At School We Are Respectful, Responsible and Safe in our Actions: Last week Mrs Griffiths and I spoke about our School Expectaions and took each class through ways we can act respecftfully, responsibly and safe at school. As a school, we expect students to follow both rules and standards of behaviour, so that all members of our community feel valued and safe. Therefore, it is important that all students understand what these three school expectations look like in practice. To do this we gave a simple definition for each:

Respect - Being respectful means you act in a way that shows care for how your actions may impact others.
Responsible -being dependable, making good choices, and taking accountability for your actions.
Safe - everyone feels free from risk of harm.

At School We Play Respectfully, Responsibly and Safely: This week we are continuing to explore how we can put these three rules into effect in the playground when we are interacting with other students. Therefore we will be practising how we can:

Show a Respectful attitude towards other students on the playground.
Play games that are responsible and safe on the playground.
Understand other children have different feelings to us (empathy)

During this week we will also be spending time exploring the concept of 'empathy' and understanding that others can see things differently to us. This is a very difficult concept, especially for young children. This topic is followed up in other Health lessons from Kinder to Year 6.

NAPLAN: Our Year 3 and 5 students will be sitting the NAPLAN tests next week. These tests happen annually for all students in NSW in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9. There will be four tests; Reading, Writing, Conventions of Language and Numeracy. These tests will be conducted throughout the week, with the following week available should students be away for one of the tests.

School Tours for parents of prospective students for Kindergarten 2025 and beyond. We are currently running School Tours on a Tuesday morning at 10am and Thursday afternoon at 4pm for parents who are considering sending their children to McAuley in Kinder 2025. These tours of the school are a great opportunity to see our facilities and

gain a sense of who we are. In previous years Parents, Grandparents and Community Members have been delighted to find how spacious our McAuley grounds are, which is not evident when looking at our school from the road. Our wonderful flexible learning spaces cater for small group work and can also be opened up to accommodate inquiry based learning. They have also been impressed with our upgraded playground facilities, the Before and After School Care facilities and all that is on offer for our children at break times, especially the synthetic grass. As we wander through the learning spaces, we hope our prospective families can feel the welcoming atmosphere of McAuley in our lovely classrooms and the engaging resources that are on offer. If you know of someone who is considering sending their children to McAuley, especially in Kinder 2025, please let them know it’s not too late to join one of our tours. To book for a tour please ring the school on 63613344 or book online through our website.

Catherine McAuley Newsletter

Term 1, Week 6 · 06 Mar 2024

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