Term 1, Week 11 2022

Pupil Free Day ( No School ) – Thursday April 14^th

Good Friday – Friday April 15^th

Easter Sunday – Sunday 17^th April

ANZAC Day – Monday 25^th April

Pupil Free Day – ( No School ) Monday 2^nd May 

School Begins – Term 2 – Tuesday 3^rd May

Mother’s Day – Sunday 8 May

Dear Families,

In the past couple of newsletters, I have written about one of our school (Mercy) values and have so far covered Compassion and Service. Today would like to focus on Respect, which is probably the value we most commonly or easily name.

Respect is about recognising and acknowledging the goodness in everyone and everything. This involves self respect, being aware that each of us is important and deserving of love and care. If we do not respect ourselves and our own families, it makes it more difficult to respect others. I know, that even AFL footballers respect their opposition players. The respect that our Mercy charism calls us to is at a much deeper level. It challenges us to not just respect others, but to care for them from within our hearts and do the right thing by them. It also calls us to care for our environment and be ‘stewards’ of the earth. Every human being deserves respect. It doesn’t matter what age they are or from what country or background they come from. If every person treated every one they met with heart-felt respect, the world would certainly be a much better place.

“Honour your father and mother” – Exodus 20:12

This weekend is Easter. It is the single most important time in our Church year. It is even much more important than Christmas. I invite you to consider attending one of the Easter celebrations in your nearest church during this weekend. If you are unable to do that then I encourage you to spend some time in ‘reflection’ about how your year is going and what it is that you can do, or change in yourself, to make the rest of the year better for you and for those you encounter each day.

In Week 2 of next term (May 9-11) we will be holding our Parent Teacher Learning Conversations. You should have received a slip of paper indicating the day and time for each child. Please contact the front office if you have not received one. Depending on the Covid situation these may be face to face or by telephone. A decision around this will be made during the first week of next term.

Remember that Monday 2 May is a Pupil Free Day. Please notify your child’s teacher, via Seesaw, if your child(ren) requires supervision on that day. It is important we know how many children will attend in order to organise our staff numbers.

I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you for your welcome this term. Thank you for the way you have supported your children and our staff throughout this fairly difficult and different term. Our staff have done an excellent job and I thank them for their hard work and dedication. I also wish Claire from Year 1 and her family all the best for the future and thank them for the contribution they have made to St Mary Magdalene’s School. We will miss you and hope that you make lots of new friends in your new school.

We are hopeful that schools will remain open, but with the increase in the number of COVID-19 cases recently, there is a possibility that we could be asked to return to ‘home’ or ‘online’ learning at some stage. We are prepared for this and wish to remind you of the online resources that Catholic Education SA has made available for families:

https://www.cesa.catholic.edu.au/learning-online/information-for-families.

I wish you a blessed and holy Easter and hope that you have a fantastic holiday break with your children. I look forward to working with you again next Term. Happy Easter!

Working in Partnership

Peter Mercer

Head of Campus

Our Lenten Journey has come to an end. This we began Holy Week with the celebration of Palm Sunday. This is a time we remember Jesus being welcomed into Jerusalem, like a King, by an excited crowd. People grabbed branches and waved them. They laid down clothing for Him to walk upon. Where in our lives might we have waited in excitement, hoping to be noticed? On Thursday, April 14, we remember Jesus’ Last Supper. This was the last meal he was to share with his disciples before he died. Before the meal, Jesus washed the feet of the disciples. He held up the bread and then the wine, He gave thanks and blessed them. He asked his disciples to remember Him each time they do this. Today in the Catholic Church, we are invited to partake in this meal and to remember His story. On Good Friday, April 15, we remember Jesus’ journey to his crucifixion. This is a time when we reflect on the way we or others carry crosses in our everyday life.  

Students across the school have been learning about Holy Week through song and have created artworks to share their understanding. 

Due to not being able to gather as a whole school, we continued with prayer through Microsoft Teams and connecting with students and staff at St. Thomas More School. We gathered like this to start our day on Monday morning with a focus on Palm Sunday, Tuesday morning with a focus on Holy Thursday and Wednesday morning with a focus on Good Friday. 

