Welcome to Term 3
Greetings to all and welcome to Term 3
I hope that you and your children have had a good and productive start to Term 3.
Here in the office we are gearing up for a busy term and have a couple of exciting new projects to roll out. We are also commencing work on Conference 2020 and you will hear from us before the end of the term with a ‘Save the Date’ and some additional information regarding the theme and speakers.
Firstly however I would like to take the opportunity to introduce our newest member of staff, Donna McConville. Donna has joined us in the role of Admin Officer and takes over from the lovely Sarah who left us at the end of last term after eight years working with us. Sarah has moved on to a full time role and we wish her every success in that. Donna comes with great skills and attributes and her children attend Catholic schools here in Perth. She has hit the ground running and we are all enthusiastic about what this term will bring.
We are very excited to be promoting our inaugural ‘Parent Engagement in Learning Week’ which will coincide with book week commencing on 19th August. As it is our first foray into this space we decided to keep it simple and marry it with events that schools and parents will already be engaging with during book week. This year we have identified two key themes - ‘Reading’ and ‘Attendance’.
Reading, as we know is the number one activity that all parents should be doing with their children. Those fifteen minutes a night are so important in many different ways. A new study has found that young children whose parents read them five books a day enter kindergarten having heard about 1.4 million more words than kids who were never read to. If five books is a bit of a stretch for you, children who are read only one book a day will hear about 290,000 words by age 5 than those who don’t regularly read books with a parent or caregiver. From a wellbeing perspective, reading to children also suggests that they will associate reading with love and affection.
These are really significant statistics and so it is vitally important for us as parents to find that time every day to read. Please read through the article further down in this newsletter for more information about this topic.
Attendance is the other key theme for the week and we will be sharing information about the importance of being at school all day every day.
We will share this information through our FB page, newsletter and website so keep connected.
We also ask that those schools who have not returned a completed Office Bearers Form, do so as soon as possible as we will forward information directly to parent groups using this channel.
We look forward to hearing your stories about how you promote these two important messages in your school.
Good luck to everyone for the term ahead and particularly for those of you with children in Year 12. This is their last full term at school and will be packed full of events as well as keeping the nose to the grindstone. Remember to take time to smell the roses and enjoy the last of their ‘school days’.
Warm regards
Siobhan Allen
Executive Director