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Dear Parents, Guardians and Carers,
As we move into term four teachers will be starting to prepare the children for their transition into next year and what that might look like for them. Developing resilience and problem solving skills as they navigate new opportunities and experiences is important now and as they move into adolescence.
The following article by Michael Grose provides good tips to assist as parents.
Personal problem-solving is an under-rated skill shared by resilient children and adults. First, identified alongside independence, social connection and optimism by early resilience-researchers in the US, the ability to solve your own problems is the basis of a child’s autonomy and self-efficacy.
When parents solve all children’s problems we not only increase their dependency on adults, we also teach kids to be afraid of making mistakes and to blame themselves for not being good enough. This is fertile ground for anxiousness and depressive illness.
So how can we raise kids to be courageous problem-solvers rather than self-critical, low risk-takers? Here are six practical ideas to get you started:
- Turn requests for help into problems for kids to solve:
Kids get used to bringing their problems to parents to solve. If you keep solving them, they’ll keep bringing them. ‘Mum, Sarah’s annoying me.’ ‘Dad, can you ask my teacher to pick me for the team?’ ‘Hey, I can’t find my socks!’ It’s tempting if you are in a time-poor family to simply jump in and help kids out.
Alternatively, you can take a problem-solving approach, cueing them to resolve their own problems and take responsibility for their concerns. ‘What can you do to make her stop annoying you?’ ‘What’s the best approach to take with your teacher?’ ‘Socks, smocks! Where might they be?’
- Ask good questions to prompt problem-solving:
A problem-solving approach relies on asking good questions, which can be challenging if you are used to solving your child’s problems. The first question when a child brings you a problem should be: ‘Can you handle this on your own?’ Next should be, ‘What do you want me to do to help you solve the problem?’ These questions are not meant to deter children from coming to you. Rather to encourage and teach them to start working through their own concerns themselves.
- Coach them through problems and concerns:
Imagine your child feels they were unfairly left out of a school sports team by a teacher and asks you to get involved. The easiest solution may be to meet with the teacher and find out what’s going on. You may or not resolve the problem but in doing so you are teaching a child to become dependent on you.
Alternatively, you could coach your child to speak to the teacher themself and find out why they were left out. Obviously, there are times when children need their parents to be advocates for them such as when they are being bullied, but we need to make the most of the opportunities for children to speak for themselves. Better to help your children find the right words to use and discuss the best way to approach another person when they have problems. These are great skills to take into adulthood.
- Prepare kids for problems and contingencies:
You may coach your child to be independent – walk to school, spend some time alone at home (when old enough), catch a train with friends – but do they know what to do in an emergency? What happens if they come home after school and the house is locked? Who do they go to? Discuss different scenarios with children whenever they enter new or potentially risky situations so that they won’t fall apart when things don’t go their way. Remember, the Boy Scouts motto – Be Prepared!
- Show a little faith:
Sometimes you’ve got to show faith in children. We can easily trip them up with our negative expectations such as saying ‘Don’t spill it!’ to a child who is carrying a glass filled with water. Of course, your child doesn’t want to spill it but you’ve just conveyed your expectations with that statement. We need to be careful that we don’t sabotage children’s efforts to be independent problem-solvers with comments such as, ‘Now don’t stuff it up!’, ‘You’ll be okay, won’t you?’ , ‘You’re not very good at looking after yourself!’
- Applaud mistakes and stuff ups:
Would a child who accidentally breaks a plate in your family while emptying the dishwasher be met with a ‘that’s really annoying, you can be clumsy sometimes’ response or a ‘it doesn’t matter, thanks for your help’ type of response? Hopefully it won’t be the first response, because nothing shuts down a child’s natural tendencies to extend themselves quicker than an adult who can’t abide mistakes.
If you have a low risk-taking, perfectionist child, consider throwing a little party rather than making a fuss when they make errors so they can learn that mistakes don’t reflect on them personally, and that the sun will still shine even if they break a plate, tell a joke that falls flat or doesn’t get a perfect exam score,
As I’ve often said your job as a parent is to make yourself redundant (which is different to being irrelevant) at the earliest possible age. The ability to sort and solve your own problems, rather than step back and expect others to resolve them, is usually developed in childhood. With repetition and practice problem-solving becomes a valuable life-pattern, to be used in the workplace, in the community and in family relationships.
Celebration of the Sacrament of First Communion
Our First Eucharist children will soon start their preparation for this celebration with our parent information night on Wednesday night 25th October at 6pm in St Michael’s Church. In preparing our children to receive this sacrament we come to realise that they are being drawn into a deeper relationship with Jesus and also with the Catholic community. But this is not just a personal experience, it becomes a family experience because our children draw life from the environment in which they live; and the family and the Catholic community are the basic sources of that life.
The Sacrament will be celebrated on the weekend of the 25th and 26th of November. We will keep you all in our prayers as you prepare for this celebration.
