We have many generous families here at St Brendan’s who volunteer in the canteen when they can, help at stalls, attend our PAG meetings, clothing pool, reading, covering books, providing feedback to improve our school, meals committee, gardening and donate gifts for others. I want to take this opportunity to thank you all.

My apologies for the QKR! Payment glitch we experienced at the start of this term. This new system has been implemented in many neighbouring schools and is more cost effective for our families. Unfortunately, we did experience a glitch as mentioned in our Compass post last week. Thank you for your patience and understanding and also for logging onto QKR! to make the payments that had not been deducted from your nominated account for our Mother’s Day gifts and the first week of Canteen.

Welcome to new students who are now part of our wonderful community. We hope you are settling in nicely and found many new and familiar friends:

Saskia – Year 1

Giselle – Year 4

Lexi – Year 3

St Brendan’s Feast Day was last Friday, 16th May. The children participated in many activities relating to St Brendan including: boat making, colour-in competition, writing activities and a whole school mural which will be displayed in the Stage 3 building. We also celebrated mass with Fr Baby, Sr Josie and our amazing parish band. Thank you everyone for your participation. Our staff also shared a “feast” during our morning tea and lunch! Being part of St Brendan’s community is strongly valued, we appreciate everyone’s diversity, skills and talents and that’s what makes our school so amazing.

We are in our full Winter uniform this week! The children look very neat in their uniform when worn well without the “trimmings” e.g. jewellery etc. Please save all the “trimming” for weekends and after school. Children do not need to wear dangling earrings, non school coloured ribbons etc to school. Children will also need a school hat and black shoes.

Unfortunately due to the inclement weather our Cross country representatives were unable to race on Tuesday.The cross country will now be run on Friday 30th May at Gosford. Our representatives will be: Rain R, Rahnie S, Oliver T, Ziggy E, Felix C, Quinn V, Kingston W, Josie S.

Our Life Education van arrived last week and the lessons within the van for each class commenced this week. All details of the lessons presented for each grade was shared on Compass last Sunday.

We are experiencing many St Brigid’s students walking from their school to St Brendan’s to board the afternoon bus. This should not be happening for various reasons including the safety of the unsupervised St Brigid’s students walking from their school. Mr Murdoch from St Brigid’s will be expressing his expectations surrounding this. If you do have a high school child please remind them to board their afternoon bus at St Brigid’s and not St Brendan’s.

Mrs Fletcher and Miss Foskett attended the Gwandalan Lions Club dinner on Wednesday night in my absence. I would like to thank Gwandalan Lions Club for their generous donation of $1500 to allow us to maintain our SBLM community garden.

Next week (Week 5) is Sorry Day and Reconciliation Week. Thank you Mr Gainsford for organising activities and experiences alongside Mrs Loneragan who always does such a wonderful job organising activities for our Wellbeing Week!

Our Parent Advisory Group (PAG) meeting will be held on 3rd June in our Year 5 collaboration space at 5pm.At this meeting our Parent Engagement Coordinator, Mrs Victoria Price and our Wellbeing coordinator, Mrs Madeleine Loneragan, will be presenting our Resilience Project for parents. Please come along for approx. 1 hour!

Mrs Price will also be offering information on 123 Magic at her sessions at school on 4 June (12-2pm), 11 June (12-2pm) and 25 June (1.30-2.30pm). Please see our facebook page for further details and registration.

As mentioned in my last newsletter, Busways will be onsite on 5 June after school counting Opal card holders and non-Opal card holders. Please apply for your free Opal card as soon as possible online.

Our Kindergarten enrolments are nearing completion and letters of offers are very close to finalisation.If you are or you know families wanting to enrol their children please contact our office as soon as you can!We are offering Getting to Know You sessions this year also on top of our Wednesday morning playgroup, our Story time sessions, our Ready, Set Go program and our Orientation/transition Days.

Your children’s Semester One reports will be available on Compass on Friday 20 June. Formal interviews will be offered the week commencing 23 June (Week 9). Year 6 interviews will need to flow into Week 10 due the Year 6 teachers attending the Year 6 Canberra excursion that week.

Some dates for your diary:

King’s Birthday long weekend – Monday, 9 June

Year 6 Leadership day at St Brendan’s – Tuesday, 10 June

First Responders Day – Wednesday, 11 June

Stage 3 Soccer gala day – Thursday, 12 June

St Brendan’s athletics carnival – Friday, 13 June

Blue Gum (all other house colours welcome) Family Mass – Saturday, 14 June

Year 6 Canberra Excursion – Wednesday 25 – Friday 27 June

Year 5 Point Wolstoncroft Camp – Thursday 28 – Friday 29 August (Term 3, Week 6)

This week I have been attending the State wide Principals’ conference with several key note speakers.. Just a few take homes for you to ponder:

• Education as Hope building!

• What “Who” do you want to be when you grow up?

• It’s not about how clever you are .. it’s about how you are clever!

• A catch phrase we hear as educationalist includes we are educating children for the future however do we know what the future holds? Should we change our catch phrase to Our students are future makers?

Thank you to our helpers at the Mother’s Day breakfast last week. We had at least three Dads who made their way to the BBQ and cooked up a storm – including washing up at the end! A huge thank you to our staff who always put in 110% effort to make sure our community are looked after. Not to forget our wonderful Mums who always give back to our community when they can – thank you and I hope you enjoyed your morning with your children at SBLM.

Congratulations Aston who attended Bathurst last week for the Polding Soccer Trial. He did very well, making it to the final cut in a very competitive field, with selectors choosing him for the Probables versus Possibles game, an achievement in itself. He played extremely well and just narrowly missed making the Polding team. We are very proud of his efforts, sportsmanship and dedication.

Congratulations Rain who has made the Polding PSSA Rugby 7’s team on the 4th of June she now will be invited to attend training, a team lunch, and jersey presentation. Rain will be competing June 5th and 6th at Blacktown. Well done and enjoy the experience.

God Bless,

Charlene Reid

Principal

Our SBLM Community Garden is thriving with the help of Mr Murphy and our lunch club gardeners, however, if you would like to volunteer an hour a week we might be able to work with Mr Murphy and his group of gardeners to continue growing amazing produce, do some weeding and some planting. If you are available I would like to lock in an “open hour” for all who is available to come in and help with the garden and keep the momentum going. Please complete this form to indicate your preferred day and time and we will lock in a time depending on the majority.

We are excited to host a special morning to celebrate and honour the incredible work our First Responders do! This event will take place on Wednesday, June 11th. If you are a First Responder and would like to participate, please complete the form so we can plan accordingly. Once we have a better idea of who can attend, we will share more details. Thank you for all that you do—we look forward to celebrating with you! Please complete this form as soon as possible.

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Are you struggling with challenging behaviour with your children aged 2-12? Learn the 1-2-3 Magic strategies at our 3 session program run by Victoria Price and Jo Spek. Please register your interest here.

Don’t miss this special online reading event to support your child’s literacy skills!

CCSP is excited to invite all families who have children enrolled in Catholic schools across NSW and the ACT to join us online with the Diocese of Wollongong’s Bishop Brian Mascord, who will read the classic Bible story The Parable of the Lost Sheep.