Dear Families,
Welcome back everyone and I hope the past week has brought you much to enjoy and feel grateful for.
As we approach the middle of Term One here at school, teachers are now in 'full swing' in classrooms. Year level expectations have been established, relationships are being nurtured, cooperative learning strategies employed, rich learning tasks offered, timely assessments and formative feedback being given and much, much more. Teachers are discovering more about your child's learning needs and adjusting their teaching and learning accordingly.
At home, we hope you are supporting your child to engage with their Purposeful Practise Grids by adopting a calm approach, a good space for them to work in and ensuring some healthy snacks are close by!
Parent Teacher meetings over the phone are being offered in Weeks 7 and 8 of term. Please read the letter below for more information about booking a time with your teacher.
Covid Updates
Please make sure that you read the information below under COVID Updates.
The Department of Health (WA Health) has provided schools with the attached document setting out a series of FAQs for all parents and caregivers. The document outlines important information regarding children who have been or may be identified as a close contact of a person who has been identified as a positive COVID-19 case.
Mask Wearing Years 3-6
As you will have read or heard on the news, many primary schools in Perth have already been affected by positive COVID cases in their communities over the past few weeks. Individual students and a number of classes have been sent into quarantine after being exposed to a COVID positive classmate in their classroom.
While we fully appreciate that children having to wear masks is not an ideal situation, the wearing of a mask appears to be very important, not only to prevent infection (to classmates and the teacher) but also to ensure that our children have the best chance of continuing face-to-face learning if someone in their classroom should test positive for COVID-19.
When all children in a classroom are wearing masks correctly, and when exposed to a positive case, they are less likely to be classified as a close contact, removing the potential need to isolate and allowing them to stay at school and continue face-to-face learning.
Catholic Education WA are working closely with the State Government's Health Mandate. At this stage, students in Year 3 and above will only be required to wear masks if the government deems a high caseload has been reached.
Parents are asked to buy child-sized masks that fit appropriately and to please try hard to help support children to take this likely development 'in their stride'. In other words, rather than catastrophise or dwell on the negatives of mask wearing, please set your child up with simple and positive messages that help them to maintain perspective, accept that there are good reasons for mask wearing, that this is a temporary situation and to understand that things are never as bad as they first seem!
Students have been seeing staff (and parents) wearing masks now for some time. The way that we react to a mask wearing mandate will influence how children manage. Thank you for modelling a calm and positive approach.
Thank you
Many thanks to our P&F and Advisory Council teams who both met online via TEAMS on Wednesday. While not an easy way of communicating, it was wonderful to see some friendly faces and to share our journey so far. The P&F will be communicating with families shortly about ideas for helping to give the children some special things to look forward to in the term ahead.
Congratulations and thank you to Jain Chow, who has taken on the P&F President's role for 2022, to Pamela Lawrence who has taken on the position of Treasurer, and to Leanne Wallis for continuing on in her role as Secretary of the P&F.
Congratulations and thank you also to Craig Bishop, who has taken on the School Advisory Council's Chairperson's role, to Stephanie Malelo, who will now be the Council Secretary, and to Melinda Curran, who has been co-opted onto the School Advisory Council.
Thank you to all families for your support, encouragement, cooperation and communication - we really miss interacting with you all in person, however hopefully, with good community support, things will return to a semblance of normality soon enough.
The Beginning of Lent
As we move into Week 5, we also move into the Season of Lent. Ash Wednesday begins the Christian celebration of Lent - forty days of prayer, fasting and giving to prepare us for the celebration of Easter.
An important aspect of Lent is the call to quieten down the busyness of our lives and to make time for reflection and contemplation. It is a great time to reassess where we are placing our time and energies; to consider what we are doing to improve the quality of our relationships; to reflect on how we are nurturing our prayer life.
Lent challenges us to avoid striving for external markers of success and fulfilment and instead to listen to what the still, small voice of God is saying to us in our hearts.
Lent calls us to our inner room - to an extra moment of quiet, amidst the ordinariness and noise of our daily lives. We are called to journey back home to the God who loves us and is always ready to help and guide us.
All the best for a great weekend everyone!
Kindest regards
Tania Thuijs
Principal
