It's often a question that we hear but don't necessarily answer honestly or have time to listen to the answer, but we must be prepared to take greater time to pause, consider and listen more carefully to the people in our lives.

Has it really been 15 years since it ended? One of my absolute favourite shows (like many millions of other people around the world) was Friends. With characters who brought silly humour into our living rooms and a great amount of laughing out loud sitting around the television with family and often friends.

Moving into 2020, a great deal has changed in our world, we seem to be entangled in the pace of life with the need to constantly be connected and always working, while perhaps not paying as much attention to the people around us. We all need to do better at trying to find a happy balance!

Hands up if you are one of those people who can never be more than an arm's reach from their mobile device - I just need to check my emails, look at Facebook or other Social Media platforms for the umpteenth time, find out the real name of that character in the movie you are watching or try to Shazam a piece of music that you hear on the soundtrack or radio.

Are you prepared to make a pledge, one night every week - no phone, no tv and no computer (totally unplugged) - just spend time with yourself, your favourite people, take a walk or a drive to your favourite place or look through some old printed photos (or am I showing my age!)

In my role as Assistant Principal, I have the responsibility for Wellbeing and Engagement for R-7. This is a brand new role at LNPS this year, which will have many new challenges that I will embrace whole-heartedly. Developing student teams to lead us all forwards with the aims of developing greater opportunities for all students to find their 'happy place' during lunchtimes was the starting point for me.

Analysing student Wellbeing feedback and in collaboration with Amy Byrnes, we have already begun to develop our lunchtimes with the opening of the gym for Active Lunches every day. This gives our students another option for 'something fun to do.' We are very grateful to Mr Clayton and Miss Mirjana who have volunteered their time to support this initiative which has enabled us to start during Week 2.

Promoting our core value of 'Care and Concern' and wanting students to think about other people in their school community, we have established a student leadership group who will meet to discuss successes and future improvements so that this initiative can continue to grow. We would like all of our students to feel happy, have lots of fun, love their life, focus and be committed to tasks until they are completed but we also want them to understand what to do when things aren't going well.

'I would love to become a Play Leader because I want to make younger students have a great lunch time, and it will be a great opportunity to give back to school considering I'm leaving the school next year. If I do get the opportunity to do this job I will put in lots of effort to make other students enjoy their lunch times. I would really love to be a play leader.' Stephan Y6

Congratulations to our seven Student Leaders for getting involved in our Active Lunch start up. These students were happy to be involved every lunch if needed, followed the school values, were good role models for younger students and said they'd be fully committed to the role during 2020. The remainder of our Y6/7 Play Leaders will discover shortly whether they have completed successful applications.

Eleni Floros
Ella Shields
Noah Dew
Stephan Contellis
Luca D'Aloia
Yana Boundris
Anna Diakomichalis

This week we've had dodgeball, basketball and mini soccer for which we've had many students engage with during their lunch times. We hope that this number will continue to grow as our Play Leaders and Student Leaders develop ownership and drive improvement. If students would like to make suggestions about other indoor/outdoor activities for lunchtimes, please ask them to speak to our Play Leaders (who wear a red Student Leader badge) so that they can feedback to our team.

The following structure was decided by our Student Leaders but this will change during the year. As we get ourselves more organised, there will be a display in the gym to celebrate success and communicate with our Active Lunch Community.

MONDAY - MELLOR

TUESDAY - FISHER/TORRENS

WEDNESDAY - FISHER/TORRENS

THURSDAY - MELLOR

FRIDAY - FISHER

Photo 1 - All aboard! - a bus stop for school pick ups - daily reminder of the environment now so common. Not that exciting for a new reception on their first day!

Photo 2 Devastation! Not what you would like your backyard to look like!

While the whole world watched on in horror, and continues to watch, many parts of Australia continue to go through the recovery and healing stage after this Summer's bushfires. The images above were sent to us by Mrs Cate Berden who popped in this week to see us. She highlighted a group of families who have had an awful time over Christmas and the holidays.

The Kangaroo Island Community has five families who have lost all of their possessions during the horrific fires. The families have 12 young children aged between 2 and 10 years old and their world has been turned upside down. They needed to relocate and mentally and emotionally deal with the situation let alone try to settle back into a new school year at Parndana Campus. The children have not only lost their favourite items, Christmas presents, pets etc but all of their possessions.

Wanting our students to develop their understanding of our core value of 'Care & Concern' and empathy for others, some students will be selling cans on Community Night this Thursday. All profits will go towards purchasing some new books and boxes of lego so come along and support our wider South Australian Community. If you have any young children's books or boxes of lego that could be donated, please get in touch - Mike.Tarleton884@schools.sa.edu.au.

Students will spend some time in the coming weeks investigating other fundraising ideas so that we can continue to do our small part in helping raise the spirits of these families - let's help put the smiles back on their faces.

Thank you for your generosity.

Mike

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