with a ‘Peace’ sticker and wondered...what is this all about?  

At St Benedict’s, we are employing a ‘way of being’ which enables us to be the best members of our community that we can.  This way of being is a ‘Way of Peace’ - Peace being an acronym for Persistent, Empathetic, Accountable, Care for Community, Engaged

This has been taken, not simply because we like the idea of being peaceful, but because PEACE formed the basis of the teachings of St Benedict.  The Benedictine motto is quite simply the word ‘PAX’ - which in latin means peace.

The idea behind this ‘Way of Peace’ is to give a language around how we speak to students around behaviour (positive and negative) in ensuring we are being Persistence, Empathetic, Accountable, Care for Community and Engaged.  It would be expected that EVERY class discusses PEACE and what this looks like for them in their context in the classroom, playground and other areas of the school.  

Instrumental Program

We’ve had a record number of students sign up to participate in the Instrumental Music Program this year (38!).  Students have been attending guitar, keyboard or drum lessons with Mr Nic Mitchell or Mr David Roberts.  It’s been great to hear some of these lessons and I know many of our budding musicians have been very excited!  There’s some plans starting to try and have some of our students showcase what they have been learning later in the year!

Pax,

Nick

Student Protection

Student Protection is an area that we at St Benedict's and Townsville Catholic Education take seriously.  Did you know that every employee undertakes mandatory training in this area?  School staff are Mandatory Reporters - This means that by law, we are obligated to notify Child Safety should we have concerns for student safety.

Throughout the school year, we have a range of activities that we undertake that are focussed on this area including National Day of Action against Bullying, Daniel Morcombe Day and Child Protection week.  We also have a nominated Safe Person in our school - Miss Curley - who undertakes additional training to support our school staff, alongside our Leadership team in this area.  Every classroom has a Student Protection poster in their room, with Classroom teachers, Miss Curley and Mrs Collins identified as safe people to talk to if a student has a concern.

Sometimes as parents we are just looking for some support or resources to assist us in the parenting journey.  Our school website has a great link to School.TV that has some great resources and articles that are really informative and helpful.  Why not check it out at the link here.  Student Protection is everyone’s business and should you ever have a concern for your own student’s or anothers safety, please chat with your class teacher or see a member of the Leadership team.  Together we can keep our students safe for a brighter future.

P&F News

Please save the date for our 

P&F AGM on Tuesday 8th March at 7pm.  

This will be in our new board room attached to the Library.  At this meeting we plan to welcome new community members and existing alike.  Our P&F will be taking a new direction this year in terms of its community focus and organisational structure with the new Parent Coordinator Roles and School Coordinator Role to be outlined.  More details will be outlined at the meeting, however we will be seeking community input on fun and creative ways to engage our parent community in the learning and teaching of our students.  We hope to see lots of you there.  

Best wishes - Your P&F Team

The 5/6 Turtles have made a ‘Turtley Awesome’ start to the year.  We have been learning all about our responsibilities and the expectations of being the senior students of the school.  In class we have been reviewing the Benny’s Way of PEACE and linking this to how we are role models at the school for our younger students.  We have also been looking at what a ‘Growth Mindset’ is and have been exploring the power of ‘Yet’ to set some learning and personal goals in order to set our year up for success.  There has been some wonderful learning happening in our classroom as well as in our specialist classes and we are all looking forward to a successful year in 5/6 Turtles.

Please be mindful of other vehicles in car park 

Townsville Dashboards (https://dashboards.townsville.qld.gov.au) provides a digital platform for the community to easily access data and insights about their community and Council service performance.

Access Townsville Dashboards to:

• Explore dashboards, profiles and tools (Community and Economic Profiles, Disaster Management, Planning Services, Townsville Mapping);
• Download and explore a range of Council open datasets (currently 82 datasets published) through our Open Data Portal;
• View Council datasets and information through a series of interactive visualisations (Your Council);
• Open datasets include:
• animal complaints and registrations
• city maintenance activities
• community grants
• building approvals and development applications
• library services
• waste services, including food organics garden organics and kerbside collection
• water dam levels, production and consumption
• Aerial photography and digital elevation model information in also available for download;
• The open datasets provide an opportunity for students to explore local datasets and to utilise these datasets for data-driven decisions and digital solutions.

They would welcome any feedback on Townsville Dashboards, particularly:

• Aspects of Townsville Dashboards you currently utilise and value
• Additional content and datasets that you would find useful