As mentioned in previous GPAC Meetings we would like to create a new event across our two schools called a Yarning Session with Parents. This is an opportunity for parents and staff to just sit back, over morning tea, and yarn together. This is distinctly different from GPAC. The idea behind this yarning session is for you to share if there is anything or anyone you would like to hear from. We could arrange an Indigenous guest speaker to share knowledge and culture. Eg: Indigenous astronomy. Is there an activity that you would be interested in doing? eg: basket weaving. Would there be an interest if we all went on the Tribal Warrior cruise on Sydney Harbour or a walking tour of Redfern or La Perouse led by local Elders? We have a lot of cultural knowledge within our own parent community – is there something that you would like to present to the rest of the group or even run an activity yourself?

This session will involve some brain storming from those families present. Morning Tea will be provided by the coffee shop at Redfern Oval underneath the Long Room. There is no cost involved. We have chosen to take this event off site to allow a yarning session like this to happen in community. We are also keen to look at other sites or venues for future yarning sessions as well.

We hope to see as many of you as possible on Tuesday 7 March at 10:30am.

This year we are progressing with our Reconciliation Action Plan and Gawura Strategic Plan. We have employed the services of an Aboriginal consultancy firm called 2 Point Co who will help deliver this. There will be extensive consultation with all stakeholders who wish to participate.

Please see this link to read about who 2 Point Co are and what they hope to achieve this year and click on the link HERE if you wish to be involved and 2 Point Co will contact you directly.

Please reach out to myself or your class teacher if you have any queries around the term. The children have settled back into school well and truly now and we look forward to the remaining weeks of term ahead.

Have a lovely and safe fortnight ahead.
 

Mr John Ralph
Head of Gawura

New Junior School and Gawura Student Protocol - Early departures

The school day officially finishes at 3:10pm for Junior School and Gawura. If you need to collect your child/ren prior to 3:10pm an adult must collect them and sign them out at Ground floor Reception. This will be recorded as a partial absence.

Please email your child's teacher and jsreception@sacs.nsw.edu.au to notify of an early pick up which enables them to be ready and waiting at L7 Reception, minimising wait times.

If no notification is given, parents will need to sign in at Ground floor Reception and head to your child's class to collect them in person. They may be on the rooftop or in an alternate classroom setting - timetables are located outside each classroom door. This process can take up to 15 minutes per child if unnotified and our administration staff are unable to accommodate the volume of interuptions.

Please endeavour to make all appointments where possible outside of school hours and limit early holiday / weekend departures.

Mrs​ Rhonda Robson
Deputy Head of School (Primary) / Director of Primary Education

It has been so lovely to meet new students and families over the last few weeks. I trust you’re all settling into our community well and navigating the intricacies of our school’s setting.

In order to keep our students, staff and community safe, I wanted to take this chance to remind you please not to park on Bathurst Street to pick up your Junior School and Gawura students. We have a regular convoy of buses each afternoon coming through that parking bay who will need the entirety of the area to park, drop off and pick up students safely.

Please do continue to use Kent Street for afternoon pickup and morning drop off, being reminded that many other families want to share this same facility. In the morning, if your drop off could be efficient, we’d be grateful. In the afternoon, please be willing to go around the block so that we can safely share the parking bay and not create a blockage for drivers coming up from Bathurst Street or down Kent Street.

We are grateful for your support in keeping your children safe and traffic moving along efficiently.
 

Mr​​​​ Selwyn Wu
Deputy Head of Junior School (Pastoral Care and Educational Admin)

Resilience

Our experiences over the past few years have highlighted the importance of resilience for us all, including our children, as we have had to bounce back from countless setbacks and disappointments. As part of growing resilience at school we focus on students developing the Character Strengths of being courageous, open minded and persistent. We encourage you to ask your child about the ways in which they are growing these strengths in the classroom. We also seek to support parents in a number of ways with the SchoolTV parenting resource providing some great ideas and resources on resilience and our upcoming guest speaker Collett Smart, will be with us on Wednesday 15 March speaking on Raising Resilient Kids. Please use the registartion link in Upcoming events to book - we are looking forward to seeing you!

