Dear St John's families,

Thank you everyone for your kind words regarding my appointment as Principal at St Thomas Aquinas Charnwood from next year. I will definitely miss this lovely place and I am squarely focussed on giving everything I have to the last day!

Assistant Principal, Rebekah Brown and I have been teaching 5 Blue for 6 weeks and we have loved it. As you would all be aware, there is quite the teacher shortage at present and obtaining replacements is very, very difficult. We continue to speak to new candidates whenever we can find them. Having been teaching since 1990 (my first 5 years teaching Kindergarten) it's nice to know that teaching is like riding a bike; with enough experience under your belt, you never forget how to do it.

Rebekah and I offered to teach 5 Blue to ensure that the students continue to learn without interruption. It was also to make sure that our teachers receive release time to keep up with their programming, assessment and communication requirements. It has meant that Rebekah and I have been very, very stretched in both teaching a class and undertaking our other full time roles. Thank you everyone for your assistance.

What went well today?

There are five components to our Positive Behaviour for Learning Policy. They include:

• Developing a culture of positive behaviour
• Acknowledging positive behaviours
• Creating a positive environment
• Discouraging and responding to problem behaviours
• Responding to and supporting students with highly complex behaviours

One of the ways we develop a culture of positive behaviour is by naming, noticing and celebrating positive behaviours. We believe that 'you get more of what you focus on'.

So every day, directly after recess and lunch, the students gather in their lines, ready to go inside to learn. We take that moment to ask students, and teachers who were on duty, 'What great play did we experience today?' Students raise their hands to tell us how they played Oztag and sorted out any disagreements calmly or how a group playing basketball invited someone who was wandering past to join them. Teachers talk about imaginative or caring play they saw. We ask all those those students to stand and we all give them a clap.

At the end of the day we all come out to lines and ask 'What went well today?' Many children will raise their hands and five or six will be chosen to share about something they enjoyed learning or feel proud of. It is a fabulous way to focus on positive thoughts from the day before going home.

Our brag tag system is another way that we focus on the positive. Every student has a brag tag on which they collect small stickers that any staff member can hand out. Staff members give these to students when they see students following expectations in the school. Staff will say "I want to give you this brag tag sticker because you.....". They are never used to 'bribe' students (i.e. "If you......you will get a brag tag."). They are used incidentally, after the fact, to help highlight for a student something they were doing was excellent learning, behaving, caring, etc. The feedback always links back to examples when the students 'Respect others, respect themselves or respect the environment'.

Over the next few Newsletters I would like to share a little more about the ways we support positive behaviour for our students. I look forward to sharing this successful approach with you.

Kind regards,

Matthew Garton

Principal