09 February 2022
I would like to welcome everyone to the 2022 school year and look forward to having a chance to connect and share this time with our wonderful community. The delayed start to our face to face teaching on campus has certainly provided a number of challenges to our teachers, students and families. I have been impressed by the way in which our community has used learning activities, phone calls and online meetings as wellbeing strategies to start the year off developing relationships that will continue to grow and forge ahead this year.
Our wellbeing framework centres around positive psychology theory and a focus on character strengths, understanding emotions, attention and awareness, relationships, coping strategies and positive habits and goals. Within the Junior School we utilise a number of programs to embed explicit wellbeing strategies. The URStrong program is important to developing the language of relationships in our School. This program has provided free memberships to help support families and I would encourage our families to sign up. Understanding the language of relationships used by our teachers to support our students can help build that connection between school and home.
In 2022 the Junior School are trialling the digital platform SchoolTV to provide parents and teachers with an extensive range of wellbeing resources. Parents can access this tool from a tile in Keystone or by following this link.
In my first article for the year, I would like to highlight the topic of school transitions. We have a number of students who have begun their schooling at St Peter’s College this year and have been transitioning into a new school, students who have moved from ELC to the Junior School, students who have moved into a different year level and we now also have many students moving from online learning to face to face learning in Week 3. With so many transitions happening across our School, we need to ensure that we are all in this together to support each and every member of our community. This resource can provide some strategies and support for you to talk through with your child and please don’t hesitate to contact your child’s class Teacher, Year Level Coordinator or myself to give further support at this time.
Ben Storer
Deputy Head of Junior School – Wellbeing and Administration