Project Compassion – 20c Challenge 

I would like to say a very big thank you to our families for the support you have provided to Project Compassion through your ‘giving’ of 20c coins. We gathered last week to lay out our coins to cover the word ‘give’. Each class gathered for prayer and discussion about how this money might be used to support those less fortunate than ourselves. 

Through your generous giving we were able to raise $81.00

Sacramental Program 2022 

If you would like your child to be involved in the 2022 Sacramental Program, please see Melissa Musolino. Due to Covid we are currently looking at the possibility of offering an online version of this program. 

Happy Easter  

As we head towards our Easter break, we hope that you stay safe and well. May Easter be a time of renewed hope for you. May you take the time to appreciate the small things in life that so often get overlooked in the business of our everyday life. 

Dear Parents and Caregivers of Children in Year 3, 4, 5 and 6,

I am sure that all families understand the importance of doing their best to keep children safe when in an online world. It came to our attention recently that there has been some online ‘chatter’ and messages involving some of our students over the past week that I would consider to be rather inappropriate or threatening towards others. I felt it important to take this opportunity to remind you to be always on the alert when your child is online because of the dangers involved and monitor what they are doing and ‘saying’. Sadly things happen online and then we have the fall out at school when the children are ‘face to face’.

As parents it is imperative that we help our children to make choices in an online world that, we ourselves, may not know or understand a great deal about. We are all familiar with Facebook and  I am sure know about the negative consequences that happen amongst adults. Young people tend not to use Facebook any more but have similar issues on other social media apps and games such as Discord, Roblox, Messenger, and SnapChat. Many of these apps have a minimum age and yet I constantly hear of young children having their own accounts. For Facebook, Twitter, Tik Tok, Fortnite, Instagram and YouTube the minimum age is 13 years! New apps seem to pop up regularly and this makes it really difficult for parents to keep up.

Most of these apps are probably okay, as long as they are used for their intended purpose. However, they all have the potential to be used in a negative or inappropriate way. The most important thing for parents is to be vigilant in monitoring what children are doing online. This can be difficult when children have smart phones and other small devices which are easy to hide or use in their bedroom.

I understand that being tough but fair may cause difficulties for some families, because children will argue that “everybody is online or using this app and their parents don’t supervise”. However as a parent of a young child, I would use some ground rules for when they are online:

1. Set yourself up as the administrator and not let them have full admin rights.
2. Always have the right to access their device and check their online activity regularly.
3. Don’t allow them to use their device unsupervised, especially in the private confines of a bedroom.
4. Have a limit on screen time … and control this by setting limits for individual devices in your router/modem.
5. Discuss with your child about appropriate behaviour and go through scenarios of what to do when something specific happens. Remind them that, while they may delete things they have written or posted, once it is in an online world, others may have kept a record. Also clicking on random links can be problematic.

I encourage you to access the following links for further information:

1. eSafety Commission
2. eSafety Commission parent webinars
3. Carly Ryan parent link

The second link will provide information about how you can be proactive in helping keep your child safe with a whole range of apps such as those I’ve mentioned above and some that I am sure you have never even heard about. I encourage you to also check out ‘The Social Dilemma’ on Netflix if you have an account.

Working for in Partnership

Peter Mercer

Head of Campus

8 April 2022

Thank you to everyone who attended our programs over in the Community Hub this term. We have had a very exciting and interesting start to the year. Some of the great things we have done this term include our Playgroup in the park sessions and library excursion where we read some cool stories with the children’s librarian and did a wonderful craft activity. We welcomed our new English teacher, Belinda to the hub and welcomed many new families into our programs.  We wish to thank the wonderful team over at Good360 who donated backpacks at the beginning of the year and recently, a huge assortment of children’s clothing and pyjamas. We also wish to thank the team over at THE ONE BOX, who provide 25 of our families with a box of fresh fruit and vegies, bread and 2L milk every week during the school term. If you would like to go on the waiting list to receive a box, please see Kerryn for a form.  

Our cuppa and craft group were celebrated and awarded a special thank you from the Believe Housing team for the amazing artwork they did on their “Art Pole and Community Garden” project which is located in the Haslam unit blocks in Elizabeth Vale (Across the road from the soccer club).

We hope everyone has a wonderful holiday break and hope to see you for more exciting things in term 2!

From, Kerryn (Hub Leader), Belinda (English), Elizabeth (Jet Creche & HIPPY), Keryn B and Gill (My Time)