Dear Parents and Carers,

HOPE and the Purpose of Catholic schools and Catholic Education

On Wednesday Evening the St Patrick’s staff participated in faith formation twilight professional learning with Prof Br David Hall. The theme of the evening was on HOPE. This reflection was most powerful and speaks to the heart of the Catholic school and our teachers:

Supporting students to be St Pat’s Kids.

It is important to recognise and acknowledge the many students (usually 95% of the population) who are showing us daily that they know and can follow our three school rules:

Thank you to the many students who not only follow the rules but who lead the rules by their exemplary behaviours for learning and engaging in the life of their classroom and our school.

This week the Leadership Team and I have invested time in speaking with both CE staff and external experts regarding school wide positive behaviour and strategies to engage all students in learning. At St Pat’s there continue to be 5% of students each day who are not showing behaviours for learning and are not fully following the school rules. We know that the function of children’s behaviour is often to communicate their unmet needs. One way to understand behaviour is to look at what the child is trying to access or avoid: adult attention, peer attention, tangibles.

Sometimes students with unmet needs experience very heightened emotions, they may use a physical action when they are angry/upset, they may use aggressive language, they may withdraw. Of course there are many other ways children behave to communicate their needs are not being met.

Today we have a CE team working with staff on supporting students with a variety of learning and engagement needs. Next Monday we have other team members coming to school to focus on strategies to help all students engage in class and community, and most importantly fully participate in learning.

The Leadership Team are considering the next steps to support all students to engage fully including: visits from other experts, coaching, and further defining and clarifying the boundaries for these students. You can expect to hear more about this in coming weeks with a plan being shaped for 2021.

We continue to support students to make strong choices at school and we are looking forward to the opportunity to recognise positive behaviour for learning at our Tathra days in Week 6 of term.

School Concert DVD

We hope your family was able to find a DVD player and enjoy the school concert. If you wanted to send in a message of thanks to Ross Mannell who gifts his time and talent every year to create this memory please email or send a note – we will pass them on to Ross.

Blessings,

Jo

Students set regular goals, however the language used in the classroom is success criteria.

In the planning process, teachers think critically about the intention of the lesson/s to come. This enables them to create a success criterion, the success criteria caters for all learners and increases in knowledge skill and application over time.

Teachers use success criteria in various ways but always to enable students to know what it is they are learning and what their next steps will be. Most recently all staff attended a Professional Learning experience facilitated by James Nottingham. James promotes the use of learning intentions and success criteria in the classroom as a tool for students to become more independent problem solvers. As well success criteria provide teachers with very clear next steps for the students, enabling feedback on student work to be more focussed on the knowledge, skill or application that is being currently the focus.

I wonder if this thinking could apply to family life, what about this learning intention

To demonstrate the ability to get ready and be on time.

Wellbeing is connected with how we accept ourselves in the NOW.   Whatever we are feeling will ultimately affect the way we see our world.   If we are happy then life is amazing and we are energetic conversely if we are sad life is drab and our energy is stagnant.  How we move through our feelings is the key to our happiness.   All feelings are neither “good” nor “bad”.  Feelings are our human bodies way of warning, releasing and responding to stimulus from our world.  Our job is, over a lifetime of practise, to manage how to express our feelings in an appropriate way so as to be true to ourselves. This term 4 our focus is on Friendship and in my role as Wellbeing Coach at St Pats I have been facilitating workshops unpacking the idea that friendship is not about the other person but about our own self esteem and tapping into our strengths.  Questions like; 

Challenge students at St Pats to seek out those students who model friendship naturally, ask them the questions above, so as to gain insight into what friendship looks and feels like.  More insights coming soon.

The students in the Empowered Program are well underway on their journey of self-understanding.  For the first two week the students were invited to LISTEN…..listen to what others said to them, Listen to their own self talk and listen to their heart.  As we were discussing how the mind tries to trick us but that the heart never lies, Zoe a student from Grade 1/2 R put up her hand and shared her insight:

 A mindfulness challenge is given at the end of each session and under the listening theme all students were invite to say the following words before they go to sleep and the first thing they do in the morning:

This week the theme was FEEL. Having two Empowered sessions this week the students explored energy vibrations.  The students listened to the vibration of a singing bowl and pointed to where on their body they felt the vibration.  They were also given thermal photographs of 14 different emotions and were asked to make conclusions about the colours predominantly showing on the upper part of the body.  The most fascinating emotion that multiple students observed was the blue colour of the emotion depression whereas love was yellow and red. On a worksheet with the outline of a body the students were invited to place five different colours representing five different emotions inside the outlined body.  The mindfulness practise was to;

These challenges are given to build up your child’s resilience and power throughout the Empowered Program.  For true power comes from within and we are the only person who can give ourselves this internal strength.

The clubs began this week and were well attended.  The clubs on offer for the next three weeks are; Disney Club, Fun and Fitness Club, Handwriting Club, Basketball Comp, Nature Drawing club and Arts and Craft Club. 

  

    

School Fees

Thank you to the families who have finalised their Term 4 School fees, a reminder 2020 School Fees are due 20 November 2020, except those with direct debit arrangements.

Drink Bottles                                                  

It is imperative that your child brings a drink bottle to school each day. Due to recent Covid-19 restrictions there are no bubblers available and the students must provide their own drink bottle.

School Uniforms – Hats

Could you please ensure that your child brings their hat to school, as they are required to wear a hat to play outside. Hats can be purchased on Qkr!                        

Berry Interschool Equestrian Championships – 19^th, 20^th, 21^st December 2020.

Open to riders from K-12. 

Entries are now open till Wednesday 2^nd December. 

Enter via Nominate.

Venue: Berry Equestrian Centre.

If you are interested please contact Team Leader Heidi Jessop on 0423 864 948.

Thank you to all those families who have donated second hand uniforms to the uniform shop so far this year. Our second hand cupboard is nearly empty and we need more items to offer to our new Kindy families. Please consider donating as all proceeds go back into the school community.  Donated items need to be:

• Current logo,
• School uniform brands ( LWR or Midford),
• Cleaned,
• undamaged and unstained.

Second hand items can be forwarded to the front office.

Please click here to view the new uniform price list.