Gioia House Pastoral

Thank you for your generosity in donating to St Paul’s Church, Burwood. The donations the students have brought in will be used to make family hampers to bring some Christmas cheer to families in our community. As we know, one in eight people across Australia live in poverty trying to provide for their families. St Paul’s Church stocks a community pantry which allows locals the opportunity to receive groceries and household items they need throughout the year. As part of our Service Learning, we continue to encourage our students to find opportunities to give back to our community and people who are less fortunate than ourselves.

This term, our Gioia House Action Girl Pastoral program focused on students continuing to identify ways we can build resilience, develop relationship skills and be e-safe online. The students watched a performance titled ‘Be Brave’ that identified different situations in life where we have to build resilience and identify strategies to help us work through it. Each class continued to work through a variety of lessons focusing on building positive relationships, developing communication skills and identifying strategies we can use when working through a variety of different life scenarios. Students also continued to look at ways we can be safe online. We discussed the importance of how to be a good digital citizen, password privacy and protecting our personal information. It was pleasing to see the students were able to confidently respond to how they can be safe online and identify appropriate action if required.

Rock and Water

During Rock and Water activities Year 6 McLaren and Azizian/Dunphy worked together to learn and develop our skills. We worked outside for these lessons and enjoyed working with friends in different classes. We learnt many different skills and we have shared some comments below about our learning.

The ping pong ball activity was very hard. You had to keep good eye contact and you want to keep looking at the ball but you can’t. One person holds the ping pong ball in their open hand and the other person holds their hand over the top. While looking at the other person’s eyes you have to grab the ball. It is hard not to hesitate and keep closing your hand on the ball.
Annabelle Gittany

I learnt that you can be sometimes stressed but there are ways to calm yourself down e.g. if you are doing a speech you can do a breathing activity using your senses to calm yourself.
Ciara Darlow

The rooster fight helps us to identify people’s strengths and weaknesses and our own. This will help us when we are working with other people in group tasks in Year 7.
Lucinda Oong

It helps to calm us down to help us deal with situations that we will go through in our life where we need to stop and breathe and be calm.
Ella McGinty

We did the walking activity. People walked into different directions across each others path with a rock and a water attitude. We can use this in Year 7 when there is a lot of people walking and we need to be able to adjust our pace and still get to class on time.
Georgia Magri

Thank you to all the students and families for your support this year. Wishing you and your family a blessed Christmas and Happy New Year.

Marisa Maks
Assistant Head of Gioia House