Dear Parents,

Welcome to Week 10 families! I hope everyone enjoyed their Easter long weekend and had an opportunity to spend time with family and friends. As we head into our final weeks of Term One, I have encouraged students to ‘earn their break’ by continuing to try their best, share their gratitude, show empathy and ensure that we are continuing to develop positive learning habits but also  ‘build our community’ through our actions.

Hospital Visits

With this idea of ‘building community’ in mind, I wanted to congratulate our students and staff on their recent visits to Batlow Hospital. These visits are a great way for students to connect with the community, meet individuals with a different perspective and experience of life and engage in a form of service that brings a lot of joy to people’s lives. It was with great pride that I watched our K-2 class engage so positively with the residents and then hear of the connections made by our Year 5/6 students’. Well done!

School Uniform

As our mornings get cooler and with students now wearing jumpers to school, I want to encourage families to ensure that names are clearly written on tags. As much as I would love for jumpers to go straight into bags after they are removed, we know this isn’t always the case, so the name on school clothes is really helpful!

Furthermore, I am more than happy for students to be wearing Summer or Winter uniform in the coming weeks. We are certainly approaching colder weather but are still getting some beautiful sunny days and I am happy to leave this decision up to parents for the time being.

Western Region Cross Country - WE NEED YOUR HELP!

As I have flagged in previous newsletters, Batlow will be hosting the Western Region Cross Country on Thursday 2nd May. This is a fairly big undertaking for the school and our community council. With the support of St Joseph’s, Adelong, we are running a canteen, a raffle, assisting with First Aid and standing at check points on the course. If you are interested in assisting with this, please fill out the attached form. This will assist both schools and their Community Councils with their organisation on the day.

Cross Country Helpers - CAN YOU HELP?

Donation of Books

A couple of years ago, Anglicare organised a visit from Dave Powman to Batlow, where he talked to our students about his experience with learning difficulties at school. Dave went on to write a series of cartoon books that talked about overcoming challenges. I wanted to say a big thank you to Joanne Murrell from Anglicare and Dave for their delivery of a number of these Powman books to our students of St Mary’s yesterday morning.