We ask parents, guardians and carers to continue to remain vigilant in preventing COVID-19 transmission. Any student who is unwell should continue to remain at home. This is about keeping students healthy and well in our school and reducing the spread of both COVID-19 and other illnesses.  

Parents, guardians and carers of students who are unwell, including displaying symptoms of COVID-19, will be contacted to collect their child from school and asked to keep them home until they are no longer symptomatic.

Students who are absent from school for an extended period of time, will be supported in their learning with work on google classroom. 

We have quite a few events coming up in the lead up towards the end of the school year. We are looking forward to celebrating these with you as a community. 

DIVERSITY DASH

St Michael’s Primary School is proudly a diverse school, with students from more than 20 different cultures and language backgrounds. As part of a new initiative by School Sport Victoria and in recognition of our diverse and inclusive school community, this year’s walk-a-thon is a Diversity Dash which will be a fun, social, colourful and inclusive event.

This annual event is an important whole school fundraiser, empowering our students to help raise money for their school, while promoting healthy exercise and fun with their friends and teachers.

During this year’s event, there will be colourful music stations where students have the opportunity to take a break, have a dance and be sprayed with colour! Colour is optional and students wishing to take part MUST wear a white t-shirt during the Diversity Dash and bring their school polo top and spare shorts to change at the conclusion of the event!

This year, the junior course will also have a range of obstacles for children to enjoy!

At the completion of walking, students will enjoy fresh fruit!

There will be prizes for:

• Highest individual fundraiser
• Highest fundraising class
• Boy and girl that completes the most laps from each year level

If you are able to volunteer to assist at the event please follow the link below:

Diversity Dash Helper Form

All sponsorship money needs to be collected and paid via CDFpay by 10pm Tuesday 22nd November 2022. Prizes will be awarded at a special school assembly Thursday 24th November.

ART SHOW

St Michael’s Parish Family Day:

You are all warmly invited to the Parish Christmas family Day on Sunday December 4th.

Helping your young perfectionist

• Dr Kaylene Henderson

There’s a perception in our society that perfectionism is a good thing, akin to ‘being perfect..’ That it’s something we should strive for or drop into conversation in job interviews… Yet the reality is quite different.

Perfectionism leads us to place unreasonably and often unrealistically high expectations on ourselves. Essentially, it causes us to raise the bar so high, that we frequently wind up feeling like failures, consumed by frustration and self-blame.

Of course, this can be very unsettling to witness in our kids and it can be hard for us to know how best to help. It can start when our children are very young and grow with them in intensity and impact. Perhaps you have a young child who refuses to draw because her drawings don’t look exactly like those of an adult artist. Or maybe your little guy becomes so distressed by a small mistake in his homework, that he insists on starting all over again in his unhealthy quest for perfection.

If you have older kids, perhaps they refuse to submit an assignment because it’s not perfect, or they won’t run the cross country because they know they won’t win.

While it’s great for our kids to hold high expectations of themselves, aiming for perfection actually sets them up to fail. Their habitual ‘all or nothing’ thinking leads to the unhelpful belief that if they don’t achieve 100%, they’ve as good as flunked. Their focus on their mistakes rather than on their successes often affects their self esteem, fuelling a vicious cycle that can lead to stress, depression and anxiety if left unchecked.

The sooner we help our kids break this unhealthy habit, the better. So let’s look at a few tips for doing just that.

Reduce your praise

There are two ways in which we tend to praise children. ‘Content praise’ often draws attention to the end product, for example, “What a fantastic drawing!”, or to a fixed quality in a child, such as “You’re so clever”. In contrast, ‘process praise’ focuses on how your child got there. When we use process praise, we draw attention to their good ideas, problem solving approaches, effort, persistence, concentration and enthusiasm.

While it’s helpful for all children to experience more process praise than content praise, this is particularly true for children with perfectionistic traits. This allows us to draw the focus away from how impressive the end result might (or should) be and instead highlight the importance of having a go, trying their best and learning along the way.

For example, rather than saying, ‘What a fantastic drawing! You’re an amazing artist – what were you worried about?’, it’s more helpful to say something like, ‘It’s great to see you having a go at drawing. I love watching you try new things’; or, ‘I love seeing the ideas you come up with when you draw’.

Of course, most of the time we needn’t praise children at all. Saying simply, ‘Drawing is fun isn’t it?,’ is often enough to provide children with that all important sense of connection.

Model making mistakes

At my children’s school, they’re taught to embrace ‘flearning’ – learning through failure. Admittedly, my children witness me ‘flearning’ all the time at home, but in the eyes of your child, you might seem perfect. It’s helpful for your kids to see that you make mistakes too, and importantly to learn through your modelling how mistakes can be managed.

Look for (or create!) opportunities to do this. When you’re planning on bringing some spoons to the dining table, you could bring knives over instead and say, ‘Oops, my mistake. Not to worry. I’ll just go back and swap these over.’ Or, perhaps you could draw alongside your toddler and deliberately keep from drawing inside the lines, commenting to your little one as you go, ‘I love drawing with you’. By doing so, you model for your child that mistakes are okay, that they needn’t hamper their enjoyment of a task and importantly, that the end result isn’t all that matters.

Teach your child to speak to themselves as a friend

How does your child talk to themselves?

Would they speak to a friend in the same way?

No? Then what might they say instead?

We all know how much our inner voice can affect how we feel. Teach your child to be kind to themselves. To be supportive, forgiving and encouraging, even when they make mistakes.

Consider how you react when your child behaves in an ‘imperfect’ way

Do you respond calmly when your child accidentally spills cereal all over the kitchen bench or do you tend to overreact? It’s important when we’re teaching our children that they needn’t be perfect, that our responses back this up.

By accepting our children as they are – wonderful, ‘good enough’ young learners – we teach them to do the same. And that’s so much better than perfect.

Kind regards,