Well thank goodness for Friday as the saying goes! Today has been a delightful end to a very busy tricky week. It has been lovely to see our students relaxing into the end of the week, making so many great choices and really celebrating their contributions to our community. We have had quite the influx of students visiting the office today showing us some the great work they are doing in class, some showing us buckets of rubbish they have collected and are showing us how they care for our community by picking it up but also highlighting how much we all need to improve in putting it in the bin in the first place. We have also seen students receiving PEACE stickers for their engagement in learning and for showing respect to each other. Let’s keep this up!

Hats Blitz

You may have noticed or heard that we have been having a blitz on our expectations with wearing hats and being accountable for them. We have raised the expectation that all students and staff are wearing hats whenever they are outside of the classroom and if they are not wearing them, they are in their school bags; the only exception being when they are in the hall for morning parade or Friday Assembly. We have been reminding students of the importance of sun safety as the first priority and even when it is windy (like today) or not as hot (like yesterday), that the sun can still cause terrible damage to our skin. The bonus of the hat blitz is that we are seeing our lost property box decreasing in the quantity of missing hats.

Water Bottles

While we will keep up the blitz on hats for the rest of the term, we do have a high number of water bottles in lost property, many with no names on them. We have started reminding children of the value of water bottles as research shows they will always drink more when using a bottle than just straight from a bubbler.  The humidity at this time of year is challenging and keeping hydrated is essential.

Love of Reading

One of the areas we discussed at our leadership meeting last week was how important reading is and how much we want all of our students and families to love reading. Reading builds our vocabulary, builds our thinking skills and contributes to all areas of learning. When reading,  we can go on great adventures with different characters and we can learn so much about other people, things and places. Next year, we will be working together to nurture and build a love of reading for everyone in our community. We are thinking about quite a number of initiatives to foster this love of reading and we hope that you can all get involved with this too. We will be looking for parent or grandparent volunteers to read with children in our library or the hall before school starts and we will be talking about a lot of the books we love and even some of the ones we haven’t loved. We will celebrate the number of nights that children read at home with special prizes like we do with Run Club to help get us all reading. I will share more of our plans for 2023 each week until the end of the year. We have lots to look forward to.

Please have a lovely weekend.

Cheers

Penny

Please be reminded that children are not supervised at school before 8.00am unless they are at OSHC. It is not reasonable or safe to leave children unsupervised at school.