Wellbeing and Community Engagement

Patrick Halpin 

Assistant Principal 

Community Engagement Taskforce

Thank you to all the parents and community members who attended our most recent Community Engagement Taskforce meeting earlier this week.  We had a very interesting discussion and came up with some excellent ideas, some of which we will be actioning throughout the year.  If you have any ideas as to how we can increase the engagement levels of our school community, please email me or join us for our next meeting in Term 2 (dates will be announced via Compass).

Snapshot Survey

We had 58 responses to our survey on Special Celebrations over the past fortnight.  Occasions that our community mark include:

• - Red Nose Day – Lunar New Year Moon Festival – Jewish Festivals (Passover, Channuka, New Year, Shabbat) – Christian Festivals (Easter, Advent, Christmas, Holy Communion) – Birthdays – Life, achievement and family – St. Patrick’s Day – Remembering family members – Mother’s Day – Father’s Day – Australia Day – AFL Grand Final – Vietnamese New Year – School Holidays – Hindu Festival (Diwali, Holi) – May the 4th (Star Wars Day) – Melbourne Cup Day – ANZAC Day – Sinhalese New Year – Vesak Celebrations – Anniversaries – Chinese New Year – Weddings & Baptisms – Name Days – Reconciliation – Sorry Day – NAIDOC week – French Festivals (La Fete Des Rois, Le Carnival, French National Day, Music Fete) – Greek Festivals (Easter)

The most exciting response in this survey was that 27 respondents expressed an interest in being added to the mailing list and/or joining a working party to help us mark these celebrations.  I will be in touch with those people over the coming weeks to organise a working party meeting and to start our work on celebrating everybody. 

The aim of this working party will be to increase our awareness and understanding of other people, cultures and religions and is a project I am very excited about.  If anybody didn’t get a chance to respond to the survey but would like to join the working party and/or mailing list, please let me know.

Shake and Wake

Shake and Wake is an initiative that the Wellbeing Sub Committee decided to roll out this year in order to build a sense of community, expose students to a fun way of exercising and provide a healthy, enjoyable and fun start to our day.  I, for one, have thoroughly enjoyed it and have received fantastic feedback from the students. 

The song list is growing everyday with requests from the students, staff and parents but we are aware of our responsibility to ensure that there is a mix of songs to ensure students of all ages can participate and enjoy the atmosphere.  We must also be mindful that a balance between structured dance moves and free dancing is important to ensure that the students enjoy the activity but do not get overly excited before their day begins. Students can learn the dance moves and the songs through repetition and that familiarity will increase participation.  

A number of parents have informed me that their child has not yet joined in - that is absolutely fine and to be expected.  Dancing, while being a fantastic way of reducing anxiety, stimulating memory, activating the brain’s pleasure circuits, regulating mood and improving body image, can be a difficult thing to do in front of other people.  Allow your child the opportunity to watch everybody else dancing and model your enjoyment of dance during Shake and Wake!  One day, they are more likely to join in if you participate but, if not, as you will see from this video,just watching other people dancing can cheer us up!

I would love your feedback,  to make sure that we are hitting the mark.  If you have any suggestions or comments, we would be delighted to hear them.  

I wish everybody a very enjoyable long weekend.