Magical 2024 Book Week!

This year's Book Week theme, Reading is Magic, certainly lived up to its name!

I would like to thank our incredible Teacher Librarian, Miss Judd, for her huge effort in organising such a fantastic school event.

Thank you also to our parents and carers for your effort in preparing your child's costume. The students looked terrific, and their enthusiasm was contagious as they joined in the day's spirit. 

You may have noticed that the staff also joined the fun, dressing up as characters from the Harry Potter series, bringing the magic of Hogwarts to St Matthew's.

Miss Judd outdid herself by providing a special Harry Potter-themed morning tea for the staff. This featured a spectacular cheese ball sorting hat, among other treats!

Throughout the day, the students engaged in vertically streamed activities centred around the shortlisted books. It was wonderful to see them engage creatively with literature.

The great news is that the school raised $365.40 for the World Literacy Foundation, which will help establish libraries in Uganda. Congratulations!

Once again, thank you to Miss Judd for your dedication and to all our students and staff for making this year's Book Week a truly magical experience!

Community Breakfast  - TOMORROW 

Please join us tomorrow (Friday) from 8.00am on the K-1 Playground from 8 a.m. for our parent and carer breakfast. This celebration marks two special events: Mother's Day and Father's Day.

Happy Father's Day

St Matt's Family and Friends Trivia Night 

The school Community Council warmly invites the parents, carers, staff, and friends of St Matthew's to attend the annual fundraising Trivia Night.

Tickets can be purchased using the QR code on the flyer in the School Community Council section of this newsletter or by visiting Try Booking https://www.trybooking.com/CUWZT.

From all accounts, the trivia night is great fun and raises valuable funds for resources that assist your child.

Child Safeguarding Corner

 Child Safeguarding Corner

The Child Safe Standards provide tangible guidance about how to create cultures, adopt strategies, and act to keep children safe from harm. Each fortnight, I present one of the standards and ask you to reflect on how you think we’re addressing the recommendations. We welcome ideas and feedback from our families and community!

This week, we’re looking at Standard 8: Physical and online environments minimise the opportunity for abuse or other kinds of harm to occur.

This standard aims to identify and minimise risks to children in physical and online environments at school.  This standard is necessary because safe physical environments play a significant role in reducing opportunities for abuse to occur. 

We aim to prioritise this standard for child safety in what we say and do:

• Leaders set expectations about behavioural standards for staff interacting with children in physical and online environments. Our Code of Conduct sets clear behavioural expectations about adult interactions with children. 
• Risk assessment and management plans identify risks to child safety in physical and online environments and how these will be managed.
• Physical environments are considered. We increase natural lines of sight while respecting a child’s right to privacy. 
• Children are provided information about online safety and regularly encouraged to tell staff about negative experiences. 
• Staff and parents are provided with information about risks in the online environment. 

Indicators of success for this standard include: 

• Opportunities to harm children are reduced or removed.
• Children engage in creative and safe activities.
• Children speak up about risks in the online environment.
• Children’s privacy is balanced with the need to keep them safe. 

If we are addressing this standard successfully, we would expect our children to say: 

• I know there are some spaces in the school I am not allowed into. 
• I can talk to someone I trust about anything I have seen or done online.

We now have a page on our school website dedicated to Child Safeguarding, and we encourage you to view it. 

If you have any questions or feedback about how we are addressing this particular Standard or about our new Child Safeguarding page, please email me (petra.cole@cg.catholic.edu.au). 

Friendology

St Matthew’s is proud to be a URSTRONG school. URSTRONG provides a friendship skills curriculum, Friendology 101, that helps our students establish and maintain healthy relationships, manage conflict with kindness, and increase their overall resilience. One of the first foundational concepts in the friendship skills curriculum is the four Friendship Facts.

Knowing what to expect in our friendships makes it much easier to understand and accept the ups and downs.

The 4 Friendship Facts were developed because it was noticed that children weren’t sure what was “normal” or common in their friendships. These 4 Friendship Facts are the foundation of a healthy, respectful friendship and apply to relationships throughout life:

1. No friendship (relationship) is perfect.
2. Every friendship is different.
3. Trust and respect are the two most important qualities of a friendship. 
4. Friendships change…and that’s ok.

Do you often find yourself at a loss for advice when your children come to you with their friendship issues? Don’t worry—you’re not alone. You can join URSTRONG for free and support our school by sharing the same messages and teaching the same skills that we teach here at St Matthew’s. URSTRONG provides simple but meaningful language and skills to open up a dialogue with your children. You can join URSTRONG for free at https://urstrong.com/.

Petra Cole

Assistant Principal ┃Child Safe Advocate┃Classroom Support Teacher

Sunday 1st September Gospel 

Gospel Reading
Mark 7:1-8,14-15,21-23
Jesus teaches that it is that which comes from our hearts that defiles us.

This Sunday, our lectionary returns to Mark’s Gospel after a number of Sundays in which we heard the Bread of Life discourse from the Gospel of John. Recall that we focus on the Gospel of Mark in Lectionary Cycle B but substitute John’s report of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes for Mark’s report of this event.

In today’s Gospel, Mark provides a significant amount of information about the Jewish observance of ritual-purity laws. Most scholars believe that Mark includes this information because his audience includes Gentile Christians who have no knowledge or experience of these laws. We can infer, therefore, that many in Mark’s community were not Jewish Christians.

In this Gospel, Mark addresses the question of which Jewish practices would also be observed in the newly emerging Christian community. This was a significant question for the early Christian Church, especially in communities that included both Jewish and Gentile converts to Christianity. We also hear this question addressed in the letters of St Paul with regard to table fellowship. In Gospel passages such as the one today, we see the Gospel evangelists finding justification for a Christian practice distinct from Judaism in the remembrances of Jesus’ teaching and the practice of his first disciples.

