Leading up to St Joseph’s feast day this week, our daily whole school prayer focussed on the teachings of St Joseph. This is the prayer our community prayed together:

Congratulations Ruby

Congratulations to Ruby (Yr 4) for being selected in the Wollongong Touch team to attend the MacKillop selection trials on Friday 28 May, 2021. This is a fabulous effort!

Gardening Club

Year 4 – An UnBEElievable Experience

In Week 6, Year 4 discovered through our ‘Bring Your Bee Game’ experience the importance of working as a team and how each role within that team was not only important but every role relied on the other for the survival of the team. This was then related back to how bees live, their roles in the hive and the importance of cooperation for every bees survival. This lead into Week 7’s topic about what threatens bees and what is being done to protect them. Then Year 4 got into creative mode and used this information to create a poster with a slogan on how great bees are and/or what we can do to help them.

Lunchtime Gardening Club – Why Are There STILL So Many Weeds!

So much rain, so many weeds! Unfortunately over the last fortnight, we have only been able to get into the The Patch one lunchtime out of the two each Thursday due to the rain. However, having the dedicated team that we have, they wanted the inside lunchtime to be all about learning! Our leaders decided they wanted to investigate how to grow different plants and as a team, they agreed on the following – learn about growing cucumbers and chillies as well as how to prepare the garden beds. So thanks to the ABC’s ‘Gardening Australia’ program, we were able to watch mini clips on all these topics – Rod and I were very impressed with the level of enthusiasm shown for learning as well as the resulting discussion around if any of it was doable (you’ll have to stay tuned for that outcome!) However, when we were able to be in The Patch, it was all about Weed Attack and Gardening Club was discovered by lots of extremely excited Kinders! Our team enjoyed showing them what plants to remove and it was fantastic to hear the laughter and delight that our Kinders showed in removing these offensive plants. And of course, Kinders discovered that after a lunchtime of work, the reward is to sample the available produce.

Stay tuned for what we get up to next.

Sue Murray, Coordinator

I thought you might be interested to know the top five presenting issues for Counselling at our school. These are:

Peer Relationships, Emotional Regulation, Family Relationships and breakdowns, Anxiety and Self-Esteem/confidence. 

One of the main ways a School Counsellor addresses peer relationship issues and emotion regulation, is to teach children how to understand their emotions and to learn not to react to their feelings.

When there is an event that triggers anger, there is usually another emotion holding that anger up.  It may be frustration, embarrassment, sadness, a feeling of unfairness, or any number of things.  When we feel the anger, we are not necessarily aware of the underlying emotion, and what the anger does is cause us to react in the following pattern:

Trigger = Anger

REACT (yell, fight, etc.)

RETREAT (after we react, we generally either retreat into ourselves or walk away angry, etc.)

RETHINK (after we retreat, we generally rethink what just happened and regret how we reacted).

What we have to try to do is teach children how to identify the emotion they are actually feeling besides the anger, and then reorganize the pattern of behaviour as follows:

Trigger = Anger = Frustration and sadness

RETREAT (slow the emotion down by taking a time out, breathing, etc.)

THINK (once we recognize and slow down the emotion, we can think about what happened and what we should do next)

RESPOND (once we are calmer, we can identify the best way to move forward, we can respond appropriately, rather than reacting inappropriately).

If your child is struggling to manage their emotion, this is something you might want to use at home so that your child can start to understand that they have a choice in how they manage their strong feelings, and that putting their brain in charge, rather than their emotion, is the way to go. 

If you have any questions, please feel free to drop me an email to doreenw@catholiccare.dow.org.au Just a reminder that I am here at the school every Tue and alternate Thursdays.  Enjoy the rest of term one and have a Happy Easter.

Doreen Waddington, School Counsellor