Month: May 2023

I hope everyone has some nice plans for Mother’s Day this weekend.  A time to get together with your families and special people in your life.  I know our students have some lovely cards and gifts coming home for their mums.  I hope all our mums and grandmothers get spoilt.

Please note that we have a curriculum day next week – Thursday 18^th May.  Our staff will be spending the day on inclusion and the adjustments we make to ensure that all the students are accessing the curriculum and achieving success.  They will also be working on Assessment and Reporting.

School Council

Last term we held our Annual General Meeting.  We farewelled three School Councillors – Amanda Read, Shaun McEachern and Sonya Nori

• Amanda served for 4 years and was a great support of our staff and programs and always celebrated the positive elements of our school.  She served on Curriculum and Building and Grounds committees.
• Shaun served for 2 years and was a great voice for student learning and ideas.  He served on the Curriculum committee.
• Sonya served for 8 years and was a great insight into the classroom and how it looks for students.  She served on the Curriculum committee and minute secretary.

We welcomed three new parents and one staff member to our School Council (Marika, Wayne, Sarah and Nick).  School Council comprises of the following:

President – Peter Raja (Parent rep)

Vice President – Sarah Reidy (Parent rep)

Treasurer – Linda Amos (DET employee)

Committee – Parent representatives: Natasha Morris, Jackie Owen, Alison Wilkinson-Falk, Paul Carter, Wayne Buttie, Marika Smith, Sarah Clemens, Catherine Pattison

DET employee – Shoana Carey, Heidi Inglis, Tyson Buckingham, Nick O’Shea

Wellbeing

The other day I had the privilege of watching ‘The Imperfects Podcast live’.  For those not familiar with The Imperfects Podcast – it has Hugh van Cuylenburg from the Resilience Project, his brother Josh and comedian Ryan Shelton.  The podcast is all about how perfectly imperfect we all are. When we constantly comparing ourselves to others, it can not only be exhausting, but extremely harmful. However, when we share our struggles, we start to realise that everyone, no matter how successful, has something they are battling with.

In the podcast, Hugh, Josh and Ryan chat to a variety of interesting people who bravely share their struggles and imperfections, and we can all learn some valuable take-aways we can apply to our own imperfect lives.

I encourage you to have a look through and take a moment to listen to some of the amazing people they interview.  I personally have enjoyed Ben Crowe, Hamish McLachlan, Dr Billy Garvey and Chrissie Swan, however, there are many more episodes that I could list and there isn’t many that I have learnt something new or able to connect or relate to.

At the live show, I had the privilege of listening to Ben Crowe.  Ben is a leadership mentor and life coach and has worked with Ash Barty, Dylan Alcott, Richmond Football club and more.  He spoke about preparing ourselves for an event coming up and acknowledging our feelings, what we hope to achieve from it and what we can control and not control.  It is so important that we do not get distracted with the things that we cannot control.

Consider an event that your child has coming up – excursion, performance, a game, a test, camp, a sleepover.  You could talk with them about how they are feeling about it and what they want to achieve/get out of it.  You can talk to them about the things that they cannot control and how they need to let go of those feelings.  Some ideas of things we cannot control – the rules or procedures of an event, the weather, how an audience will react, the content of a test, how other players will perform, other people’s feelings and what they say.  Then get them to understand what they can control – their preparation, their attitude, their mindset, their feelings, their choices.

This is a very powerful activity and can be applied to all events and for all people – big and small.  I hope this supports you with helping your child through a challenge.

End of day pick up

Do you ever get the feeling that it always rains at 3:30pm!  We have had some very wet afternoons that presents challenges.  I thought I would take the opportunity to remind everyone of our afternoon procedures.

At the end of the day, students will be dismissed from their classroom and follow your pick up arrangements.  We will have staff at the gate on the Princes Hwy and at Kiss’n’Go.  The staff member will stay on the gate until 3:45pm.  At 3:45pm a bell will sound and any child that have not been collected, will head into the office where they will wait for you.  Sometimes we will give you a ring to check on your arrival time and to let you know that your child has moved into the office.

Therefore, please be reassured that if you are held up in traffic that your child is with us.  It is always a good idea to tell your child to wait near our staff so if you are running late, we can keep them company and move them inside when the bell rings.

If you know early enough that your pick up arrangements have changed, you can ring the office to pass on a message.  However, with 650+ students and our grades often out and about in the afternoon, it can be challenging to get the message to the student late in the day.

We have a small number of students with mobile phones and we have some of our students wearing smart watches.  Please be mindful that there is Department of Education policy in regards to mobile phones (switched off once on the school grounds and handed to the classroom teachers during the day) and wearable devices (must switch off all notification during the school day).

Linda Amos – leave

Mrs Amos is taking some well-earned long service leave this term.  She is away for five weeks and will return on the 13^th June.  Whilst she is on leave, we have Cara Trott and Chris Jeffries helping us in the leadership team.  Cara will be with us in the office for the whole period, and Chris will be sharing his role with the classroom and in the office.  He is also returning from leave and you might have seen him scootering around with a plastered foot!

Mother’s Day raffle and stall

On Monday, the P&Fs conducted our Mother’s Day raffle and Tuesday and Wednesday was the Mother’s Day stall 

• I would like to thank our school community and the Beaconsfield community for their generous donations – the prizes were fabulous. 
• I would like to thank our school community for supporting the raffle and purchasing lots of tickets – the box was very full with tickets, and for sending students along with money to purchase gifts.
• Lastly, I would like to thank P&F for giving up their time to receive the donations, make the prizes, write all the raffle tickets, set up the stall and selling the gifts.   You are an amazing group.

Let’s Celebrate

I wanted to finish up with a celebration as to how respectful our students are.  Over the past month we have received a lot of feedback from a variety of sources to let us know how polite and well-mannered our students are.  We have received:

• A letter from a member of the community informing us how polite and well-mannered our students were at the traffic lights – moving aside to let someone pass.
• We have had a new crossing lady for the last couple of weeks at Lyle ave, and she has commented how lovely our students are.
• The photographers that have come this term have feedback how well behaved our students were when taking our photos.
• Parents and Friends have been onsite for two days at the Mother’s Day stall and have feedback how lovely all the students and how helpful our grade 6 helpers were.
• We held our Open Day on Saturday with grade 6 captains attending and I have begun tours. We received many complimentary comments and an email, telling us how delightful and what an amazing job they did and how respectful our students are.

We try very hard to create a culture of caring and respect and we understand that from time to time our students might make a wrong choice, but we hope by the majority demonstrating the behaviours we expect, that they quickly make a choice to be a respectful member of the community and have that sense of belonging and being part of Beacy.

Sadly, we do receive emails and phone calls from the community about Beacy people doing the wrong thing but it is often our parents in regards to driving and being pedestrians.  Please make sure that you are also being safe, abiding by the road laws and modeling the correct behaviours.  From time to time we do have parking inspectors out issuing fines, and I would hate to see people receiving a costly fine Things to note:

• Only park legally – do not block drive ways, park in no standing zones or in the 2 minute zone, only access the disable parking if eligible.  If you have someone else picking up your child, make sure they are aware of the parking around our school.
• Crossing the road – only cross the road at the two school crossings.  Please do not cross at the Lyle ave end, near the Princes Hwy.  Please make the effort to walk a little bit further and use the school crossing. 

Happy Mother’s Day

Heidi Inglis

Principal