Term 4 - Week 8 - Newsletter

Prayer of the Week

From our Principal

Over the last few weeks, students from Year 5 have been busily preparing, practising and presenting ‘speeches’ in readiness for the 2024 School and House Leaders voting procedure and subsequent announcement.  From the initial drafting stage, to the actual speech presentation, through to the ultimate announcement of our new leaders, our students will experience a vast plethora of emotions: pressure, expectation, excitement, nervousness, relief and anxiety in the lead up to the declaration of new leaders. 

However, for all but a few students, these emotions will very quickly turn to disappointment, sadness, embarrassment, shock and even failure when only six student names will be called out.  All of these emotions are perfectly natural and normal, however, endeavouring to reassure children of this is not always easy.

Michael Jordan is not only one of the greatest NBA players of all time, however, one of the greatest athletes in history to grace our planet.   Six championship rings, five NBA MVPs (Most Valuable Player) and six finals MVPs are just a few achievements in his highly celebrated and decorated basketball career. Jordan wasn’t just a great player, he had an amazing work ethic, outlook on life and the ability to inspire and motivate millions of people around the world.  However, he too had major setbacks in life!!

 “I know that fear is an obstacle for some people, but for me it is just an illusion…..   Failure always makes me try harder on the next opportunity.”

Neither of Jordan’s parents were tall, nor were his brothers and sisters beyond average height. Michael himself seemed destined to be short, an unlikely candidate for the professional basketball career he dreamed about. In backyard games with his friends and brothers, he tried to compensate for his height by playing harder; thus was born his fierce desire to win, especially against the odds.

However, he loved basketball very much, his spirit and desire to be able to play in competition events was driven even more by the rivalry with his brother Larry. Everyday, both competed in one on one intense matches in the back yard, and usually Larry dominated his younger brother. In fact, Larry was considered a true athlete of the family by his brother and the High School coach.

The High School coach came to know Michael through Larry and invited Michael to the basketball summer camping prior to his enrollment to High School. He was asked to try to qualify for the university team group. Everyone in the camp admired Michael’s speed and skill, but the coach was discouraged by the possibility that Michael would not reach the minimum height required. So when the list of names of the university team was announced, Michael’s mates-all of them were 198 cm in height-were in the list, but Michael was not.

It was the very moment so deeply imprinted on Michael’s life. He stared at the alphabetically arranged list of names, read and re-read the list several times, feeling sure his coach had mistakenly left his name out. Jordan told Reader’s Digest that when he discovered he had been dropped from the varsity:

“I went through the day numb. After school, I hurried home disappointed and ashamed, closed the door to my room and cried so hard. It was all I wanted–to play on that team.” He added: “It’s probably good that it happened. It made me know what disappointment felt like. And I knew that I didn’t want that feeling ever again.”

Fortunately his mother came to his side and gave him some important advices. “She said that the best thing I could do is to prove to the coach that he had made a mistake”, recalled Michael. “And, leaving my disappointment behind, I started to improve my performance”.

Michael reluctantly rejoined the junior university team squadron. But while he was recognised as a dedicated player, he changed his training intensity. Michael’s sport instructor, Ruby Sutton, was the first to notice that change: “Usually I arrive at school between 07.00 am and 07.30 am. Michael was there before me. Each time I came in and opened the door, I heard the sound of ball bouncing, in autumn, in winter, in summer. Almost every morning I had to ask him to leave the court”. Knowing that his lack of height made him unqualified for the university team, he often tried to get taller by hanging on a horizontal bar.

Behind his competence and spirit, lies the secret: to always appreciate failure and take advantage of it for some goodness. Through the following years Michael used to motivate himself by reflecting on his failure: “Whenever I achieve some success but feel so tired, I often come to think to give up and leave everything. But then I close my eyes and see again that list that didn’t include my name. Usually by doing that my spirit is revived”.

 “You can achieve incomparable level of skill through incomparable spirit and commitment”.

So, for those students who do not hear their name revealed as School Captain or House Leader on Thursday morning, just remember, even the greatest people on Earth experience setbacks, however, it’s how you deal with them which is the true judge of character.  Best of luck!!!

“I can accept failure, but I can’t accept not trying.” – Michael Jordan

God Bless,

Duane Wann

Principal

2024 Staffing Update

In readiness for the 2024 school year, please find below Teacher Allocations.

