5-8 Community News

Partnerships assisting the St Pats Athletics Day

Last Friday, the Partnerships for the Future students assisted St Pat's Tongala with their annual Athletics Day. It was a great opportunity to further build connections and partnerships between the schools and a further opportunity for our students to enhance their leadership skills. Our students assisted with the running of the day, including coordinating events, timing of races and allocating place getters. 

Cohort Conversation

Twice a term, the Years 5 - 8 community meets to reflect on the term and discuss successes and areas that can be improved upon. We again nominated our staff and student SOLE STARS which is always a cause for celebration. 

The successes we identified this term have been our continued commitment to our studies, our participation in the many sports days and the way we have worked on improving our sleep, exercise and eating routines. Areas to improve on are ensuring our laptops are charged and ready for every school day and ensuring our interactions with each other always include positive language. 

TA Topic 

In the later parts of the term, our focus has been on positive body image and how social media affects our ability to be self compassionate. Throughout recent content we have supported our students to develop their understanding of what is healthy to view online and what is harmful. Discussions have been leading us to build on our growing understanding of the effects of social media, but talk more specifically about who is a good ‘influencer’ online and who is not. Students have been challenged to think about the growing amount of filters and advertising that determines what we view online and whether people are ‘real’ or ‘fake’ in the online world. 

Organisation for school

We have continued to discuss the importance of being organised for school. 

The key themes we have discussed as a community are:

• Having a fully charged device every morning

• Ensuring phones are not in bedrooms at night as we know they can keep us awake

• Eating breakfast and having lunch every day

• Exercising or undertaking a mindfulness activity every day

• Ensuring homework is collected early in the week and spending time on it each night