Jesus first criticizes the Pharisees for putting human tradition above God’s Law. Here, Jesus is referring to the tradition of the elders, the teachings of the Pharisees, which extended the ritual-purity laws of Temple worship to everyday Jewish life. Jesus criticizes the Pharisees for making this tradition equal to and as binding as the Law of Moses.

Next, Jesus comments on the meaning behind the Pharisees’ language of holiness—clean and unclean. Jesus teaches that a person is not defiled by the food that enters his or her body but rather by sin that emerges from his or her words and actions. In this teaching, Jesus unmasks a deeper question behind the one posed to him by the Pharisees. The real issue is holiness, which is not found in external acts alone. Holiness comes from within and is evidenced in the actions and attitudes that emerge from a person’s life.

If we read today’s Gospel carefully, we will see a pattern in Jesus’ teaching method that will be repeated in the weeks ahead. Jesus’ first teaching is directed to the Pharisees who questioned him. Jesus’ words are then directed to the crowd, teaching that a person is defiled by his or her words and actions, not by the food that he or she eats. In verses omitted in today’s reading, we learn that Jesus returned home with his disciples, who in turn questioned him about what he had taught. The words we read at the conclusion of today’s Gospel are addressed to Jesus’ disciples. Mark’s narrative shows several audiences for Jesus’ teaching: his antagonists, the crowds, and Jesus’ disciples. As we see in this reading, the words to the Pharisees are often words of challenge. The teaching to the crowds is often a general, sometimes cryptic, message. With the disciples, who often misunderstand Jesus’ words, further explanation is offered about his message and its meaning.

Jesus’ words challenge us as well. In our desire to show that we are holy, we might also give too much credence to externals, following rules without thinking about the intention behind them. Jesus reminds us that we do not make ourselves holy by our actions. Rather, we become holy when we allow God’s Spirit to transform us. Our actions should be an expression of the conversion of our heart to God and to God’s ways.

Upcoming Events 

Posting Images Online

Social media can be a great way to keep family and friends up-to-date on milestones and achievements in your child’s life. However, it is important to be mindful of what personal information and content you may be sharing. 

Need to know 

Images and videos of children posted to social media can be used by online predators to build a profile to groom parents or children. Content uploaded to social media may inadvertently contain personal information and could reveal a lot about yourself and your child. 

Identifying information often shared online can include: 

• Age (or school grade)
• Full name 
• School or sports team (particularly at back-to-school time) 
• Address (including street number) 
• Interests/hobbies 
• A trusted adult’s full name 

Everyday images of children may also end up in the collections of online predators. These can be images of children engaging in everyday activities, including bath-time, sports and swimming carnivals, or just children being out and about.

Top Tips

• Use strong privacy settings for accounts where you post content of your child. Set up your accounts to ’private’ or ‘friends only’ 
• Manage your follower/friends list regularly, and only share to those you trust. 
• Consider a group chat with trusted family and friends rather than posting to social media. 
• Check the background for identifying information. (like public signs, street signs, house numbers) 
• If your child is wearing a uniform, consider blurring the school logo or covering with an emoji.
• Question suspicious friend requests and followers 
• Question and report suspicious comments or contact from users, particularly if these are regarding your child. 

https://www.thinkuknow.org.au/resources-tab/parents-and-carers

Fathers Day Stall - Friday 30 August

Welcome to St Matt's Family and Friends Trivia Night 2024!

Come join us for a night filled with fun, laughter, and brain-teasing questions at Raiders Belconnen. Get ready to test your knowledge and compete with friends and family in this exciting in-person event. Whether you're a trivia master or just looking for a good time, this is the place to be!

Grab your team, brush up on your facts, and get ready to win some awesome prizes. Don't miss out on this chance to show off your smarts and enjoy a great evening out. See you there!

Use the QR code below to purchase tickets or visit Try Booking https://www.trybooking.com/CUWZT

Anita Heiss Reads Bidhi Galing

An online literacy event for all families to celebrate Indigenous Literacy Day Wednesday, 4 September 7pm – 7.30pm

Indigenous Literacy Day is held on the first Wednesday of September and is an annual celebration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ Stories, Cultures and Languages (find out more here: (https://www.indigenousliteracyfoundation.org.au/ild). To celebrate this year, the Council of Catholic School Parents NSW/ACT’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Committee has organised a wonderful online evening event open to all families in our schools.

We are delighted that Aboriginal Australian author Anita Heiss will read her book Bidhi Galing. Dr Anita Heiss AM is a proud member of the Wiradyuri nation of central New South Wales and one of Australia's most prolific and well-known authors, publishing across genres, including nonfiction, historical fiction, commercial fiction, and children's fiction.

Her book Bidhi Galing (Big Rain) tells the story of the Great Flood of Gundagai in 1852 and the Wiradyuri heroes Yarri and Jacky Jacky, who paddled bark canoes through raging floodwaters, risking their lives to save countless others. Primary school students aged 7–12 – and their families! – will love this story and the beautiful book illustrations. It’s a chance to sit down together and enjoy a nice, quiet time listening and reading, which is a wonderful way to support children’s literacy skills at home.

Go to the Council of Catholic School Parents NSW/ACT website to REGISTER or complete the form here: https://ccsp.schoolzineplus.com/form/63.

Or use the QR code:

Invitation to ‘A Bluey Perspective’

Parents and carers are invited to attend a free event with ‘Bluey’ creator Joe Brumm at Merici College on Wednesday, 11 September.
The event aims to bring families together to listen to Joe talk about why he thinks Bluey has been such a success and the important role parents play in their child’s learning and development.

https://events.humanitix.com/a-bluey-perspective

Belconnen Blaze Little Athletics - Registrations Open!

Holiday happenings- Kippax Kids