Hi everyone and welcome to Week 4. I hope all the Mothers in our community had a great Mother’s Day last Sunday. I hope your family spoilt you and let you know how much you mean to them. I told an interesting story the other day about my wife. My son got a new skateboard and we were at the skate park and my wife decided to have a go on the board. I was holding our 3-month-old daughter at the time. When she got on my life flashed before my eyes as I envisioned her falling off and breaking her wrist or something. Mums do so much for their families that I would hate to think about what would happen if she was out of action for a few weeks! Luckily, she didn’t fall and life resumes as normal. So, God bless you Mums! You do so much and I am glad we get to share your children’s education with you.

As you may know, I am very passionate about ecology and making sure we are doing all we can to take care of our planet for future generations. This year World Environment Day is on Wednesday 5th June, but because a number of our students won’t be at school for that day, we are celebrating a day early on Tuesday 4th June.  I would like to encourage everyone to contribute Zero Waste for one day. We are calling it ‘Zero Waste June 4 One Day!’ We are asking all children to bring a packed recess and lunch that contributes zero to landfill. Obviously, we are not counting food scraps as land fill as this waste goes into our green bins, and whilst I don’t think it necessary to go Zero Waste forever, I think it’s important to keep talking about waste and thinking about ways we can do things differently. The St Joseph's Kingswood Eco Warriors and I are working together and give families suggestions on what we can do on the day and how we can prepare for it. If you have any comments of suggestions please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Last week we held a Cybersafe  Families workshop in our Multipurpose room. If you were unable to make it, I thought I would add a couple of things that I found interesting and would encourage you to consider. The first thing would be the privacy settings on your Facebook account, the presenter talked about ‘Sharenting’. This was a term I hadn’t heard of before but something we all do without thinking about it. ‘Sharenting’ occurs when something exciting happens with our children and we upload the photo or video to our Socials. Unfortunately, there are a number of people out there copying these images and saving them on a huge database or worse still, trying to find out where these children live. They also use clues in the photos to find out information about your children and try to use these to develop relationships. Scary I know, so please be aware of your settings and change them if you need to. The other tip was a website called https:/wwwwcommonsensemediaa.org/. On this website you can see the reviews for many different types of movies and video games that you might like to read before allowing your children to watch or play.

I hope you all have a great couple of weeks,

Take care,

Jamie