Year 12 Pastoral Guardian
In last week’s Wednesday and Thursday pastoral cohort email to your daughters, I congratulated the Year 12 students on their spirit of 'keeping on keeping on'. Ask them to share my email and Ms B’s email with you. We absolutely understand and acknowledge your concerns for your daughter’s final year and how she is travelling, and we have communicated with the cohort last week on multiple levels about their concerns. Your daughters know that I am always there for them as Pastoral Guardian, as we all are, and it has been and is always a privilege to be there to care for them over their final Senior years at the College. This final Parent Corner for Term 1 focuses on how we can move forward together as family members in these times. Last week, the Year 12s in my lunchtime roams shared that, even though they have social media, with the thought of so much time at home, in isolation, what they normally do for their well-being is not the same. There has, therefore, never been a more important time for family connection.
A presenter on The Drum on Thursday 26 March commented that family, love, and connection are far more important than some of the priorities on which we have been focussing on in recent years. Recently, when I asked my students what they were grateful for, the overwhelming response was: my family and friends.
Relax: Maybe it is a time to make time and take time to connect with one another and maybe just rest as a family and find a balance in our lives. Dr Tuite shared a great quote this week:
Another approach, reiterated by an ABC education channel on Thursday 26 March, was to keep a healthy, focused routine –a school routine during school weeks and our lives in general. If we are more restricted to our home space, still keep a daily routine of wake- up time, exercise, and individual and family time activities to be physically and intellectually engaged and healthy.
I have been thinking of what my family can do if we are spending more time together in our new situation. I thought of my childhood and my own child’s childhood in how to keep active and enjoy learning together. As a family - even with adult children now - we had a fun time this week brainstorming and problem solving about how we could keep boredom at bay. No B words in our household is our family joke!
What can you do as a family together to build life skills for your children? Here’s my family’s brainstorming that does not cost extra.
Cooking: Plan meals together and create recipes to which you all contribute so you have a roster of favourite meals and the shopping, on- line delivery, if necessary, to make budget-friendly, creative meals. I spent a lot of valuable family time in the family kitchen as a teenager and still enjoy my family meal preparation - communicating. Cooking skills are life skills. I love cooking shows, so we view these together as a family. Master Chef family competition coming up! Take the time to enjoy eating meals together at the family dining table that, in our busy lives, does not always happen. Our Italian exchange assistant teacher, Miss Tricceri, recently shared the importance in Italy of a strong family culture and the central role of eating together as a family.
Being Italian means sharing and being together. Do you know why we have this strong food culture? The reason is that when you eat you’re all sitting around the same table. We don’t start eating until we’re all seated.
I asked the 12s last Friday what family activities they enjoy and you will read their suggestions throughout this Parent Corner. Victoria Ah San recommended cooking as a great family activity.
Connection, love, and family are such important values.
Games: Get away from technology for a while and explore family games that you have for indoors and outdoors. We are going to raid the garage and find our games. We will play bocce, get our badminton and ping pong sets out, play cards, Monopoly and Scrabble, enjoy, and laugh. I heard puzzles and jigsaws are continuing to be popular, with significant intellectual and mental health benefits. Melena Alba recommended puzzles. Hend Abdalla said she thought she wanted to play basketball in her backyard to keep active. So our Year 12 students are really thinking about alternative activities for the time ahead.
Related to this creative problem solving, our Captains have also been planning creative, fun ways of connecting with all year levels of students on our college platforms. using technology instead of assemblies. Katie Guthrie shared she enjoyed Sudoku and Scrabble. Emily Wilderbeek said that finding the matching socks after the washing was a funny family challenge. “Hide a lemon somewhere in the house to see who can find it", said another. We all have our unique, funny family favourites, don’t we?
Exercise: Gyms and pools are closed for now. I plan, if we can, to go walking around our local paths and forests and to ride our bicycles along local creeks. If this is not possible, how about having a picnic or barbeque in your garden with the kids, or in your case your young adults, helping prepare. Engage them to help with the gardening! I’m looking forward to spending time in my garden and getting a little healthy sunshine. I’m setting my exercise bike up and reconfiguring my space downstairs for us all to exercise. I even found some hand gym barbells! Mrs Jen Southern shared some hints for daily routine workouts such as squats, leg press, sit-ups, and jogging. Grace O’Donnell suggested workouts and pilates on YouTube, while Posie Tooma is going to do yoga and meditation and exercising together with her family.
Creative activities: Revive the hobbies and interests your children enjoyed and you enjoyed. I am going to open my art cupboard and finally make the time to do pastel drawings, lino cuts, charcoal sketches, and pen and ink. I love art. How about digital art? I have a very positive extended family member who loves photography and always posts amazing photos of nature and things she enjoys in life. Her posts inspire us, and her comments encourage us to create with no cost. I also have so many photos in boxes upon boxes in my home and folders and folders on my phone that I have been meaning to catalogue. Finally, I might make time to do this and, in the process, enjoy musing over all the fun we have had as a family. In fact, I think I am going to run out of time on the holidays and evenings. Jo Jo intends watching home videos of fun family memories.
Reading, music, movies, learning: Practise your musical instrument if you are gifted in that area or want to be. There are plenty of programs on the net to teach musical skills. Play your favourite music; make a new playlist. Dance to Let’s Dance or do family Zumba. That’s what my extended family members in the UK are doing in the lounge room with their high school kids. View movies on Netflix or however you usually do. I am even reviewing my old movie favourite sets on a portable DVD player now that my laptop does not have a slot for a DVD. Tech marches on! Posie again shared enjoying board games, and viewing documentaries with her family and classics like Bambi. Go, Posie! Jess Heeley recommended silent discos with friends on Skype. Thanks for all the creative ideas, Year 12s. How about reading online or paper novels? You will never be bored! It might be a time for me too to stop making excuses about learning Spanish online, with the plethora of language learning programs available.
Other family responsibilities: I read a Facebook post last week and I shared it with some Year 12s at lunchtimes. Life skills - teach your children how to change a tyre, plan a menu, mow the lawn, load the dishwasher, do the washing, learn about finances. Melena again suggested redecorating at no cost - rearranging and tidying your space. It won’t be too long until they are independent and having to, or choosing to, live away from the family hub - in Australia or overseas. Some of these ski