Dear Parents, Caregivers and Children,

This week the message to our children has been about effort and many of the behaviours that sit inside our 6C 'Courageous'. This week there are two specific contexts that many of our children are doing which require their courage, Athletics and the various assessment tasks. While the contexts are quite different the behaviours of showing resilience, trying new things and enjoying the challenge resonate through both of them. 

As you can imagine our children have responded well and when I have been lucky enough to be a fly on the wall with some of the assessment tasks, you can really see the effort and thinking children are putting in to showcase their understanding. The same goes for Athletics Day. This day challenges everyone, no matter how good you are at it, that is one of the aspects I like most about it. The effort across all age groups was evident and I was enormously proud of our children and the way they approached the different activities. For most the challenge was fun, which makes it that little more sweeter to be a part of. 

Yesterday I was lucky enough to go around and collect 12 calves from some of our very generous farming families who have donated a calf to support our fundraising efforts for our school pool. Their time, effort and cost with doing so has been significant and I want to take a moment to say a big thanks for handing over what are excellent looking and healthy calves to us. An agent has already had a look at them and has made favourable comments on their quality. Please take a moment to see the photos of some of the families. 

Finally as we start to build towards the closure of the year, our place of learning becomes increasingly active and busy. However, it is our job to make sure that it is not just busy but productive. Simply, being busy is easy, it is being productive that's the skill. I would like to leave you with this Blog Post from Seth Godin.

"Anyone can be busy. All you need to do to feel busy is to try to get two things done at once–or seek to beat a deadline that is stressing you out.

Productivity, on the other hand, has little to do with busy. Productivity requires bringing soft skills (real skills) to the table in service of the generous work you seek to do. Productivity is learned. And productivity takes guts.

People are discovering that once they get out of their own way, they can get a huge amount done.

Once you see what’s possible, it’s amazing how much you can contribute.

Learning is not the same as education, and busy is not the same as productive."