Surveys- As part of monitoring the wellbeing of our students we periodically ask them to complete age appropriate surveys related to friendships, and social and emotional wellbeing. If you would like further information about these please contact bwake@sacs.nsw.edu.au.

Mrs​​​​ Bronwyn Wake
Junior School and Gawura Wellbeing Coordinator and Psychologist/Counsellor

AMEB

Congratulations to Emma Dowsett who recently achieved a B+ in Grade 2 Piano.

Practice

Please come along to the Chapter House on Thursday 9 March to hear a talk on helping your child with practice. Details of the event have been sent via Rev. Newling and the Junior School and I hope to see many of you there.

Ensembles

Junior Ensembles have made a good start and are already showing promising signs of great performances throughout the year! Please ensure your child is punctual for all rehearsals and if they will be absent, please email krobertson@sacs.nsw.edu.au to let us know.

Mrs​​​​ Kate Robertson
Head of Music (K‑6)

Premier's Reading Challenge 2023

It’s that time again. The Premier’s Reading Challenge (PRC) 2023 opened on Monday 27 February!

By now, all families should have received an email from us containing information regarding your child’s personal username and password, as well as a summary of the rules of the challenge. As soon as you receive those login details, you can start uploading the titles of the books your child has read since the challenge finished last year.

What’s new for the PRC in 2023?

A big change has been made to PRC rules for 2023. The same number of books still need to be read to complete the challenge; 30 books for students in Kindergarten to Year 2, and 20 books for students in Year 3-6. However, students may now include 10 personal choice books as part of their tally.

Every year the PRC adds new books to their lists, so please encourage your child to keep an eye out for the PRC-stickered books in our library. There are literally hundreds of titles to choose from!

This year at St Andrew's Cathedral School, students in Year 3-6 will be introduced to the PRC student site, a user-friendly and engaging way for students to access book recommendations for their year level and to enter the books they have read into their own reading records. We will be encouraging students to become more active participants in the challenge process.

For more information, including book lists and the comprehensive rules, please refer to the PRC website https://online.det.nsw.edu.au/prc/home.html

If your child attended a different school last year and completed the PRC there, please be in touch with me so I can request that their records be merged. Unless records are merged, 2023 will be recorded as their first PRC year and they will miss out on the Gold and Platinum Awards which are based on their accumulative PRC tally. If you have any other questions or issues, feel free to email me ncotter@sacs.nsw.edu.au

Although the aim of the challenge is for students to read a certain number of books, we promote the challenge for the purpose of igniting a love for reading in our students. Each year, there are many stories of children successfully completing the challenge and being exposed to books they would never normally pick up.

So, for the joy of reading, and the growth that happens in our hearts, minds and lives as we read, let the challenge begin!
 

Mrs Nicole Cotter
Coordinator of Digital and Information Literacy

We are now in the thick of our sporting programme in the Junior School and Gawura, a major carnival already completed, we are heading to our first ASISSA representative carnival for the year and already part way through both the ASISSA inter-school and IPSHA Saturday sports competitions. We wish all our swimmers the best of luck at the ASISSA carnival on Thursday 16 March!

Saturday sport

We have continued our successful start to the ISPHA Saturday sport competition with all teams already showing improvement in the first three rounds. A special mention to our Year 6 Girls B team who have started the season winning every game, a successful start under tough conditions with a small squad. The 6A Boys basketball team are looking strong this year with some great results and showing real development from 2022. I would like to thank the parents for your support and encouragement of all St Andrew's Cathedral School teams at sport already this year.

CIS Trial information

The CIS competition has two levels above school level competition, i.e. St Andrew’s sport progresses on to ASISSA sport which then progresses on to CIS level. As you can see, the level is high and therefore, I need to ensure that any nominations that I make need to be safe and appropriate.

The CIS sports that will trial in Term 1 this year are:

AFL: Girls and Boys – nominations send prior to Monday, 20 March.

If your child plays at a high level and is interested in trialling for the CIS in the above sports, please send an email to jssport@sacs.nsw.edu.au and include:

1. The full name of your child,
2. The age your child is turning/will have turned as of the 31 December 2023,
3. The sport and age group (if age group is applicable) that your child would like to nominate for,
4. A supporting letter from their club/rep team to confirm the level at which they are currently competing.

