Swimming lessons

After spending the bulk of this week away from school doing a course in Project Management (very intense and heavy stuff to learn), it was lovely to get back to school to see the kids and our staff. From all reports so far, swimming has been a mostly positive experience for all and everyone is generally coping well with the changes in routine. Please continue to support your children with consistent routines and good opportunities for down time and rest as we enter into our second and final week of swimming lessons. 

School Board and P&F

This week we had our final meetings for both the School Board and the P&F. I am so grateful to the parents in our school who can give their time, energy and expertise to these groups. I thoroughly enjoy our meetings and love working with people with different perspectives. Each parent and staff member who assists with the Board and the P&F are fully invested in guiding our school to be the best we can be. This year has certainly held up a number of limitations as far as opportunities for meetings, community gatherings and general community building which remains one of our top priorities moving forward. Please accept my sincerest and heartfelt thanks to those parents who have been able to contribute this year.

Transition

Over the next few weeks, we expect to begin transition processes with a number of our students who need support in moving to their new year level, class teacher and classroom. This process is well coordinated by our Inclusive Education Coordinator, class teachers and parents. This will also include transition for our Kindy kids coming to Prep where they will join us for assemblies and for play a couple of times. Our goal is to ensure our students feel as positive as they can about the new year ahead.

Grounds update

This week we have planted 12 more well established trees that will grow and provide beautiful shade in the years to come. Our windmill will have some more work done on it and around it next week with a cattle trough and a fence being added in. Please don’t get excited, we are not getting any poddy calves! I have already been told our windmill is serving the community, helping the local fisherman know whether to go out on the boat or not :)

We have shade sails coming for the see-saws and for the adventure playground. We are also replacing the swings near the kindy and duplicating the swings we add there up near the windmill for the Year 2’s.

Our Defence Memorial is underway with the steel sculptures being erected, now for some gardening with rosemary for remembrance and dandelions, the official flower for defence children. Mr Dellaway who did the sculptures is also creating some metal poppies to complete the memorial.

Our Indigenous garden should also be complete before the end of term with some  sculptures representing the Wulgurukaba people totems and some artistic pieces representing the country where our own indigenous children come from. We are very pleased to be including an Acknowledgement to Country written by one of our past Year 6 students.

O’Holy Night

Mr Christie has done lots of planning for our O’Holy night on Wednesday 2 December. We are hosting it on the low oval with lots of technology support. Hopefully the weather will be good and an outdoor event will be lovely. We are going to arrange some lighting up behind our Yellow Block so we can have some onsite parking in the dirt area to help alleviate congestion. The P&F will have candles for sale on the night but we encourage everyone to bring their own picnic style dinner, chairs and/or blanket to sit on.

Before O’Holy night though we do have our Swimming Carnival to look forward to which while we can’t have everyone is at least a start to getting back to normal.

Thank you to Sergeant Danial Trew for speaking with our students at assembly today regarding Remembrance Day. It was a wonderful reminder of how lucky we are to live in a safe country.

Best wishes for a fabulous week ahead.

Cheers

Penny Collins

Principal

Welcome to the end of Week 6!

It’s been a big week this week.  On top of swimming lessons, we’ve also paused for Remembrance Day and celebrated NAIDOC week.  More about these below.  

We finished the week with Year 3/4 presenting assembly with a liturgy on Remembrance Day, where we paused to pray and reflect on the sacrifice made for us by both past and current men and women in the Defence Force.  It was wonderful to welcome Sergeant Daniel Trew, a parent from St Benedict’s, who presented a reflection from the point of view of a serving member.  These reflections are always delivered poignantly and received so well from our students.  On Remembrance Day itself, all classes gathered outside their classrooms to hear ‘the Ode’, ‘the Last Post’ and observe a minute silence (this was played over the school Public Address system). 

We also celebrated NAIDOC week this week, with the theme being; “Always was.  Always will be”.  All of our classes stopped to celebrate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture within their classes.  It was great to see some of the wonderful work students were doing, and how well they were engaging in these tasks.  I particularly enjoyed when I stopped to talk to one of the Prep children during their activity, they stopped and relived the dreamtime story of how the birds got their colours in wonderful detail!  

As you are no doubt aware, students will be attending our annual Swimming Carnival on Friday November 20.  A schedule of races will be sent out at the start of next week to enable families to arrange appropriate times to attend the event.  Also, the P&F will be doing a sausage sizzle for students at the event, with pre-order forms being sent out during the week.  

I think it’s fair to say that the countdown to the end of the year is now on!  I encourage us all to continue to support our students and each other, as it’s certainly been a busy year.  It is also exciting though that we still have so much to look forward to until the year is out!

Pax

Nick

St Benedicts supporting National Recycling Week

The theme for this years’ Planet Ark National Recycling week is ‘Recovery - A future beyond the Bin’.  This has been a part of our activities this week at school. Our students have enjoyed a visit from the Townsville CIty Council Waste and Water Educator Ashlee to talk all things recycling. Our ¾ Emu’s have also shared an informative presentation at Assembly, sharing insights from a recent school waste audit to inspire their peers toward making a more conscious effort to ensure all of our waste sorting options are used correctly. 

As you may already know, here at St Benedicts we sort our waste in the following categories:

• Purple Bins - General Waste

• Yellow lids - Comingled recycling such as paper, cardboard, tin, recyclable plastics

• Blue Bins - Containers for Change collections 

• Scrap BIns - Food waste from students as well as the staffroom and tuckshop

• Soft Plastics - Collected in staffroom from tuckshop, administration and staffroom. 

• St VInnies collection in our recycling centre in the carpark. 

• Battery World Collection in the office. 

• Plastic Bottle lids

• Bread Tags for Wheelchairs

• Metal Lids and ring pulls 

All of these efforts are to help reduce our unnecessary contribution to landfil and raise awareness within our community of our environmental footprint.

If you would like to support our efforts at the school and help your children to understand how they can contribute to our rubbish and its ‘future beyond the bin’ it would  be wonderful if students engaged in their families’ recycling at home.    

One of our greatest challenges here at school is contamination of waste streams, with scraps put into recycling bins for example, or containers not being rinsed before recycling. 

We would love it if you help us! By simply encouraging your children to rinse containers at home before placing in your home recycling bin, it will instill understanding and will help them learn by familiarity and repetition. What is good for your bins, is good for ours too!.

We learn about recycling all year and do our best to support a sense of stewardship and personal responsibility and contribution in students of all year levels.  Even our youngest students can get involved . 

Feel free to share your recycling tips and pics with our school community via the parents facebook community too!, we would love to see what you are up to.

We hope that National Recycling Week will help to inspire our community to consciously Recycle, Repurpose and Reuse, especially with the silly spending season right around the corner. 

Happy Recycling!!

Limited Stock - Some things may not be available for Wednesday and Thursday.

CLOSED LAST DAY OF SCHOOL FRIDAY 4 DECEMBER

PLEASE ENSURE YOUR CHILD/CHILDREN HAVE A MORNING TEA FOR THE FINAL DAY OF TERM.  SCHOOL FINISHES AT 12PM - 4 DECEMBER 2020