Dear Parents,

This coming weekend, children from our School and Parish will receive the Sacrament of Holy Communion for the first time. Holy Communion is an incredible gift and the amazing thing about the gift is that it can be unwrapped time and time again in our lives, and every time we do this, the gift will be brand new. Each new unwrapping gives us the opportunity to gain a better understanding of what the gift actually is. When St Paul wrote to the people of Corinth, he gave the earliest description of the Last Supper in the New Testament.   Paul points out that Jesus said, “This is My Body”, and that he did not say, “This is a symbol of My Body”. Jesus was most definite in what he said: “This is My Body” and, likewise, “This is My Blood”. During his papacy, Pope John Paul further reminded us that we are all united through the Eucharist, that though we are many, we share one bread. Bread is made up of many grains of wheat but in the bread the difference between them is not apparent; likewise, we are joined to one another and united in Christ through the Eucharist. Hence, we have good reason for a family to celebrate when a family member receives Communion for the first time.

The people, who lived and associated with Jesus, had the comfort and support of his actual presence. Jesus foresaw the need for his presence to remain with them so they could carry on with his mission and so, the events of the Last Supper. For us, who have so many distractions in life, we might sometimes forget about God, forget about the Eucharist, forget to pray, and forget to read the New Testament. First Communion day for a family member, can be a time of renewal for all family members, perhaps a time to unwrap the gift again and discover an understanding that is truly relevant to where we are in life. The Eucharist is the Sacrament of God’s love and love is something that all of us can use plenty of. I ask that our School Community keep the First Communicants and their families in our prayers as they continue on their Catholic faith journey. I take this opportunity to thank the Parish Sacramental Team, especially  members of our staff Mrs MGinnity, Mrs Simpson, Miss Price, Mrs Bryant, Mrs Brandes, Mrs Bryan and Mrs Christieson for their time, dedication and work in assisting in preparing the children for this sacrament.

“TAKE AND EAT THIS IS MY BODY

TAKE AND DRINK THIS IS MY BLOOD”

SEMESTER ONE REPORTS AND PARENT / TEACHER INTERVIEWS
The Semester One school reports are currently being prepared by the teaching staff of Mary Immaculate. The reports will be distributed on Friday 28 June. The staff have put a great deal of effort into ensuring that the reports contain an accurate reflection of student achievement and effort over the first Semester of this year. The key to understanding the report is a C grade means that a child is meeting specific grade outcomes over that Semester. For a child to achieve an A grade, they need to have demonstrated that they are exceeding grade outcome by an extensive way. Parents will have the opportunity to discuss their child’s report during the scheduled interviews. The Parent / Teacher interviews for Semester 1 will be held from Monday 1 July to Thursday 4 July. Now that our school is using the COMPASS Office System, we will be using an on-line booking procedure. A note explaining the procedure was sent home last Monday. So far just over 20% of bookings have been made.  If you have any difficulties with the process please contact the school office.

GOOD LUCK - On behalf of our School Community I would like to wish Chaise A (Year 6 Blue) all the best when he represents MacKillop at the PSSA Under 11 Rugby League Carnival next week. I am sure Chaise will do himself, our school and our Diocese proud. Mr Warren will also be attending the carnival in the capacity of the MacKillop Primary Open team coach. Best of luck Mr Warren.

SPARTAN – A - THON - I am looking forward to seeing the children participate in our inaugural SPARTAN-A-THON tomorrow. A reminder that the children have permission to wear Ninja mufti play clothes. Closed in shoes are essential. Thank you to all families for procuring sponsors for their children and to the P and F fundraising committee for organising the event.

Have a great week and let Christ be our way and life.

Don Spencer

Principal

PROFESSIONAL LEARNING - At Mary Immaculate the staff has an ongoing commitment to professional learning. The staff benefits from attending inservices, in curriculum areas, that assists them in providing quality learning opportunities for the students in their class. The following staff have or will attend professional learning and hence will be away from school.

PUPIL SUPERVISION

STAFF DEVELOPMENT DAY - PUPIL FREE DAY TERM 3

The staff of May Immaculate will be attending an overnight retreat in Mittagong from Thursday evening 25 July until Friday afternoon 26 July 2019. The children will not be required to attend school on Friday 26 July (Friday Week 1 Term 3)

AVOIDING THE POLICTICS OF PARENTING
PARENTING IDEAS - Michael Grose

My daughter, who had a sleep adverse baby couldn’t believe her ears when a new mum in a mother’s group proudly announced that her four month old slept through the night. My daughter thought, “What am I doing wrong?”

Approaching this mother to discover her sleep secret, my daughter learned that this boast was made on the back of some dodgy data. The four year old had slept the night through once, but this mother thought it was worth boasting about.