If you are wanting to nominate for any of the above sports, you need to send the above information through prior to the nomination due date stated next to each sport above. If you have any questions, please email me at jssport@sacs.nsw.edu.au
 

Mr Oliver Denny
Head of Sport Junior School

Congratulations!

Congratulations to Maya Hughes as she recently represented Canterbury Touch Association at the Junior State Cup in Wagga.

Maya played in the U12 team and at 10 years of age, was the youngest in the team. In the Quarter finals the team lost to Cronulla who went on to win the competion.

Well done Maya!

Young Archies

Year 5 and 6 students have been arm-deep in Chromacryl paint during the last few weeks! Each one has been working to create a painted portrait from a photograph of someone who is significant in their lives - someone who knows them and whom they know. It’s been an intense and exciting process seeing our students develop in their sketching, colour-creating and painting skills. It’s particularly good now to see the finished portraits as they reach completion. And there are some beautiful pieces!

We will be sending a selection of these finished works across to the Art Gallery of NSW (AGNSW) this weekend in time for the 2023 Young Archie Competition.

All Year 5 and 6 works, once finished, will form a large exhibition as part of our in-house St Andrew's Cathedral School Young Archie Competition on Level 6 and 7 of our Junior School and Gawura areas. Students will be given the opportunity to view all the works and use a judge’s eye to select our own ‘People’s Choice Winner’ and five Highly Commended winners. 

Congratulations to these students whose finished portraits have been selected to go across to the AGNSW for the 2023 National competition:

Charlotte Sims
Serena Liu
Camilla Mao
Chanel Khoe
Nyarla Gordon
Florian Spender McGuinness
Rhys Hughes
Leo Gregory
Samara Nair
Meera Joshi
Katia Delic
Ellowyn Podd

Works below by Charlotte Sims (with painting), Isabelle Wood (standing painting), Rhys Hughes, Samara Nair, Chanel Khoe, Florian Spender McGuinness.

Mrs​​​​ Miriam Daly
Visual Arts Integrator Junior School and Gawura

Tired of your child’s backtalk? Here’s how to stop it.

By Janet Lehman, MSW

Janet Lehman, MSW, is an American social worker who has worked with troubled children and teens for over 30 years. She specialises in child behaviour issues — ranging from anger management and oppositional defiance to more serious criminal behaviour in teens.
This is a great article, well worth the read.

“There isn’t a parent out there who hasn’t heard backtalk from their child. Mumbling under their breath, rolling their eyes, having to always get in the last word. There's no question these behaviours are incredibly frustrating to deal with.

Know the difference between backtalk and verbal abuse.

I want to distinguish between backtalk and verbal abuse because people often confuse these two very different things. If your child has started saying hurtful or harmful things, the line between backtalk and verbal abuse has been crossed.

Backtalk can take several forms.

Backtalk itself can take several forms. One form comes from the child who can’t keep quiet. No matter what you say, they have to have the last word. Then there’s the child who wants you to understand their point after you’ve already said “no.” It’s easy for children to get into the mindset of, “If I could just explain it better, you’d understand my situation.”

So, you’ll get children who present their problem or request repeatedly in the hopes that their parents will give in.

Establish the rules about backtalk and explain them to your child.

The first step to stopping backtalk is to talk with your child during a quiet time and lay down some ground rules. Discussions about these rules are critical to good communication and cooperation down the road.

Be clear about what isn’t acceptable behaviour.

Swearing or being rude is not acceptable, state that clearly to your child. Do this during a calm time. Let your child know exactly what they can and can’t do and tell them the consequences for crossing the line.

Don’t overreact to backtalk.

Most of us will lose our cool and overreact to backtalk at one point or another. We’re overwhelmed, frustrated, and tired of our child’s attitude. In the heat of the moment, it’s easy to have an extreme reaction to something that isn’t particularly important.

Don’t take backtalk personally.

If your child is screaming and yelling, “I hate you! You can’t make me do it,” it feels personal, but it isn’t. Instead, it’s just angry talk, and it’s a behaviour problem, so don’t make it a personal problem between you and your child.