DATES TO REMEMBER:
- 13th October: Andrew Chinn incursion
- 16th - 26th October: 1/2 Swimming
- 25th October:First Eucharist Parent Meeting
- 27th October:Walkathon
- 30th October - 2nd November: Foundation Swimming Program (Week One)
- 1st - 3rd November: Grade 5 Camp
- 6th November: School Closure Day
- 7th November: Melbourne Cup Day Public Holiday
- 10th November: School Art Show
- 13th - 16th November: Foundation Swimming Program (Week Two)
- 20th November: Foundation 2024 Transition
- 22nd November: Foundation 2024 Information Meeting
Kind regards
Jodie
This week’s readings all work together leading to the message of the parable told by Jesus. The scene is set as soon as Jesus began to describe the vineyard – fenced, a winepress and tower built – his audience would have immediately known that he was reflecting the Isaiah description of Israel as the vineyard of the Lord. The imagery Jesus used would have been so familiar to his audience that it was almost mundane, and yet Jesus, as usual, gives the image a twist. He describes a vineyard owner whose tenant farmers rebel, beat and murder his servants. Any one of these acts was punishable by death and the audience may well have expected the story to end there. And yet the landowner sends further messengers – hopeful of a change of heart from the tenants and allowing them the opportunity to do what is right. After these messengers are also murdered, the landowner sends his own son to collect the harvest from the tenants.
Jesus, of course, is drawing on the familiar image of Israel as the vineyard of the Lord. God, the landowner, has entrusted this beautifully prepared land to the people of Israel and yet they have taken ownership for themselves and forgotten their Lord. Messengers, in the form of prophets, have been sent to call the people back to God but they were ignored and even murdered. Now, the Son has been sent to the people and received much the same response. When Jesus asks his audience of chief priests and elders what the landowner should do, they are acutely aware that he is asking them how God should deal with them.
In what ways do people of the world today act as though God is not the ‘landowner’?
On Friday 13th October, Australian religious songwriter and singer, Andrew Chinn, will be visiting our school to share his songs with our children. Andrew’s songs, such as “These Hands”, “Rainbow”, “An African Blessing” and “Rise Up!” are used in classrooms and liturgies around Australia, New Zealand, USA and Canada. During the day Andrew will work with the children in their learning levels and in the afternoon we will have a whole school performance. The performance will take place in the school hall, at 1:55pm instead of assembly.
Each year at St Michaels we support several different organisations as part of our Mission Outreach; including Caritas, St Vincent de Paul and Catholic Mission. As a Catholic Community we are inspired by the life of Jesus to reach out to those in this world that are marginalised or less fortunate than we are. Our mission focus for the rest of this year is on the work of Catholic Mission in Timor-Leste.
This year Catholic Mission are supporting the work of the Salesian Sisters in Timor-Leste with 2 important projects: the Don Bosco Children’s Home and the Maria Auxiliadora Medical Clinic. These are two very important services that the Salesian Sisters have established to support the people in the community.
At St Michaels we are focusing our fundraising efforts on the Children's home. The staff at the Don Bosco Children’s Home under the guidance of the Salesian Sisters not only provide a home for many children but give them access to education. Every $20 that we raise at St Michaels will provide the students with books and equipment to aid their learning.
We began our fundraising campaign last term, raising $600 on our casual clothes day. The first of this term's efforts will start this week with a Colouring Competition and a ‘Guess the lollies in the jar’. The students from the Mission Team will come around to the classrooms over the next few days to speak with the children. Entry in both of these competitions will be 50c
If you would like to learn more about the work that Catholic Mission are doing please check out the website Socktober: for mission month
Each week students from each class are awarded Student of the Week certificates. These children are nominated for the example they have been within the school based on the School Wide Expectation focus for that week. The weekly focus will be from Wednesday until Tuesday the following week. Awards will be presented to students in their classrooms as there will be no assembly this week.
In Week 2 the School Wide Expectation focus is Resilience :
I view mistakes as a learning opportunity.
I persist through challenges and difficulties in my learning.
| Rie Rankcom | Luca Mifsud | Cooper Janiw |
| Sabella McGirr | Evie Howe | Ruby Crow |
| Jimmy Daniel | Samantha Griffiths | Kelsey Reed |
| Levi Ason | Noah McMahon | Braith McNeill |
| Jacob Constantinou | Aurora Buhagiar | Charli McMahon |
| Harley Synnott | Kaiden Garth | Logan Tatti |
| Mack Hayes | Olivia Wisewould | Nathan Kimani |
The shop will be open every 4th Thursday of the month. The next day it will be open will be on Thursday 26th October from 3:00pm to 3:30pm. The stall is located in the large meeting room at the school, so those wishing to purchase items will need to enter through the main office. Donations and swaps welcome.
