This year, Refugee Week was held from 16 - 22 June. Refugee Week is Australia’s peak annual activity to raise awareness about the issues affecting refugees and celebrate the positive contributions made by refugees to Australian society. Originally celebrated in 1986, Refugee Week coincides with World Refugee Day, 20 June.

God, no one is a stranger to you and no one is ever far from your loving care.

In your kindness watch over migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, those separated from their loved ones, those who are lost and those who have been exiled from their homes.

Bring them safely to the place where they long to be, and help us always to show your kindness to strangers and those in need.

We ask this through Christ our Lord, who too was a refugee and migrant who travelled to another land searching for a home.
Amen

Reports are coming home with your child tomorrow.  The reports are addressed to parents and therefore should not be opened beforehand by the children.

St Bede's P&F has been offered a chance to run a Sausage Sizzle fundraiser on Saturday, August 17 at Bunnings in Fyshwick from 8am - 4.30pm.  This is a great opportunity to raise funds and also a fun way to connect with other families.

We are now looking for families to volunteer for one shift (2 hours) on the day.  Any help would be greatly appreciated!

If you are able to help, would you please let Linda know and she will pass on to the P&F committee.

Thank you for your ongoing support!

Just as your electricity account or your phone bill have a due date, unfortunately so do school fees. (This is to ensure we can also pay our electricity and phone bills on time and continue to provide for your children’s education needs!)  Reminders for Term Three fees were sent home last week.

Have any of these particulars changed?

• address,
• home phone numbers,
• work phone numbers,
• mobile phone numbers,
• email address or
• emergency contacts.

It is extremely important we have the correct information on file especially in the case of an emergency as well as effective school communication.  Please email Linda on Linda.Wells@cg.catholic.edu.au if you need to update your information.

The following students received an award in Week 3:

ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS

WALK IN LOVE AND PEACE AWARDS

LEADERSHIP AWARDS

(Excluding current Year 6 students)

If your child is leaving St Bede’s at the end of this year, would you please notify Julie or Breen as a matter of courtesy.  This includes those who have applied for a place at Marist College, St Edmund’s College and CGS.  Although we hate to see any of our families departing, our planning for 2021 will soon be under way so it's important we have this information as soon as possible.

My daughter, who had a sleep adverse baby couldn’t believe her ears when a new mum in a mother’s group proudly announced that her four month old slept through the night. My daughter thought, “What am I doing wrong?”

Approaching this mother to discover her sleep secret, my daughter learned that this boast was made on the back of some dodgy data. The four month old had slept the night through once but this mother thought it was worth boasting about.

I welcomed my daughter to the politics of parenting where benchmarking of kids’ physical and social development, their behaviour and academic progress can become a constant.

The pitfall of benchmarking with other children

Comparing your child with others is a stress-inducing and, ultimately, useless activity. It’s hard to resist, as we tend to assess our progress in any area of life by checking out how we compare with our peers.

When you were a child in school you probably compared yourself to your schoolmates. Your teachers may not have graded you but you knew who the smart kids were and where you ranked in the pecking order.

Now that you have kids of your own do you still keep an eye on your peers? Do you use the progress and behaviour of their kids as benchmarks to help you assess your own performance as well as your child’s progress? Or perhaps you compare your child to yourself at the same age?

Benchmarking children’s progress with that of other children is not a wise parenting strategy. Inevitably, it will lead to parent frustration as there will always be a child who performs better than your own on any scale you use.

Kids develop at their own rates

Each child has his or her own developmental clock which is nearly impossible to alter. There are late bloomers, early developers, bright sparks and steady-as-you-go kids everywhere. It’s the first group that can cause the most concern for parents who habitually compare children to siblings, their friends’ kids and even themselves when they were in school.

The trick is to focus on your child’s improvement and effort and use your child’s results as the benchmark for his or her progress and development. “Your spelling is better today than it was a month ago” is a better measure of progress than “Your spelling is the best in the class!”

Gender matters

It’s no secret that different architects developed boys’ and girls’ brains. One major difference lies around timing, or maturity. The maturity gap between boys and girls is anywhere between 12 months and two years, and seems to be consistent all the way to adulthood.

Quite simply, girls have a developmental head start over boys in areas such as handwriting, verbal skills and relationship skills. Boys benefit greatly from teaching strategies designed for their specific needs. They also benefit from having teachers and parents who recognise that patience is a virtue when teaching and raising boys, as it seems to take longer for many boys to learn and develop.

Kids have different talents, interests and strengths

So your eight-year-old can’t hit a tennis ball like Novak Djokavic, even though your neighbour’s child can. Perhaps your neighbour’s teenager is a piano virtuoso, while your fourteen year old’s idea of musical talent is listening to Spotify while doing homework. Comparisons are stressful, as they can bear no relationship to children’s interests and talents.

It’s better to help your child or young person identify his or her own talents and interests. And also recognise that strengths and interests may be completely different than those of his or her peers and siblings.

Avoid linking your parenting self-esteem to your child’s performance

Take pride on your children’s performance at school, in sport or their leisure activities. Seeing your child doing well is one of the unsung pleasures of parenting. You should also celebrate their achievements and milestones such as taking their first steps, getting their first goal in a game or getting great marks at school.

However, you shouldn’t have too much personal stake in your children’s success or in their milestones, as this close association makes it hard to separate yourself from them. It may also lead to excessive parental pressure for kids to do well, which is an acknowledged source of anxiety for many children and young people.

The maxim “You are not your child” is a challenging but essential parental concept to live by. Doing so takes real maturity and altruism, but it is the absolute foundation of that powerful thing known as ‘unconditional love’.