Newsletter August 13, 2024

This Thursday 14th August, the Catholic Church will celebrate a special day to honour Mary, the mother of Jesus - the Feast of the Assumption. This feast day commemorates that Mary, the mother of God, was assumed body and soul into heaven and reunited with her son Jesus.

The feast day of this holy and momentous event stems from the middle of the 5th Century when the Commemoration of the Mother of God was celebrated each year on 15 August in a shrine located near Jerusalem. More than 100 years later, the feast also commemorated the end of Mary’s time on earth and was known as the “Dormition of Our Lady.”

On Thursday at 10:30am all classes will attend Mass at St Brigid’s Church with a focus on Feast of the Assumption of Mary.

Our prayers and thoughts are with the following students who will receive the sacrament of Eucharist this Sunday at St Brigid’s Church.

Reina Borg - Alexander Cauchi - Archie Clarke - Grace Conlan - Petar Filipovic

Hamish Fodor - Bridie Grigg - Jamie Jarvis - Noah Kettle - Ciara Paolini

Oscar Phillips - Georgia Shanahan & Harry Breguet

In preparation for Book Week, this Friday 16th August, Perform Education will be facilitating a production titled, '2024 Maybe a Miracle'. The performance is for Foundation - Year 6 students and will commence at 1:30pm at the Mechanics Hall Ballan. For your child to attend, permission is required via PAM.

Each year since 1945 the CBCA has brought children and books together across Australia through CBCA Book Week. During this time schools and public libraries spend one glorious week celebrating books and Australian children's authors and illustrators.

On Monday 19th August, children are invited to dress as their favourite book character and we will hold our Book Week Parade. Families are then welcome to visit classrooms and participate in Book Week activities.

On Tuesday 20th August, we will welcome the team from Photo Design Ballarat to take professional photos capturing a day in the life of our beautiful school.

3-Way Conferences will take place this term on Tuesday 27th August from 2:30pm - 6:00pm and Tuesday 3rd September from 2:30pm - 6:00pm. 3-Way Conferences will be 10 minutes in duration. Given the nature of these meetings, it is expected that all students attend the conferences with their parents. Families can book a suitable time through PAM/SIMON Everywhere. Bookings  are now open.

On Friday 30th August, we are excited to welcome fathers and special people in our lives to our Father’s Day Breakfast and Liturgy. We will commence our celebration with breakfast from 8:30am in the Gathering Space. As this breakfast is for fathers and special people only, children are required to be dropped off to school from 8:30am as per usual. Following breakfast, our Liturgy will commence at 9:15am at St Brigid’s church and will be attended by the whole school.

A big thank you to our Parents and Friends for organising the pie drive. 

Orders can be made via the Spriggy Schools App and need to be placed prior to Friday 16th August. To order please go to Spriggy Schools using the Events Tab.

Delivery to St Brigid's will be on Thursday 29th August, 2024. If you are unable to collect orders on this day they can be sent home with your child or if requested, placed into the freezer for collection the following week.

Our P&F are in the process of creating a St Brigid's School Cookbook. Please click on the following  link to submit your recipe: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/DCDNJBT

Handy tips when submitting your recipe: 

• Please use standard metric measurements for ingredients (cup, teaspoon, tablespoon, millilitres, grams)
• Temperatures to be given in Celsius (not Fahrenheit)
• Please list the method/directions with numbered instructions

Sample recipe below:

Condensed Milk Chock-chip Cookies

Serves: approx. 60 // Prep time 20 Minutes // Cooking time 12 minutes

Ingredients

• 500 g butter
• 1 1/2 cups white sugar
• 1 can sweetened condensed milk
• 5 cups self-raising flour
• a pinch of salt
• 3 x 250g bags chocolate chips (any mix of milk, white and dark)

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 180oC Line baking trays with non-stick paper.
2. Using an electric mixer, cream butter and sugar. Add salt and condensed milk and continue to beat mixture until light and fluffy.
3. Add flour 1 cup at a time, mixing in between each cup
4. Add the chocolate chips and mix in.
5. Using wet hands, roll dough into golf ball sized balls. place onto baking tray.
6. Bake for approximately 12 minutes or until lightly golden.

This recipe makes a lot of cookies so you may need to bake in batches!

You are welcome (and encouraged) to submit more than one recipe for consideration! This will help us if we receive duplicate recipe submissions.

More information to follow within the coming weeks.

Over the last few weeks we have had a number of outbreaks of nits and lice across the school. We all know that such discoveries can means a somewhat frustrating and tedious process in order to ensure complete elimination.  It is important that we all share responsibility for this problem and so we all need to undertake regular checks of children’s hair.  

Whole school prayer/Assembly will again take place in Term 3 from 9:00am - 9:20am. The timetable is as follows:

Assembly Schedule Term 3

* Please note - hot lunches will be served at 12:30pm this Friday before the "Maybe a Miracle' Performance.

Hot lunches have resumed for Term 3 via the online ordering system - Spriggy Schools.

Please see the brochure for information regarding the Spriggy Schools App.

Volunteers:

This term we will re-introduce a roster to help prepare and serve lunches on each Friday. If you are available to help out on a Friday between 11.30am-1.00pm please contact the school office (valid Working with Children Check is required).

The children really enjoy hot lunches and this can only happen with the help of volunteers!

Our next P&F meeting will take place on Thursday 15th August from 3.15pm - 4.00pm in our school Library. An active P&F committee allows families the opportunity to play a valuable part in providing social and fundraising activities.  Please attend this meeting if you are interested in joining our P&F committee.

Any help would be greatly appreciated as all funds raised contribute to resources and materials to support your children in their holistic development.

All of the timetabled events (to date) for the school year can be found on our school calendar which can be accessed through PAM and via this newsletter.

SZappp Mobile Application is a fantastic way for communicating and making information or resources available to our St Brigid's school community. 

Please follow the instructions in the below guide on how to install the SZappp and register an email account for communication.