Assistant Head of Primary

Pastoral Update

The past three weeks have seen the students engage in two national wellbeing initiatives, R U OK? Day and National Child Protection Week. They have also continued their learning within our Friendology program, focusing on the importance of forgiveness in friendships.

National Child Protection Week

National Child Protection Week (NCPW) is an initiative to promote the safety and wellbeing of all children. It recognises that children’s safety and wellbeing is a joint and collective responsibility shared by all members of the community.

NCPW has been in existence for more than 30 years and the core message is that ‘protecting children is everyone’s business.’ Child abuse and neglect are complex issues and all people should feel empowered to have conversations and work together to prevent their occurrence.

The theme for 2024, ‘Every conversation matters’ complements the overarching campaign message, ‘Every child in every community needs a fair go’. Year 3 and Year 4 students learned how to spot ‘red flags’ when they are online. They also learned about safe and unsafe behaviours, ‘unsafe secrets’ and inappropriate questions and requests. Younger students created artworks about meaningful conversations and identified people in the ‘Safety Circle’ who keep them safe.

R U OK? Day

On R U OK? Day, students came to school wearing yellow accessories and participated in a number of activities in classes, grade groups or with their buddies. Learning began in classrooms with an online visit from celebrity guest, Healthy Harold, along with his friends, Thought 1 and Thought 2 and learned that asking someone if they are OK is important as it can make them feel less alone. They also learned that letting someone know how they’re feeling can really help and that anytime is a good time to check in with a friend. Older students learned that sometimes our friends need time before they are ok to talk about things that are worrying them and that if the problem is serious, they can suggest to their friend to talk with a trusted adult.

Friendship is forgiveness

Forgiveness is important in friendships. Students began their learning about forgiveness in friendships by recognising that we are all imperfect and that we all make mistakes at times and therefore, we all pass the ‘human’ test – we all make mistakes, we all fail sometimes, we all have difficult days and we all do things that we regret.

Students also learned that forgiveness is about letting go, moving forward and not holding on to things. To be effective, forgiveness must come from the heart and when this happens, it helps us to feel lighter and allows for personal growth as well as building stronger friendships. To get to the point where we forgive and forget in friendships, we need to be able to talk things out, address and resolve the issue, let it go and move on.

To bring this learning to life, students created hot air balloons to let go of the ‘heavy stuff’ that weighs them down, recognising that they are not perfect and neither are their friends. On their hot air balloons, students wrote a message of forgiveness to themselves or to a friend.

Lauren Petroni
Assistant Head of Primary P-4 and Curriculum Leader P-4