God of hope,

You lead us on life's journey.

Open our minds to know Your voice.

Open our hands to do Your work.

Open our hearts to hold Your Spirit.

Amen.

Welcome to Term 3! I hope everyone had a restful break and that you were able to enjoy some time with your families. I always go into the holidays with big plans of how much I will get done and then time flies by! It was great to see everyone back this morning and to see so many of our students excited to be back. There was some great energy around the school today! There has been a lot happening around St Paul's over the holidays and I've included some updates below.

Please note, there have had to be some minor adjustments to our calendar, so please make sure you check this and note any relevant dates. Some key dates are also at the end of this newsletter.

This year, we have been doing some work in the area of wellbeing and part of that work has been on character strengths. Our staff have been involved in identifying to what degree we individually own each strength and we are now moving into working on identifying strengths with our students. This would be a valuable thing to do at home and I encourage you to explore your own character strengths and to get 'strength spotting' with your child/ren. There's a great survey that you can take to identify your strengths profile that can be found here. The information at this link explains the 24 character strengths which could be useful to help identify and discuss the strengths you see in your child/ren. This gives a great platform to celebrate the traits that make each of us individually feel fulfilled and how we apply our strengths.

Next week, we will have our annual whole school Scapular Mass on Thursday 27 July. As always, this is a great time to get our community together and we encourage our parents to come along and join in with us. The Mass will be at 9:15am.

There's been a lot happening in our ECE playground over the holidays! The old playground has gone and the new one has been installed. They have also poured the concrete bike path, installed the PlayMatta and the cubby is ready to go. They are hoping to have the last things done today, so before you know it, the students will be up there having fun and exploring the new space.

We are incredibly grateful for the grant we received through Patrick Gorman and the generous P&F contribution that made this project possible. It looks amazing!

In the last newsletter, I shared some information about the key messages that were identified to showcase some of the main elements that we think make St Paul's the school of choice. Last time, I included some information about the sense of belonging that we pride ourselves on here at St Paul's. This week, we'd like to highlight the extraordinary extra-curricular opportunities on offer.

EXTRAORDINARY EXTRA-CURRICULAR AND CO-CURRICULAR ACTIVITIES

We are a small school with lots on offer for boys and girls across junior and senior years. From before and after school sport to various clubs, surf school and performing arts, St Paul's has so many social and extra-curricular activities on offer across the year for our students to explore and express their many unique interests and passions.

These, coupled with our amazing co-curricular opportunities that support and complement the classroom curriculum provide rich opportunities for our students. Ranging from sporting clinics and interschool events to the many academic and special interest competitions we participate in ensure extraordinary opportunities for our students.

We often receive feedback about how surprising and impressive it is that a school of our size offers so many opportunities for our students. We are only able to do this because of the generosity and commitment of our dedicated staff. Please make sure you express your appreciation to them whenever you can.

Have a great week!

Regards,

Mr Pete Merry

Principal

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