Know when to disengage and walk away.

When tensions start to escalate, and you feel yourself getting drawn in, it’s important to stay calm. Even if you don’t feel calm, try to act that way. How we present ourselves makes all the difference with children. If we don’t get involved in the argument, the argument often dies from neglect.

Giving consequences for backtalk.

Whether or not you want to give consequences for backtalk depends on the situation. Let’s say it’s the first time something disrespectful or rude ever flew out of your child’s mouth. You’re probably going to set a limit and say, “This is not okay,” but you might decide not to give a consequence because you don’t expect them to do it again.

But if it keeps happening, and you’ve set clear limits about what’s allowed, then it makes more sense to look at consequences.

Focus on one behaviour at a time.

Choose your battles wisely and focus on one behaviour at a time.”

There are some wonderful pieces of advice in this article. Let’s be honest, we are not going to get them all right! It is a step-by-step process. Have a go and see how it changes some backtalk situations at home.

Mrs Joy Rohrlach
Year 5 Leader

Congratulations!

Exciting news! On Friday 24 February, the Year 6 ISDA team won their debate against St Aloysius. The topic was that Australia should ban the sale of meat. The St Andrew's Cathedral School team worked well in the prep room and stayed calm even with the excitement of a late adjudicator. Many congratulations to the team!

Audrey Ash
Joshua Ahn
Taali Paku
Sol Crisp
Thomas Perry
Owen Barkaway-Jones
Frederick Beck
Audrey Lau
 

Dr​​​​ Jessica Lim
English Teacher + TSAS Teaching Intern

Mentoring at St Andrew's Cathedral School

Mentoring is considered one of the most effective pedagogical strategies available for gifted students. It provides opportunities for strong intellectual stimulation, individualisation of learning, engagement with positive role models, authentic encouragement, and support to progress in areas of skill and talent. At St Andrew's Cathedral School, we have peer mentoring with our Senior School students (through our Project Catalyst programme), as well as external mentoring with professionals across a range of fields. These programmes are currently limited, with students selected according to a strict criterion.

Bligh Jordan recently participated in the Junior Vets Programme as a result of his mentorship with Louie Vassallo, Education Officer at Sydney Zoo. Below is an interview about Bligh’s mentoring experience, as well as the exciting opportunity he had to partake in this exclusive programme.

What was your mentoring experience like with Louie from Sydney Zoo?

It was very interesting! Getting to talk with an expert on animals was rather engaging. He answered all of my questions each week via email, and even offered to Zoom call our entire grade! Everyone got to ask their questions about the zoo and wildlife.

How were you selected to participate in the Junior Vets Programme?

In one of our mentoring conversations, Louie invited me to join a day of the Junior Vets Programme. Specifically, the day where the group visited him at Sydney Zoo. It took one and a half hours to get there, but my dad and I both agree it was worth it. I am still very grateful for the opportunity.

What did you do at the Junior Vets Programme?

At the Junior Vets Programme, we got to tour Sydney Zoo and learn about animal trade between zoos. We even got to see the exclusive veterinarian area. Everyone was excited about the dart gun. A rather funny moment was when we saw a tube used to unblock a rhinos’ airways, which was at least one metre long!

What was your favourite animal to work with and why?

Well, there wasn’t one specifically, but there was an enclosure I liked. It was kind of an African area housing zebras, giraffes, gazelles and rhinoceroses.

Would you recommend the Junior Vets Programme to other students?

If you’re looking to become a biologist, environmental scientist, or ecologist, then this programme may help you. If you’re looking to become a vet of any kind, then this will also really help you prepare for the career. Overall, if you want to help animals, the Junior Vets Programme is the place for you.

If you would like to mentor a student at St Andrew's in your area of expertise, please get in touch with Mrs Rebecca Lord rlord@sacs.nsw.edu.au. We are always looking for new connections and experiences for our students!
 

Mrs Rebecca Lord
Gifted and Talented Coordinator

Ezra Chin and Marcus Farley from 6O in their new Laboratory Coats for Science in the Junior School.

