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

APRE NEWS

This week has been a very busy week in the life of the Catholic Church.  Tuesday was Shrove Tuesday, colloquially known as pancake day. This is the day before Lent starts and came about with the custom of using up all of the fattening ingredients people had in their house before Lent.   A very big thank you to our P&F who cooked and delivered pancakes to all classes to help to celebrate this event.

Wednesday was Ash Wednesday which marks the first day of Lent.  We marked this occasion with a short liturgy where children received ashes on their foreheads.  Lent is often a time where people strive to ‘give up’ something, for children this is often lollies or chocolate.  We have encouraged our students to also use this time as a time to reflect on what they do and think about actions they might be able to perform and sacrifices they can make which might improve the lives of others.

Project Compassion

We had our first whole school assembly this week led by the 5/6 Crocodiles.  In their assembly they launched Project Compassion. The theme of this years Project Compassion is ‘Go Further Together’.  

“Spanning through the six weeks of Lent each year, Project Compassion is an extraordinary, ongoing demonstration of the faith, love and generosity of Caritas Australia’s caring supporters in the name of justice and peace.  Millions of Australians come together in solidarity with the world’s poor to help end poverty, promote justice and uphold dignity.”

On Monday, Project Compassion boxes will go home to students in Prep and Year 1 as well as a small box in each room.  Classes in Year 2 and above will get a large box placed on their classroom prayer table. If students or families would like to make a donation, no matter how big or small, they are encouraged to place this into their classroom boxes, or for younger students, into their take home boxes and bring in to school before the end Term 1.

If you would like to know more information, there are lots of weekly videos about the projects that are funded through Project Compassion at the following link: https://lent.caritas.org.au/page/schools#multimedia 

Have a great week and God bless,

Nick 

PREP OPEN DAY

We invite all potential Prep families to St Benedict’s in 2021 to attend our Prep Open Day on Thursday 19th March from 9:00-10:00am.  We invite you to attend with your child starting Prep in 2021 and have a tour of our school led by our senior teachers.  You will also be encouraged to book your Prep enrollment interview for 2021 at this time. If you are unable to attend this day, our Principal will be running tours on the following times:

Monday 23rd & 30th March, 9:00-10:00am AND 

Thursday 25 March and 2nd April, 4:30-5:30pm.