I welcomed my daughter to the politics of parenting where benchmarking of kids’ physical and social development, their behaviour and academic progress can become a constant.

The pitfall of benchmarking with other children

Comparing your child with others is a stress-inducing and, ultimately, useless activity. It’s hard to resist, as we tend to assess our progress in any area of life by checking out how we compare with our peers.

When you were a child in school you probably compared yourself to your schoolmates. Your teachers may not have graded you, but you knew who the smart kids were and where you ranked in the pecking order.

Now that you have kids of your own do you still keep an eye on your peers? Do you use the progress and behaviour of their kids as benchmarks to help you assess your own performance as well as your child’s progress? Or perhaps you compare your child to yourself at the same age?

Benchmarking children’s progress with that of other children is not a wise parenting strategy. Inevitably, it will lead to parent frustration, as there will always be a child who performs better than your own on any scale you use.

Kids develop at their own rates

Each child has his or her own developmental clock, which is nearly impossible to alter. There are late bloomers, early developers, bright sparks and steady-as-you-go kids everywhere. It’s the first group that can cause the most concern for parents who habitually compare children to siblings, their friends’ kids and even themselves when they were in school.

The trick is to focus on your child’s improvement and effort and use your child’s results as the benchmark for his or her progress and development. “Your spelling is better today than it was a month ago” is a better measure of progress than “Your spelling is the best in the class!”

Gender matters

It’s no secret that different architects developed boys and girls brains. One major difference lies around timing, or maturity. The maturity gap between boys and girls is anywhere between 12 months and two years, and seems to be consistent all the way to adulthood.

Quite simply, girls have a developmental head start over boys in areas such as handwriting, verbal skills and relationship skills. Boys benefit greatly from teaching strategies designed for their specific needs. They also benefit from having teachers and parents who recognise that patience is a virtue when teaching and raising boys, as it seems to take longer for many boys to learn and develop.

Kids have different talents, interests and strengths

So your eight-year-old can’t hit a tennis ball like Novak Djokavic, even though your neighbour’s child can. Perhaps your neighbour’s teenager is a piano virtuoso, while your fourteen year old’s idea of musical talent is listening to Spotify while doing homework. Comparisons are stressful, as they can bear no relationship to children’s interests and talents.

It’s better to help your child or young person identify his or her own talents and interests. And also recognise that strengths and interests may be completely different than those of his or her peers and siblings.

Avoid linking your parenting self-esteem to your child’s performance

Take pride on your children’s performance at school, in sport or their leisure activities. Seeing your child doing well is one of the unsung pleasures of parenting. You should also celebrate their achievements and milestones such as taking their first steps, getting their first goal in a game or getting great marks at school.

However, you shouldn’t have too much personal stake in your children’s success or in their milestones, as this close association makes it hard to separate yourself from them. It may also lead to excessive parental pressure for kids to do well, which is an acknowledged source of anxiety for many children and young people.

The maxim “You are not your child” is a challenging but essential parental concept to live by. Doing so takes real maturity and altruism, but it is the absolute foundation of that powerful thing known as ‘unconditional love’.

(Michael Grose- author of Parenting Ideas)

Congratulations to the following children who have won a Morning Tea with the Principal:

Riley S K Blue, Isabelle S K Gold, Ajok D 4 Gold, Mia W 5 Gold,

Jonathon M 5 Gold

Happy Birthday to the following children who will be celebrating a birthday this week:

Sienna W, Sophie R, Cohen A, Lincoln H, Indyana A, Isaiah S, Jayden D, Max D, Jaxson H and Charlee P

What a beautiful Grade Liturgy Year Six!

On Thursday last week, Year Six had the opportunity to share a reverent Liturgy around Pentecost and how the Holy Spirit fills us with hope.

You can see that they are a very creative group – representing the gifts of the Spirit as a tree.

Important Dates to Remember:

Sacrament of First Communion

Saturday 22 June 2019

Sunday 23 June 2019

Sacred Heart Mass

Friday 28 June 2019

Year One Grade Liturgy

Thursday 4 July 2019

Have you thought about joining Alpha?

On Wednesday 6 June, we celebrated World Environment Day. We came together as a School Community to share in a special Liturgy that focussed on the theme of World Environment Day – Air Pollution. Approximately 95% of the World suffers from Air Pollution with Australia being one of the lucky few who is not greatly affected by this issue – yet!

During our Liturgy we connected our air quality with the plants in our environment. Each grade was given a plant to take care of that will be planted in our Dreaming Garden. Each grade will be responsible for planting it, watering it and generally looking after it, with the aim of giving students ownership of a living thing in their environment and therefore gaining a feeling of responsibility.

We are hoping that our Dreaming Garden will thrive and produce fruit to further engage our students in their local environment. More photos to come as the plants make it into the ground.