The students are planting cotton seeds to grow as they study the Science Unit from Farm to Fibre in Term 1 Stage 3.
 

Mr​​​​ Jim Boddy
Junior School Science Specialist Teacher

School holidays

TheirCare have announced the upcoming School Holidays programmes available. Please click link below for more information.

TheirCare April School Holidays Programme

If you have friends or families interested in enrolling at St Andrew’s Cathedral School, invite them along this Wednesday

This event is designed to provide interested families looking for K-Year 4 enrolments with information about our unique school and the opportunity to explore the school after hours.

With long waiting lists now into many year groups, including Year 5, 6 and 7, the Junior School is now becoming the best point of entry. For more information about the evening, download this flyer.

Please note this is not for families already enrolled, but an opportunity for you to promote our school to friends and family who may be interested in enrolling.

Wednesday 8 March
4.30pm Tour
5.15pm Information session
St Andrew’s House

Coffee in Chapter House

Music parents, all ages

All music parents are warmly invited to join us for Coffee in Chapter House to meet other parents and key Junior School music staff. This is an opportunity to learn simple habits to transform music practice at home, whether your child is new to learning an instrument or has been learning for some time.

Thursday 9 March, 8am to 9am
Chapter House

Please RSVP by Monday 6 March.

Come and join the P&F Executive and other parents at the first General Meeting of the year to discuss current school activities, school focuses, upcoming school events and future plans.

Each meeting has a school report from a senior member of staff and an opportunity for parents to ask questions in an informal setting. You will also hear about P&F fundraising initiatives and ways that parents and friends can support the school.

Attending P&F meetings is a great way to get to know more about the school, meet other parents and to get involved.
Cheese and wine provided!

No need to RSVP – everyone welcome

Tuesday 14 March, 6pm
The Community Hub, Level 4, St Andrew’s House

Parent seminar: Collett Smart – Raising Resilient Kids

Most people agree that the wellbeing of their child is important, but have you ever wondered how we can actually teach the skills of wellbeing? At St Andrew's Cathedral School, there are many ways in which we approach this complex task, including our weekly classroom Social and Emotional Wellbeing (SEW) lessons. These lessons focus on the development of our St Andrew’s Character Strengths, emotional regulation, attention and awareness, positive relationships, coping and resilience, habits and goals.

Are you keen to enhance your relationship with your child and help them grow in confidence and resilience?

In this parent seminar, well-known psychologist and presenter Collett Smart will outline:

• The factors that develop resilience in children
• The research on what young people need from the adults and carers in their lives
• Practical tips for enhancing your relationship with your child.

For all Junior School and Gawura parents and carers.

Wednesday 15 March, 5-6pm
Community Hub, Level 4 St Andrew’s House

Do you or someone you know have a son or daughter who is a gifted learner?

Please invite them along to our annual information night.

Our school caters for gifted and talented students within an inclusive cohort by providing specialised educational programmes and opportunities. This interactive seminar will provide parents and educators with tips on how to best support gifted and talented students from Kindergarten to Year 12.

Our guest speaker for this evening is educator and author Michele Juratowitch, a frequent presenter at conferences, author and co-author of Make a Twist: Curriculum differentiation for gifted students and Releasing the Brakes for High Ability Learners. For more information download the flyer.

Wednesday 22 March, 6pm-7.45pm
St Andrew's House
Cost: Free

Come on a journey of political satire with our talented drama students!

Our 2023 Major Drama Production audience will be taken on a journey of satire where the profiteering plans of large corporations and conspirators will be pitted against the beloved Aurelie (better known as the Madwoman of Chaillot) who resolves to stand against destruction, plunder and conspiracy.

To paraphrase the playwright Giraudoux: “the prudence of a single woman is sufficient to break the teeth of madness of the entire world”. Set in Paris, the play explores themes of corporate corruption, environmental degradation, and the power of the individual to stand up for change.

Thursday 23 – Saturday 25 March
Upper Chapter House
$35 Adults / $20 Students

Evening performances 6.30pm on 23, 24 and 25 March
Saturday matinee at 2pm on 25 March

All are welcome. Book your seats to one or all of the sessions below!