This week we had Indigenous artist, Amanda Wright, complete the mural on the concrete watertank near the sandpit. Amanda explained to me the meaning of different parts of the mural.

It has an elder looking towards the gate facing the carpark so he is looking at the children as they come in.

The word Wominjeka is in black and so is the girl dancing in silhouette. She is underneath the stars for the dreamtime.

The river represents the Yarra and the orange lines underneath everything is representing fire.

She also painted the eagle, named Bunjil. Bunjil is a creator deity, culture hero and ancestral being, that is often depicted as a wedge-tailed eagle (or eaglehawk) in the Australian Aboriginal mythology of some of the Aboriginal peoples of Victoria.

She was so happy when she was painting that the children kept coming up and touching the mural and was so happy that many of them began to tell her the stories of indigenous people.

I attended a Principal Conference down in San Remo last week, and one of our workshops included this quote, taken from 'Learning on Country —what do ya know? Did ya know Country owns you?' from Be You (part of Beyond Blue).

This quote resonated so strongly with me as it is never more true than today, in our rapidly changing world, that as a school we remember we have a common goal and that the journey towards that goal is taken together with an understanding that the community changes over time and as such the continuum that we work on is something we aim to move forward but sometimes we can slide the other way.

Our school has moved forward in many ways this year as our community realigns and adapts to chase the same goals; building a school that can cater for all students and deliver a rigorous curriculum while also enhancing the the social and emotional and cultural wellbeing of our students. I really just wanted to thank the community, teachers and students for having such a positive outlook this year, despite the difficulties during the pandemic we have still been able to move the school forward on the continuum.

This week Warrandyte Primary School hosted a Webinar on Cyber-bullying for parents in our community. I decided to engage the services of BullyZero when I learned that since Covid-19 the incidence of cyber-bullying has increased by 70%, according the eSafety Commission. This statistic is alarming, but a warning for all of us that we should carefully monitor and manage the online activities of our young children.

I took some notes during the session, so thought I would summarise a couple of important points.

Bullying online is only bullying when it is a repeated behaviour. It is a criminal offence and bullying behaviours include;

sending abusive texts
spreading rumours or lies
making threats
posting unkind messages
creating fake social media accounts

What was alarming was that in Facebook alone it is estimated there are over 120 million fake accounts.

Studies have also shown that young people between the age of 13-18 spend an average 43.6 hours per week on their devices.

Some of the strategies to manage our children's online activity included:

Setting clear boundaries and time limits
Get the devices out of the bedroom
Supervise and monitor online games and conversations
Set Security settings - ensure their accounts and chat function are set to private
Recommended to use parental control screen time and location tracker app

The facilitator did record the session but unfortunately she accidentally deleted that recording so we are unable to share the webinar. However, if you go onto the eSafety Commission site at Homepage | eSafety Commissioner , you will find all the statistics, supports and resources mentioned in the session. This is also where you can go to report cyberbullying to the Commissioner.

I hope you have a great weekend and for those of us doing the Football on Sunday, I hope the rain and cold weather clears.

Take care,

Nieta

Canteen News