St Edward's Primary School, Tamworth

Principal's Message

From the Principal

Today we celebrate the Feast Day of Mary MacKillop RSJ. She was an Australian nun who has been declared a saint by the Catholic Church as St Mary of the Cross.  She founded the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart (Josephites), a congregation of religious sisters that established a number of schools and welfare institutions throughout Australia and New Zealand, with an emphasis on education for the rural poor.  She is the only Australian to be recognised by the Catholic Church as a saint.

 

Each year the Armidale Catholic Schools Office requires schools to participate in School Satisfaction Surveys. Between the 12th and 23rd of August all Year 4, Year 5 and Year 6 students, as well as staff are required to complete these surveys. Parents will also receive an email requesting them to complete the survey as well. I encourage you all to participate as this allows the school to plan for future improvement. The survey will take about 15 minutes to complete. If anyone does not receive the reminder email it means we do not have your current email address. Please see General News for further details.

 

Thank you parents and carers for your continual efforts to ensure that the students present themselves in the correct school uniform in a neat and tidy manner each day. This is a very important aspect of school for it teaches the children to understand that standards are important in their lives as well as respecting the community to which they belong.

 

A term that has been gaining a lot of currency in education over the past 20 years is ‘Emotional Intelligence’. This is a multi-faceted concept that deals with the range of positive, negative or neutral thoughts we have about ourselves and a learning task at hand. One of the key skills in this domain is persistence (the new buzz word for this is GRIT). Here are some positive thoughts for improving persistence:

  • I don’t like this but I will do it anyhow
  • It’s hard but not impossible
  • I haven’t learned this yet but I will
  • This task may be unpleasant but it will pay off in the long run.

Good thinkers persist with a task even if they don’t have immediate success.