Principal Report

Principal Message – Week 2  Term 3

Welcome back everyone! I trust you all had a restful and enjoyable holiday. I know that many families headed overseas or interstate taking the opportunity to reunite with family and friends. I hope you enjoyed the time spent with your families and that your children have returned to school refreshed and ready for the challenge of term three.

This is a particularly exciting term for our school. Our school musical Shrek Junior is well underway, and the children are in full rehearsal mode. This will be our fourth musical and I can comfortably say our musicals are firmly enriched in our school’s culture and are seen by the children as a rite of passage.

There are so many wonderful quotes by the late Sir Ken Robinson regarding the importance of teaching The Arts and valuing and nurturing creativity in our children. I especially like this,

“The arts especially address the idea of aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak; when you’re present in the current moment; when you’re resonating with the excitement of this thing that you’re experiencing; when you are fully alive.”   Sir Ken Robinson, Changing Education Paradigms (2010)

Children’s participation in the Arts and in particular the Performing Arts helps to develop much more than we first think:

• They learn to think creatively, with an open mind
• They learn to express feelings, with or without words
• They practise problem-solving skills, critical-thinking skills, dance, music, theatre language 
• They discover that there is more than one right answer, in fact there are always multiple points of view
• They learn to collaborate with other children and with adults
• They feel connected as the Arts also builds community
• And because there is not just one right way to create art, every child can feel pride in his or her work. 
• In fact the Arts builds and instils confidence and resilience.

In a nutshell participation in the Arts, has enormous benefits academically and socially emotionally. We have set out to this year to not only stage a great musical but also to, encourage teamwork and collaboration and of course have a lot of fun and learning along the way. With great confidence I am willing to say that by the end of this experience every child will have achieved far more than this. 

We look forward to seeing you at our performances on Thursday 7 September and Friday 8 September.