Techers are currently in the process of determining class groupings for 2024. Should you feel your child would benefit from a ‘break’ or ‘work best’ away from other children (based on a valid reason) within their cohort, can you please email the School Administration Office by this coming Thursday 23^rd November 3pm.

In an endeavour to ensure fairness and equity for teachers, staff, parents and children, unfortunately we are unable and unwilling to accept ‘teacher preferences’ or ‘picking a teacher’ from parents/families.

Principal: Duane Wann

APRE: Kris Byrne

Middle Leader: Trish Wardle

Learning Support Teacher: TBA

Learning Intervention: Daryl Petzler 0.6 FTE, Jordeigh Standfield 0.6 FTE

Prep: Charmaine Tancred, Bec Nystrom,

Year 1: Hayley Fairweather, Katie Hargrave, Joy Wright

Year 2: Carmel Weir, Deena Jones

Year 3: Matthew Barnes, Lynda Rowling

Year 4: Clare Wilson, Anita Roberts, Leah Berry

Year 5: David Anderson, Erin McVeigh

Year 6: Russ Fechner, Lisa Souter

Sport/PE: Stacey Hancock

LOTE: Maddy Bermingham 0.4 FTE

Music: Emily Candale 0.4 FTE (Emily will also have a 0.6 Teaching load to be determined)

2024 Step Up Transition Afternoon: Wednesday 29^th November

In preparation for the 2024 school year, children will engage in a Step-Up Transition Afternoon on Wednesday 29^th November from 1:45pm – 2:45pm. The purpose of this afternoon is for children to engage with and spend the afternoon with their allocated teacher prior to the commencement of the 2024 school year.

From our Acting APRE

Wow, only two more weeks left. What a busy term it has been. Over the term, we have had the pleasure of welcoming many of our 2024 Prep students and families along for our STM Prep Transition mornings. It was great to see so many smiling children and parents attend!

Christmas Concert

This Wednesday, 22nd November,  we will hold our Christmas Concert. Information has been sent out via sentral. Depending on the weather, our Christmas Concert plans might need to be changed. Please keep an eye on our Facebook page and sentral for updates.

Year 6 Graduation

On Monday 27th November, we will officially farewell our 2023 Year 6 cohort with a Graduation Mass in the STM Church commencing at 6.00 pm. 

A few important messages regarding your child's upcoming graduation mass.

• Students are to arrive at 5:40 pm for a prompt 6:00 pm start
• Students are to wear full formal summer uniform with correct shoes, socks, earrings and hair accessories
• Girls are to have their hair up as per a normal school day
• Students are to wear their name badge for the graduation ceremony. Teachers are more than happy to collect these before the Graduation (any day between now and Monday) and hand them out prior to the graduation ceremony.

End Of Year Mass - Friday 1st December @ 9.00 am

On Friday, 1st December commencing at 9.00 am, we will hold our End of Term/End of Year Mass. It would be great to see as many parents attend this event as possible. This Mass will be held in the SportsCenter.  Please note that our end-of-year Mass was initially down in the school calendar for Thursday 30th November.

God Bless,

Mrs. Wardle

Acting APRE

Student of the Week awards

Congratulations to our Week 8  Term 4 Student of the Week Award Recipients. 

Important Dates to Remember

Student Protection Contacts

From our Sports Desk

Term 4 Interschool Sport 

Interschool sport has concluded for the year. Please return all playing uniforms in a named bag to the Health room. 

Prep – Year 3 Swimming Lessons 

Thank you for your patience. We finally have some information regarding Term 4 swimming lessons. This term swimming lessons will still be conducted by Darren Lange Swimming Academy, however the children will be bused over to the DLSA pool at Wilsonton. To account for the extra travel time, lessons have been reduced to 4 lessons x 1 hour each.   

Below is the timetable for swimming lessons for Prep, Yr 1, Yr 2 & Yr 3 for Term 4. Please ensure your child has their swimming costume, towel, cap and goggles for their lessons and anything else you feel they may require. They do not need sun shirts as they are inside for lessons. Swimming caps are encouraged for both swimming lessons and the swimming carnival at the end of the year.  Children will get changed at school prior to leaving and will get redressed when they return. Please pack slide on, easy to wear thongs/slides for easy removal. Please ensure that ALL items are labelled.  

If there is a problem with your child’s lessons, please speak to their class teacher and they will deal with the concern. Please do not contact the pool directly.  

If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact myself or your child’s classroom teacher.  

