Take note
Kinder 2025 enrolments
A reminder that St Mary's College is currently accepting enrolments for Kindergarten 2025. If you or someone you know has a child due to commence Kindergarten in 2025, please contact our Enrolments Officer, Nicole Wighton, at enrol@smc.tas.edu.au or (03) 6108 2560. Please note, applications close Friday 10 May.
We are pleased to be continuing with our flexible Kinder model for 2025, where families have the option to increase their child's access to Kinder by choosing a four-day or five-day week (all Kinder students attend three compulsory 'core days' per week). More information is available on the College website: www.smc.tas.edu.au/enrolment/
St Patrick's Day – bring out your green!
Next Monday 18 March, students in Prep to Year 6 will be invited to wear their sports uniform with an additional splash of green (such as a green hair accessory or leprechaun hat) to celebrate St Patrick's Day and our College's Irish heritage. Senior School students can come to school dressed in an Irish-themed costume on this day.
All students are asked to bring a gold coin donation to school for Project Compassion.
St Patrick's Day, or the Feast of St Patrick, is observed every 17 March. As a Catholic school that operates in the Presentation tradition, the day is an opportunity for us to acknowledge our Irish descendants, our foundress, Nano Nagle, and our beloved Presentation Sisters in the faith of St Patrick. May the luck of the Irish be with you!
Gandparents' Day
We are delighted to welcome our SMC families to the Junior School to celebrate Grandparents Day on Wednesday 27 March from 9.00am to 11.00am.
The day will allow students the opportunity to show their grandparents what they get up to in the classroom, play games together and share a lovely morning tea in the courtyard, which will be provided for the duration of the event. We look forward to seeing our SMC grandparents and special friends there!
Cheers to sustainable sipping!
Our award-winning Murphy's Café continues to focus on keeping things environmentally friendly and invites parents to join this delicious quest.
A barista-made coffee from Murphy’s is a guilt-free treat, with every step of the coffee making process at Murphy’s sustainable, from the reusable cups to the coffee grounds and milk. Murphy’s Café Manager and Sustainability Officer, Phil Shanny aims to leave nothing to waste.
Parents and carers are invited to purchase our new Murphy's branded reusable cups, which are available at Murphy's for $15 (which includes your first coffee/hot drink free!).
An estimated 1.84 billion single-use coffee cups account for landfill in Australia each year, so using a reusable cup is an easy way to ‘do your bit’ for the environment.
The Café opens early from 7.30am, so why not grab a coffee at morning drop-off to start your day off? There are also tasty breakfast on-the-go options available.
Parents are also welcome to take home coffee grounds from the Café, which are great for the garden. Coffee grounds are a great deterrent for snails and has the benefit of being PH neutral for the soil.
All the coffee grounds leftover at the end of each day are re-purposed in the College ‘luwutina kipli’, garden or go into the College’s compost system. These join the food scraps from students’ lunchboxes that are collected for the compost each day.
The produce from the College gardens is then used in meals sold at Murphy’s and used in the complimentary lunch program trials, so the process comes full circle.
Parents are also encouraged to consider buying their milk for the week from Murphy’s the old-fashioned way—in reusable glass bottles refilled from the Udder Way fresh milk dispensing system, available for $2 a litre.
Every one Udder Way keg can save up to 7000 bottles from the supply chain. It can be used 800 times before being recycled and has a lifespan of approximately 10 years. This is important considering that only 50 per cent of milk bottles are recycled.
To top it all off, the coffee beans come from Tasmanian (and SVC alumni) owned business Zimmah Coffee and the Udder Way program is a Tasmanian designed and manufactured initiative.
So, cheers to Murphy’s for keeping our sipping sustainable at St Mary’s College!
UCAT 2024 registration is now open
Year 12 students considering a career in medicine or dentistry will need to sit a compulsory entry exam known as the UCAT (University Clinical Aptitude Test) before they can apply for relevant placements in the aforementioned fields of study within most universities. Please note the key dates in the attachment below.
See the 'Community News' page in this newsletter for details on a free webinar on UCAT and pathways into medicine.