Junior School

Letting Children Struggle, Fail, Learn and Grow

I have had several conversations recently with families who feel like they need to be helping their Junior School children complete their work and do everything the teacher asks of them. You might be surprised to hear me discourage this. Yes, really! If a student is struggling with concepts or with the amount of work, it is important for the class teacher to be made aware of this. We cannot differentiate the work to be at the right level for your children if the level of achievement we see is actually your work, rather than theirs.

Developmentally, Junior School boys are at a good age to be taking responsible risks, making mistakes, and learning from them, and asking for help when they are struggling, en route to the independence of young adulthood. If we try to solve their problems for them, we take those opportunities away. Of course, sometimes a hole is truly too deep for a student to climb out of and adult help is needed, but we must be wise about when to make that decision. 

I hope we can all, with wisdom and discernment, let our children struggle, fail, learn, and grow. This can be hard, so let us pray for both wisdom and fortitude!

Year 5 Students of the Fortnight

No doubt Junior School families have heard about the Student of the Fortnight Award. In a nutshell, this is an award granted by each class teacher to one student per fortnight, usually during our grade Pastoral Care Period (PCP). To be given a Student of the Fortnight Award means you have earned it – it is not one of those once every 10 or 20-weeks awards that everyone gets a turn at. There are not enough fortnights in the year for that! When it is received, it is because a boy has truly deserved it.

Thinking we might have been able to present awards to the Students of the Fortnight when we returned to face-to-face schooling, we held off on announcing these during online PCPs. Now that it seems we will be learning online for some time, we have decided to present the awards and announce them to the community, recognising the great effort and achievements that boys have put in to earning them. So, without further ado, here are the Year 5 Student of the Fortnight Award recipients for the first four weeks of Term 3 (Year 6 will be announced next week):

Congratulations to all these boys!

God bless,

Ben Munday

Director of Junior School