Senior Swimming Carnival 

The 2023 Senior Swimming Carnival will be held on Tuesday 28th November at The Glennie Aquatic Centre. This year the swimming carnival will be open to all students born from 2011 to 2015. Year 2 students are already participating in the Junior Swimming Carnival, however, children who can confidently swim 25m or 50m are more than welcome to participate in the Senior Swimming Carnival as well. 
 
Nominations have now closed. A program will be sent out at some stage this week.  

The Central Zone and Catholic Carnival Teams for 2024 will be selected from the results of the 50m events. Correct technique us a requirement for some strokes. The Central Zone Carnival will have strict nominating times that will need to be adhered to.  

Important Information  

• A teacher will be on duty from 8am at the venue.  
• Swimming caps are compulsory for this carnival. 
• Bring food and water.  
• Sports uniform.  
• Years 3-6 teachers will attend the carnival. We encourage and it is expected that all students attend the carnival regardless of their swimming ability and have a go in at least 1 event. There will be no supervision at school for these year levels.   
• Kickboard events are for competitors who are not competing in the 25m or 50m events.  
• Competitors may only swim one distance per stroke i.e. 50m Freestyle or 25m Freestyle or 25m Kickboard. Not all three.  
• Students who are capable of swimming 50m in a particular stroke are strongly encouraged to do so.  
• Only competitors who nominate as 50m swimmers will be eligible for age champion. 
• Only 50m events will have heats if there are sufficient numbers. Otherwise 50m events will be straight finals.  
• Only 50m events will be timed.  
• Ribbons will be given to 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th places of kickboard, 25m and finals of 50m events.  
• Age champion trophies will be given to 8yrs-13yrs champion swimmers who nominate/compete in 50m events. 
• Some events may have to be combined due to the number of nominations but will be judged separately.   

• Open 100m Freestyle and Open 4x50m Individual medley events are for house points ONLY.  

Junior Swimming Carnival 

This year our Junior Swimming Carnival will be held at the TAS (Toowoomba Anglican School) swimming pool on Monday 27th November, commencing at approximately 9:00 am - 12:30 pm, access via Wirra Wirra Street. Children in Prep - Year 2 will have the opportunity to participate at this carnival. We invite parents to attend this carnival if they wish. 

We encourage all students to attend regardless of their swimming ability. Shorter lap lengths and novelty races ensure that this is a memorable day, whilst building confidence in the water prior to joining the more competitive races at the upper school swimming carnival in years to come. Some events will include freestyle/kickboard, noodle and other novelty races. 

No ribbons will be awarded at this carnival as this is purely a non-competitive carnival to encourage fun in the water. Adults will be placed in each swimming lane and will be available on the sides of the pool to assist if required. 

The school will provide buses to transport students to and from the carnival. 

Children can wear their sports uniform and wear their togs underneath. They will also need to bring a towel, goggles (if needed), swimming cap, sunscreen, morning tea and a drink bottle. 

If you have any further queries, please don't hesitate to contact your child's classroom teacher or myself. 

God Bless,

Stacey Hancock

HPE Teacher

Recipe of the Week

Thinking STM for Prep in 2024 ...

From our Classrooms

Catch up on all the individual classroom news, click the link below.

From our P & F

From our Tuckshop

Open every Wednesday & Friday. 

Please place your childs order through FlexiSchools by 1pm Tuesday for Wednesday & 1pm Thursday for Friday. 

NEW Tuckshop Menu

From our Uniform Shop

Back to School Trading Hours - BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.

Appointment can be booked via the portal link that has been sent out to parents.   

As this is always a busy time in the Uniform Shop, we ask for your patience and understanding.  Please allow extra time when you turn up for your appointment for delays as we serve a high volume of foot traffic and processing of payments.

Orders can be placed in advance and collected during opening hours,
please email :  thouniforms@twb.catholic.edu.au

From our OSHC

The week that was...

Good Afternoon ST Thomas Mores Families ,

I hope you have had a wonderful week. It certainly is starting to feel like Christmas with the school Christmas concert on Wednesday afternoon next week. The children have asked that staff at OSHC attend the concert, which I would love to do. I have asked staff if they would like to attend as well. I do enjoy going to assembly and watching as the children get their awards.

Monday-   Miss Hayley had her activity of ‘handprint poppies’. The children love anything where they can experiment with paints on their hands etc. The children watched a video called ‘Lest We Forget by Kerry Brown’.

