Term 2 I The Way Newsletter I Friday 24 May 2024

One of the greatest challenges for families and educators is learning to support our children and students in a world of social media and 24-hour media. The barrage of information and social connection is constant, and it is essential for us to build skills to help our children navigate the complexity of the constantly changing world around them

This year, the Junior School is partnering with Open Parachute, an online program that covers topics such as self-esteem, resilience, social media and well-being concerns that get in the way of student engagement and concentration.

Parents and educators are aware that our students may seem to struggle more than they used to, specifically with navigating the complexity of friendships. We seek to teach common language around building resilience across the different year levels from Kindergarten to Year 6.

Open Parachute is an online program that helps the Junior School teachers at Thomas Hassall do just that.

Each week, our students experience lessons based around documentary videos which showcase Australian youth sharing their own experiences of growing up. Peer role-modelling is clinically proven to help students develop resilience, while also creating a sense of safety in the classroom, enabling students to explore their own experiences of friendship, peer relations and building positive social behaviours.

Each lesson contains exercises that enable students to analyse the learning points and practice mental health skills-building exercises. These conversations change the way students interact in other contexts outside of class, minimising the isolation and vulnerability of students when they are struggling with peers at school and at home.

I encourage you to talk to your child about what they are learning through this wonderful program. Encourage them to speak with you about how to build and maintain positive relationships at College. It will help us all navigate this changing world in a productive and safe way.

We all know that space is vast, right? But just how big are those distances in our solar system? Let’s just say that every poster you’ve ever seen that tries to depict our solar system is way, way, way out! 

Not only are the planets, and the sun, very different in size (the inflatable models in the photo – Mars, Jupiter and Uranus – are definitely not to scale), but the distances between the planets are huge! To say that Earth is about 151 million km from the sun sounds impressive, but how do we begin to imagine such huge distance? When you consider that it actually takes around eight minutes for the sun’s light to reach us, that gives you some idea.

Another way to demonstrate this is by trying to build a scale model, which is exactly what the Year Five students did this week. In our models, the sun was made the size of a golf ball. On this scale the Earth was the size of a grain of sugar and was 4 metres away. Neptune, our most distant planet, was the size of a cake sprinkle and was a whopping 129m away from the golf ball-sized sun (actual distance of 4 500 000 000 km). When you think that our solar system is just one tiny part of a galaxy of billions of stars and that our galaxy is just one of many billions of galaxies, you might start to feel pretty small indeed!

Mr Peter Butchatsky
Junior School Teacher - Year 5 Team Leader