School Vision
St Matthew’s School empowers children to embrace life-long learning, and grow and develop as God intends.
This week’s prayer has been chosen for All Saints Day, Nov 1:
Bless the many parted souls
who lived their lives with grace.
Bless the saints in heaven,
gathered in that special place.
May we tell their stories
and remember all the ways
they lived their faith
and spent their days.
There is glory and reward,
even if at first there’s strife.
Oh, blessed saints, you help us see
a path that’s to eternal life.
May we always hold them dear
and know their life and place.
May we know their inspiration
and aspire to their grace.
Amen.
Dear Parents & Caregivers,
On Friday, staff celebrated World Teachers’ Day. Thank you to all of our beautiful families for their kind words and thoughtful messages. Amongst other treats, we were spoiled with a yummy morning tea supplied by our generous P&F and a delicious chocolate cake, supplied by Imogen Nicholas. We are so lucky to work in a school where we feel supported and appreciated.
Chicken Pen SOS
We need some clever, clever people to help design and build our chicken pen.
Can you help????
As part of our commitment to reducing our waste footprint and teaching our students about sustainability, St Matthew’s will be adopting some chickens next term. We would love to build the chicken pen this term. The run will go alongside and behind the sports sheds. We now need some handy and talented parents to project manage this masterpiece. Ideally, we would like to start building the structure during our Busy Bee on November 6, however, we are happy to fit in with other people’s work schedules.
If you think you can help, either by donating materials, designing the run, building the structure or building the laying boxes, please email susan.milton@cewa.edu.au or speak with your classroom teacher.
Busy Bee this Saturday
On Saturday November 6, we would love some volunteers to build our chicken coop (see above for more details), assemble the “Our Story” family pickets and complete a general tidy up of the school gardens and grounds.
If you are able to donate your time and hard-working hands for any period of time from 8:30am to 12:30pm, please email susan.milton@cewa.edu.au, or just turn up on the day. Children are naturally welcome to come and help, or just to play! A sausage sizzle will be available for all our hard-working heroes.
Open Day
St Matthew’s will be having an Open Day on Wednesday 3 November. This will coincide with the Year 3 and Year 4 STEM Showcase. Parents and Community members are invited to visit our school from 2:15 – 4:15pm. Visitors will be able to visit classrooms and join in learning activities.
Staffing 2022
St Matthew’s School has a full-time Early Years teaching position and a full-time Education Assistant position available for 2022. Please click on the links below for more information.
Early Years Teacher
Early Years Education Assistant
Invitation For Participation In Aboriginal Equity Audit
St Matthew’s School has been invited by Catholic Education Western Australia Ltd (CEWA) to take part in the Aboriginal Equity Audit. This audit is an opportunity for CEWA to collect key data to inform our system’s Strategic Directions and ongoing journey towards Reconciliation.
CEWA is committed to providing a culturally safe environment for its entire community, particularly its Aboriginal students and employees.
The outcomes of the Aboriginal Equity Audit will inform the development of a CEWA Cultural Security Framework, due to commence in 2022. The goal is to provide a high achieving, culturally inclusive education for Aboriginal students and outstanding employment opportunities for Aboriginal employees.
CEWA has engaged the services of Dr Juli Coffin, from the Telethon Kids Institute in Broome, to undertake the Aboriginal Equity Audit across a selection of schools in Western Australia.
Over the course of Term 4, Dr Coffin and her research team will visit our school to conduct a series of short interviews with staff, students, and community members. The interviews are intended to take between 10 to 30 minutes, to cause minimal disruption to classrooms and the teaching and learning taking place.
Should you prefer for your child to not take part in the Aboriginal Equity Audit, please let us know by emailing susan.milton@cewa.edu.au
Principal’s KINDNESS award
On Monday morning, I presented my first Principal’s Award for Kindness. Children are able to nominate each other for this award. Recipients of this incredible award will have their photo added to the Kindness tree, be acknowledged in the newsletter and receive a prize. This week, the award went to Maleah (Yr 6) for always helping younger students and helping whenever she is needed.
Susan Milton
Principal
Principal Focus – Fears & Phobias
I am sure many houses were visited by pirates, ghosts and skeletons on Sunday night for the Halloween tradition of trick-or-treating. Whether you love this practice, or loath it, it made me start thinking about this idea of “scary”.
As we all know, kids can be scared of many different things. Some appear very logical, like snakes, and some very illogical, like bananas or the colour orange:
It’s normal for children to sometimes show signs of anxiety, worries and fears. In most cases, anxiety in children comes and goes and doesn’t last long.
In fact, different anxieties often develop at different stages of development. For example:
- Babies and toddlers often fear loud noises, heights, strangers and separation.
- Preschoolers might start to show fear of being on their own and of the dark.
- School-age children might be afraid of supernatural things (like ghosts), social situations, failure, criticism or tests, and physical harm or threat.
Babies and young children don’t tend to worry about things. For children to be worried, they have to imagine the future and bad things that might happen in it. This is why worries become more common in children over 8 years of age.
(https://raisingchildren.net.au/toddlers/health-daily-care/mental-health/anxiety-in-children)
Maggie Dent, in her article “Tips for busting phobias & fears for frightened children” explains that memory plays a large role in the creation of fears:
Memories are not fixed though, they’re fluid and are more collections of associations rather than being reliable, accurate retellings.
We need to keep in mind that our conscious thoughts, often triggered by a strong memory that can be good or scary, then spontaneously trigger our hippocampus and limbic system to respond with emotions and bodily sensations.
Many parents help their children with their fears by avoiding exposing them to the experience, which may sound like a loving thing to do. Sadly over time this feeds the implicit memory and makes the neural pathway in the brain even stronger.
It’s always important to remember that kids often look to the important adults in their lives to make sense of this crazy world. If we are afraid, they will most likely be afraid as well.
Maggie goes on to suggest that a process of gently exposing children to the source of their fear, might help them to gradually become less afraid. In the following example, she is focussing on a fear of dogs:
- First buy (or borrow) some inexpensive soft dog toys.
- Create some imaginary play with these safe, good dogs.
- Read picture books about good dogs – Fearless by Colin Thompson is a lovely one to start with.
- Find lots of videos on YouTube of dogs being funny and loving. Make sure they are shown on a full size screen rather than a smart phone because the images are closer to real images and easier to anchor different memory associations.
- Find someone who has a good, safe, friendly dog for a visit to the children’s home. Take the introduction slowly. Remember dog etiquette – always ask owner’s permission, never move suddenly or go near a dog’s food, and pat gently on the back first before top of the head.
- Have several visits with the same dog – gradually playing more with it.
- Finally head to a playground – chatting positively, ‘maybe we will see another good dog…?’ and keep your fingers crossed!
This step-by-step process helps kids to take back control and may even free them from what can become a life-affecting phobia.
Be brave,