Mrs Kylie Boss

Wollongong Environment Network Contact, Mary Immaculate

Congratulations to the two classes who earned Gold Stars last week –  K Green and 6 Gold well done, keep it up!!! Again, some of the other classes came close, but we still have two classes yet to achieve at least one…. we just need to remember to bring our Library bags in and return our overdue books!

A reminder of Library days:

Monday –Year 2

Tuesday – Year 6, Year 5

Wednesday – Year 3, Year 1

Thursday – Year 4, Kinder

As it is nearing the end of Term please check around home for any Library books or Classroom readers which may need to be returned. We also ask if you can have a look for our spare Library bags which we use to lend to students who may forget theirs. There is quite a large collection of our purple bags which again need to be returned to the Library so that other students can use them. Thank you.

Damaged Books: If a book is damaged or torn while at home, please do not attempt to repair it. While we appreciate your efforts, we have the correct materials at school and it is easier for us, and better for the book, if we repair it here. Using sticky tape to attach torn or loose pages is not ideal. Please just ask your child to let us know, and we can fix it. The students do not get into trouble if a book is accidentally damaged, we would rather know about it so we can do something about it! If a book is damaged beyond repair, then we do ask that it either be paid for or replaced by something similar. Please try to keep the books away from younger siblings – we have had a number of books lately which have had to be thrown out because they have been scribbled in and torn, or water-damaged. Thank you for your support in this matter.

Premiers' Reading Challenge: Keep up the good work, we have nearly 20 students who have already completed the challenge, and many more well under way who have logged in and registered their books read so far. Remember if you are having difficulties logging in to register the books just come in to the Library at Lunch 2. The website has the list of books as well as the login for each student:

https://products.schools.nsw.edu.au/prc/booklist/home.html

You can also go to our Oliver home page at oliver.dow.catholic.edu.au/miev and click on the link to take you to the website. Remember Kinder – Year 2 must read 30 books, and Years 3 - 6 must read 20, with only 5 Personal Choice books allowed.

"Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him."

                                                        Maya Angelou, Poet

Happy reading!

Mrs Sue Bryant, Teacher Librarian

Encouraging Positive Behavior

We all want our children to behave well, yet sometimes it is easy to forget that children don’t have the life experience we have. We often assume they know how to behave in all situations when in fact they are still trying to navigate the how to do this. Our child's behaviour is often a refection of what they are experiencing and feeling.  Once we understand where the behaviour is coming from we can then know how to respond. For some children a change in routine, lack of sleep, feeling un-well or new situations can see them act out in ways we may feel are not positive. As parents our role is to help guide them in life and for this to happen we need to understand what is triggering the behaviour we are seeing. This then helps us know how best to respond and support them to make positive behaviour choices. Tips to encourage positive behaviours include:

• Actively listen to your child – hear what they are saying and how they feel without judgement – listen to hear not to respond, take time to understand their perspective.
• Make your expectations clear about how your children need to behave.
• Encourage self reflection – ask what they could do differently next time
• Set clear limits and make any consequence fair, don’t over react.
• Model the behaviour you want to see in your child, remember they learn from you.
• Give warning of transitions in activities, moving from playtime to dinner, bed time etc this allows your child to prepare for change
• Pick your battles – Is it really important, does it really matter and is it worth the fight, teaching children how to let go of little things is just as important in learning to manage behaviours
• Praise your child when you see them demonstrating good behaviour, this helps them feel great and reinforce positive behaviour.
• Encourage responsibility - by allowing your child some age appropriate responsibility you are teaching them independence a skill for life
• Mistakes are ok – let your child know that they will make mistakes and it helps us to learn how we can make better choices moving forward.

Most importantly have fun with your children, they want your attention, spend time playing with them, talking to them and enjoying them.

Rita Maher

School Counsellor

CatholicCARE Wollongong

25-27 Auburn St (PO Box 1174) Wollongong 2500

Phone:  | Fax:

ritam@catholiccare.dow.org.au

www.catholiccare.dow.org.au

The Mini Vinnies Team would like to say a huge thank you to the Mary Immaculate School Community for their generous support of the Sweet Treats Stall last Thursday. As a school, we raised $685 to send to the St Vincent de Paul Society which will help support the 2019 Winter Appeal. What a fantastic effort!

 Mrs Biviano and the Mini Vinnies Team

It's not always easy for kids to understand the value of money especially in our increasingly ditigal world.  To help your chlid to develop their saving skills and learn to be more resonsible with money, you can choose for them to be part of School Banking.

On Monday 24 June 2019 at Morning Assembly Natalie from the Commonwealth Bank will be here to talk about the benefits of School Banking and to answer any questions you may have.