Welcome back to a new and exciting term, hopefully as things in our world continue to get back to normal (for how long though, we don’t know :)). It has been wonderful to see all our students return refreshed and rested after the break, though the chill may have made everyone a little more subdued than normal. 

This week we have been able to return to our morning gatherings in the hall for morning messages and our school prayer before heading off to class and today we have been able to celebrate our St Benedict’s Feast Day. While these things help us to feel more like we are getting back to normal at school, we do miss our parent participation which does need to be the case for a bit longer unfortunately. Continued thanks to our parent community for all your support with maintaining the restrictions we have in place regarding limited numbers of adults on school grounds. I appreciate how challenging this is, but we try to be as flexible as possible without putting our community at risk. 

This term we have welcomed Miss Shannon O’Dwyer to our Year 3 / 4 Emus class and Mrs Kristy Atkins to our Year 1 Wallabies class. We have enjoyed their participation in our school community already as they have settled in quite well.

Next week we celebrate Under 8’s Day with an activity filled morning where we enjoy all things ‘early years learning’. Normally this is  a great community morning where we have all our own Under 8’s students and the Kindy kids and our new Preps for the following year, along with a multitude of parents but we continue to be limited by COVID-19 restrictions. This year we will only have our school Under 8 students and the Kindergarten students. Parents and our Prep students for 2021 will be unable to come (unless they are Kindy kids of course). We will ensure we take lots of photos for parents to enjoy.

Please continue to make safe health choices over the coming weeks. Have a fabulous week. 

Cheers

Penny Collins

Principal

Welcome back to Term 3!  I trust everyone has had a restful break and our students certainly have appeared to have enjoyed their break!

We were straight back into it this week, with our big Feast Day celebration taking up most of Friday.  We started with a whole school liturgy where we looked at how St Benedict valued a balanced life of prayer, work and helping others - and looked and how we might live that in our everyday lives.

The middle session saw students undergoing activities about the life of St Benedict and our school values.  Some of these things included the story of St Benedict’s first miracle, fixing the broken sieve; contemplative activities which involved creating natural mandals from foraged materials and reading a book called ‘Frankie the Still Fox’; and our school value of Stewardship with the creation of a bottle cap mural.  

Our students, and I’m sure some parents, are looking forward to Benny’s Got Talent this afternoon.  Fingers crossed that technology is on our side and the live stream works smoothly.

Have a great week and God bless,

Nick 

Year 5 Turtles

In Term 3, Year 5 are exploring animal and plant adaptations in Science. Students kicked off their Science unit by comparing the structural features of some different animals and plants. They used venn diagrams to list visible features and gave reason as to why they think those features would help that organism to survive. We are looking forward to exploring some of the plants and animal species we have here in our Saint Benedict’s Bush Tucker Trail.