From the Head of Junior School

Like many families I suspect, we’re enjoying watching snippets of the Olympics each day. The conversations around different sports, countries and cultures are wonderful, and provide an endless series of questions from my children, “Where is that country in the world?”, “What sport is that?”, “Why are they wearing…or doing….?”. We’ve researched the answers from the comfort of our couch, which usually leads to more questions and occasionally we all become ‘armchair experts’ and offer our insights on how an athlete could improve their performance, even though we’ve never played that sport before, and not likely to either! The whole experience is fun and interesting to share together. The Olympics have been a constant in our lives every two years (Summer / Winter games), and provide a sense of connection as a country for us, but also globally around the shared values and spirit of the games. We build a sense of our own character and identity through these shared experiences.

Character and personal development is a topic I would like to explore further this term in the Junior School. Character can be a complex, often intangible, yet incredibly valuable element of our development as people. Last term each Anchor article profiled a learner attribute we value in the Junior School and explored how they are taught, referenced and lived-out in our daily practice with examples from our students own experience. Similarly, this term we will explore different elements of our school experience that contributes to character development.

There could be an endless list of experiences that develop our character at school, from co-curricular activities, specialist subject areas, House connections, friendships, school events, camps, family networks, celebrations, hardships and successes. They all have their place in shaping who we are, and no doubt there are many other elements that could be shared depending on who you ask for their perspective.

I stumbled across a resource many years ago that I regularly come back to, talking about the character development of young people specifically, but the core messages still resonate with people of any age. Angela Duckworth, founder of ‘The Character Lab’ a not-for-profit organisation, leads a conversation drawing from evidenced research to highlight elements of character to support young people develop qualities that will help themselves and others as they grow towards adulthood. The Character Lab stems from Angela’s seminal work, and book called Grit: The power of passion and perseverance, which lead to a very popular TED talk, and development of a website - The Character Lab. The core elements of character they profile are:

Strengths of Heart – gratitude, kindness

Strengths of Mind – curiosity, creativity

Strength of Will – grit, self-control.

There are other valuable resources around the topic of character, but I thought I would highlight this one for now as I feel it has relevance to the shared experience we are having with the Olympics at the moment, and a new initiative we are launching in the Junior School this week – ‘Passions and Pursuits’.

The short article ‘Choosing Wisely’ from the Character Lab this month speaks about sharing the decision-making process with children to help them develop and understand processes for making good decisions. The value here is ‘with’, when conversations or decisions or activities are undertaken ‘with’ children they begin to develop a set of skills, knowledge, values and agency helping them develop their character further. The approach of ‘with’ resonates for me in so many aspects of our lives. I’m sure you can easily draw on your own experiences in the workplace where the approach of ‘with’ has supported the implementation of a new process, or change of some kind. In our school setting, we value ‘with’, and our new Friday afternoon programme 'Passions and Pursuits' certainly has elements of valuing learning and sharing the experience of new activities across all ages ‘with’ each other. We believe these shared experiences help to develop character through learning, connection and the subtle guidance from adults and peer mentors.

And finally, back to the Olympics. I wish your family the joy and connection this global event is sharing with us, and our community over the next fortnight.

With warmest regards,

Mr Ken Raven | Head of Junior School

You Can Do it!

During Weeks One and Two of the Term we have focused on the social-emotion key of Persistence – not giving up, even when the going gets hard! Many students show this key daily and it is great to celebrate this with our class reward winners for Week One:

Kindy: Jax Brennan

Pre-Primary: Harriet Stan-Bishop

Year 1: Fraser Lester

Year 2: Boyce Sprigg

Year 3: Annie Newman

Year 4: Beatrix Darling

Year 5: Molly O’Malley

Year 6: Evan Pretorius and Leo Payne

Our social-emotional key winners receive a certificate, token for the weekly raffle and earn a house point. Each week our ECC has a chance of looking after their house mascot for the week and a present from the prize box. Two Junior School winners are drawn each week and receive a prize from the prize box.

Our ECC Stars of the Week were:

Kindy: Sonny Williamson

Pre-Primary: Harriet Stan-Bishop

Year 1: Harry Osborne

Year 2: Emily Leov

Mrs Leah Field | Assistant Head of Junior School

Children’s University Holiday Program

In the second week of the July holidays, many of Great Southern Grammar’s Children’s University members attended a free event at the University of Western Australia’s Marine Research Facility. They spent half the day there participating in a variety of workshops lead by University lecturers. Workshops included a trip across to the labs where they extracted DNA from strawberries and investigated an array of marine specimens from the local area. There were also demonstrations about wave energy, identification of live water bugs from Lake Seppings and the crafting of paper water bombs.

The GSG students, who ranged from Years Three to Six, all had an engaging experience, adding times to their ‘Passport to Learning’. They will continue to foster their love of learning outside the school day and look forward to the next organized event.

Ms Angelina Ross | Learning Enrichment Coordinator

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