A Message from the Principal

Fostering Positive Friendships

Friendships play a crucial role in a child's development, shaping their social skills, emotional intelligence, and overall well-being. For primary school students, navigating the complexities of peer relationships can be both exciting and challenging. Parents can significantly support their children in building positive and resilient friendships by offering guidance, fostering open communication, and modeling healthy social behaviors.

Some Ideas to Help Parents:

Be an Active Listener: Create a safe space where your child feels comfortable sharing their school experiences, both positive and negative. Listen without judgment and validate their feelings. Ask open-ended questions like, "What was the most fun part of your day with your friends?" or "How did that make you feel when X happened?"

Talk About Friendship Dynamics: Discuss different aspects of friendship, such as sharing, taking turns, resolving conflicts, and understanding different perspectives. Ask questions such as "How do you think your friend felt when that happened?" or "Why do you think they reacted that way?"

Encourage Problem-Solving: Instead of immediately offering solutions, guide your child to think through friendship challenges themselves. Ask, "What do you think you could do?" or "What might happen if you tried that?" This empowers them to develop their own coping mechanisms.

Normalise Ups and Downs: Explain that friendships have their natural ups and downs, and it's normal to experience disagreements or changes in friendships. Reassure them that these experiences are part of growing up.

Encourage a Wide Social Circle: While close friendships are important, encourage your child to interact with a variety of peers. This broadens their social experiences and reduces the impact of any single friendship challenge.

Partner with the School: Teachers observe friendship dynamics daily. Share any concerns you have with your child's teacher and ask for their insights or suggestions. We also have a wonderful school counsellor (Cass Mc Ilrick) who can help your child navigate tricky friendships. Your child’s class teacher can help you to access this service.

Finally, don’t forget to try using the Living Well Learning Well language. Our students  understand that each person in our school needs to be safe, valued, respected and cared for. The students also know that they have a role to play in making our school a happy place for everyone to be.

Open Mornings

We had a good response to our Open mornings with a number of new families visiting our school. Thank you to our parents/carers for spreading the word to our community. Thank you also to the parents/carers who responded to WHY you chose St Joey’s for your child? Your positive and heart felt responses can be viewed below.  

PT & F

Don’t forget our PT & F meeting via zoom is set for this Wednesday at 6.00pm. We would love you to join us by this link     https://armcatholic.zoom.us/j/92233786086

Have a happy & safe week

Pauline Long

Principal