Hi everyone,

Thank you for all your participation in the various school events we have had this term. As always, school life is very busy but we are ever so grateful for the wonderful community we have here at St Benedict’s.  We are always so excited about how our school is growing and evolving and this term we have had much to be thankful for. We have all particularly loved the finalisation of our Early Years Precinct and seeing the commencement of our Stage 2 Building Project. We will be ever so relieved when the demountable for OSHC finally shows up- fingers crossed, it won’t be too far away.

Report Cards

Congratulations to our teachers for producing another round of report cards to communicate student progress this semester. It can be a daunting task gathering the information collected over the course of a semester and making a professional judgement about student achievement levels. We have mostly been quite proud of how our students have applied themselves and shown us what they can do and what they have learnt and we look forward to seeing how they progress next semester. If you have any questions about your child’s progress, please contact your class teacher.

School Uniforms

With this week’s newsletter, you will see attached a link to our Uniform Guidelines. Please review this and work towards having the school uniform correctly worn by the beginning of next term. School jumpers  and school shoes are the items that need the most improvement. Please also use the holidays to check bags for additional hats,or jumpers that may have been picked up accidentally. The holidays are also a good time to check all school items to see if name tags need to be refreshed as we are seeing a lot of smudged labels and still some items without labels at all.

NAIDOC Celebrations

Thank you to those families who were able to come along to our NAIDOC celebrations this morning. We are blessed in our country to have such a rich and diverse history with very dynamic cultures. Today’s celebration is just a token example of the ways we want to embrace Indigenous culture across our school community. Thanks to our Indigenous Staff Committee for planning today’s event.

P & F Meeting

Please note that P&F meetings are held on the second Tuesday of each month at 7.00pm in our Staffroom. We will be having a meeting on the first Tuesday back though as the second Tuesday of the month falls on the holidays. This next meeting will be about planning for our Term 3 disco and discussing ideas for Parent Information sessions. All parents are welcome to come along.

Term 3 Events

Next term we look forward to our Benny’s Feast Day celebrations were we will have a whole school mass in the morning, activities in the middle session and Benny’ Got Talent in the afternoon. Families are invited for the whole day. We also have 13 students participating in the Townsville Catholic Education Mulkadee Youth Arts Festival in Week 2 and lots of fun in Week 3 for Catholic Education Week.

I hope everyone gets to enjoy some rest over the break (at least a break from school if you don’t get one for yourself) and we look forward to seeing everyone in the new term eager to be back at school again.

Have a fabulous week. 

Cheers 

Penny

And we’ve made it to the end of another busy term at St Benedict’s!  We’ve had many events throughout the term, including Interschool Athletics Carnival, Readers Cup, Quest for Knowledge, excursions and plenty of learning in classrooms!  

After the business of the term, it was great to start the week with Whole School Meditation.  On the whole, the students did a wonderful job of gathering quietly and sitting in silence. Meditation is something which classes practice daily at St Benedict’s and is something which our school and diocese value highly.  Giving students time to sit and ‘be’ affords children to be silent and experience God in the silence. We are looking at holding a morning meditation open to staff, students, parents and the wider community starting sometime in Term 3, you would be very welcome to join us!  Look out for a confirmation of this soon! 

We finished this week with our NAIDOC Celebrations.  Our day started with prayer led beautifully by our Indigenous students.  This was followed by a special performance by the Marian Catholic School Torres Strait Islander Dancers.  This was a real treat for our students who were in awe of the other students performing cultural dances for them.  The morning session finished with our NAIDOC activities scattered throughout our Early Years precinct, which again was a hit for students.  A big thanks for this must go to our staff Indigenous Education Committee and Miss Annette, who helped organise the event!

REPEAT MESSAGE

Save the Dates

With the end of term upon us, I wanted to share again information about our St Benedict’s Feast Day which you may want to attend:

• St Benedict’s Feast Day - Friday July 19 - starting at 9:00am

This year our Feast Day will be held on Friday Term 3, Week 1.  It will begin with a Whole School Mass, celebrated by Fr Dave Lancini, followed by rotational activities for ALL the students and our 2nd Annual ‘St Benny’s Got Talent’ from 1:50pm.  We would love all parents, friends and families to attend the Mass and St Benny’s Got Talent.

St Benedict's Feast Day - Donations

This year for St Benedict’s Feast Day, we have Townsville Multicultural Support Group coming in to speak to our students as special guest presenters.  TMSG is a not for profit organization who welcomes every new refugee to our region and supports newly arrived migrants. Their mission is a commitment to bringing people together of different cultural backgrounds working in the spirit of friendship. 

To further support the work of TMSG, we are asking St Benedict’s families to donate items to be put together to create Personal Care/Hygiene packs for men, women and teenagers, Newborn Baby Packs and Start Up School kits to families new to our region.  Please see the information below for items that you might be able to contribute. All donations can handed in to the school office. 

St Benny’s Got Talent

I was very lucky to get to sit though over 20 acts of students who put their name down for St Benny’s Got Talent.  Unfortunately, not all students were able to perform at our Feast Day, but I would like to congratulate the following students who will be performing for us on Feast Day:

Summer and Mia (Prep P), Theo T (1W), Isabella H and Piper (1E), Tyson (2), Ruby (3), Chloe and Emmalissa (4), Ella J and Ella B (4), Sadie and Kilahni (4), Ebony and Maddie (4), Senior Girls Dance (56), Tyson (56), Haydan (56)

Have a  great holiday and God bless,

Nick