Tuesday- Miss Jannali had her activity of making their own medals out of paper plates. But when Miss Jannali did the protype the plates didn’t work so well, so she improvised and used patty cake cases. That worked well when they were laminated.  Please see our display wall below.  We watched a video called ANZAC Ted.  This was a lovely story of a stuffed bear called Ted who went to war with his owner.  The room was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop.  Some of the children improvised and asked if they could use the paper cups in the storeroom for a spontaneous activity and made very noisy instruments by sticky taping the cups together, but not before placing noisy beads in them.  Outside we had races and Miss Debbie had to time the children when they raced to the fence and back. This activity started out with one child asking me to time him, to a group of 8. I have planned an activity next week where the children will work in teams to have relay races.

Wednesday-  Miss Gemma had her activity of making an acrostic poem. When the children asked what this activity was, Miss Gemma had to explain.  We then watched a video called ‘What is Remembrance Day’.

Thursday- Miss Hannah had planned to do an activity called Discover stories of the war, but she instead improvised, and the children made bookmarks that they could take home. Leon made some this morning as well, and said he was going to take him home for a loved one. We watched a video on ‘Top 7 animals who were in the war over 100 years’’. This was an interesting video, and the children were so engaged in it, that when someone in the back made a noise , some of the children said , ‘shush we want to listen, Miss Debbie can you turn it up’.  It was a lovely story of how animals helped the war effort.

Friday- Miss Leatitia is doing a Poppy mosaic for our wall. They will be watching a video called ‘Who were the ANZAC soldiers.  I will add pictures in next weeks email.

This week we have been trialling something to help with transitions and make them smoother. We are now asking children to put sunscreen on when they arrive at OSHC. This will help with the transition after roll call/group time, for the children who wish to go straight out and play. We were finding that children who wanted to go straight out and play were congregating on the stair well while putting on sunscreen, which makes it hard for the children who need to go down to wash their hands.  As the children will already have sunscreen on when they choose to go outside, they can go straight out and not have to wait to have sunscreen applied.  The children who choose to eat afternoon tea straight away, can walk to the bathrooms to wash their hands without the congestion.

We have also noticed that not all children want to sit at group time, and that is perfectly fine. Some of the children don’t want to sit again after sitting all day. We have set up an area in the corner where they can play quietly for the 10 to 15 minutes it takes to do roll call , and watch the videos ,  then have question and answer time after. This has been well received by some of the children, mainly the preppies who just can’t sit one more minute 😊 We are trying to accommodate all children as we do have a lot of children who love group time, and the class Dojo after.

Staffing :

• Miss Hayley and Miss Charlotte are on leave. Miss Hayley and Miss Charlotte return on the  27^th November.  
• On a sadder note, Miss Charlotte has resigned and will finish up on the 29^th November. Please join me in wishing Charlotte all the very best. She has been offered a position overseas doing what she loves , riding endurance. This has been a passion of Charlottes since she was very little.   And she is very good at it.  We , the staff , and I know the children will miss her very much, but we will watch from afar as she reaches all her dreams and goals in life overseas.  All the very best Charlotte. 😊

Just a couple of reminders for this week:

• Sometimes we may not be able to take causal bookings as what happened this Monday and Tuesday as we had 2 staff away as they were sick, and with graduations and formals we had two of our juniors out too.  This is unfortunate but can not be helped as we need to stay within our staff/child ratios.
• The Christmas/New Year Vacation Program has gone out in an email.  I have hard copies on the sign in desk, also at the school front desk for your convenience. I have also attached it to this email.  Bookings are being taken now.
• Please bear in mind that during vacation care if there is an excursion, that we may not be able to take casual bookings the day before or the day of, as we have to give final numbers to the venues prior to the event happening.
• Please ensure if your child is booked in for the BSC program that they are signed in by an adult.   
• Just a reminder that all children must be signed out before 6pm. As we , the staff, need to be out of the building by 6pm, due to safety and licencing reasons. If children are picked up late on a regular basis, there will be a late fee applied.

Next week the children have chosen a ‘Bluey ‘ week. This should be fun.

Have a wonderful weekend, and please if you have any concerns, queries, or would like to drop a compliment , please feel free to contact me or the wonderful staff on the number below.  

Kind Regards

Debbie and the team

Thank you!

A huge thank you to Westridge Fruit and Vegetables for their continued support with the donation of fresh fruit every week for our students!

A huge thank you to Meat Cellar for their continued support for our school events.

Notice Board

Tennis Lessons -  sign up for 2024