From the Principal's Desk:
Dear Parents and Caregivers of Good Samaritan,
The P&F Colour Explosion Fun Run is only days away. The children are looking forward to the day and the proceeds will be combined with last year’s fundraising to support the building of a new playground for the Good Samaritan students.
The highest fundraising class will win a class pizza party! Mystery guests are lined up to be slimed along with Mrs Sillis & Mrs Hailstone!
Fundraising in schools provides additional resources, enhances educational opportunities, supports students and teachers, and improves the overall quality of education. Effective fundraising can have a positive impact on both the educational experience and the broader community connected to the school.
The supply and cost to install a new playground is significant. The Good Samaritan P&F have money set aside from last year’s colour run with the aim that this year’s run will provide a substantial amount to contribute to the overall goal of the playground.
Quotes are currently being sourced and we will soon have a good indication of what we are able to build.
This is an exciting time for our school and one for which we are most grateful to the parent community’s support.
I look forward to enjoying Friday with all of our Good Samaritan students.
Sincerely,
Toni Sillis
Principal
Can your business help build our playground?
Our Good Samaritan P&F is reaching out to your business in the hopes of securing financial support for this project.
If your business contributes to the upcoming P&F Colour Explosion Fun Run, Good Samaritan will receive 95% of the donation! You can make your donation directly by following this link.
Your business will be recognised in upcoming school newsletters and on the school’s social media pages.
Thank you for considering donating to this terrific Good Samaritan fundraising event.
Cancer's different in a young person's world.
With your support, funds raised from Bandanna Day on Friday will help young people impacted by cancer get access to programs, counselling and peer support.
Students can purchase a bandanna for $5 from the school office and wear it whilst running in the Fun Run.
Ruby, Darcy and Fernando are ready to support Bandanna Day!
Mental Health Month
Beyond Blue have developed a Mental Health Check-In tool. We encourage everyone to take a moment to check-in with themselves - to pause, reflect, and consider your own wellbeing. It’s a small action that can have a big impact
Working Bee
On Friday 3 November you are invited to come along for a long while or a short while to assist the re-establishment of the vegetable garden. Work on the garden will commence at 9am and continue until complete.
On Friday 11 November we plan to establish a garden within the concrete seating area in front of Kindergarten. We are calling for parents to assist with this garden as well.
If you are able to support this work please complete this form by Monday 30 October.
Students can wear a different hat on Thursday 26 October to show their appreciation.
You can post a “hats off” selfie on social media, either on your own or with family or friends. Get your child to grab their hat – beret, beanie, bucket, bowler – and remember to tag #WorldTeachersDay @aitsl @goodsams.fairymeadow
Below are some cards that you can download for your child to write a special message to their teacher.
Understanding Halloween
A few years ago, Emeritus Bishop Peter Ingham wrote the following to support our understanding of Halloween:
Halloween is growing in popularity but its roots are lost on most people. It is observed on 31 October, the "een" or "eve" of All Hallows Day (All Saints Day) on 1 November.
"Hallow occurs in the Lord's Prayer – "hallowed be thy name" (may God's name be held holy) – so to celebrate Halloween without connecting it to All Saints Day would be like celebrating Christmas Eve without a Christmas Day. If you take away the Saints from Halloween, along with our Christian beliefs about the dignity and destiny of human beings, then all you have left is a pre-Christian Celtic celebration held at the end of summer in the northern hemisphere.
As days shorten and winter nights lengthen, the spirits (goblins and ghouls) have more dark time to be mischievous and haunt. The pagans appeased them with treats so as not to suffer their tricks. The “trick or treat” tradition comes from people disguising themselves as evil spirits, both to fool them into leaving them alone, as well as to steal the treats left by people to appease the evil spirits. When Christianity came to Ireland, they wisely baptised “Halloween,” sifting out what was true and disposing of the superstitious.
We Christians believe in a spirit world of angels and saints. All the baptised, both on earth and who have gone before us in faith, belong to the Communion of Saints. So the old pagan custom of appeasing the spirits became a Christian holy time of remembering them, of being connected with them in love, and not being frightened of them. In time there developed (it seems in Ireland) a feast of the spirits who intercede for us, not frighten us.
This became the celebration of All Saints at the end of the northern summer and some time later evolved into All Souls Day to pray for the spirits on the way to God but who needed help.
All this reminds us, despite our modern day individualism, of the unbelievable connections we have in the family of God – on earth, in purgatory and in heaven. So these days of Halloween, All Hallows (All Saints), All Souls celebrate what we believe and name the “Communion of Saints.”
Fr William Bausch says dressing up for Halloween ritually connects us and symbolically joins us to the community of the invisible world. He says that the scary masks (witches, skeletons, etc) from a Christian point of view, are a symbol of human disfigurement brought on by sin, betrayal, sickness and death. But faith reminds us that eventually those masks, by the grace of God and our faith, will be removed and we shall be made beautiful as ugliness dissolves, sin is cleansed and even the last enemy, death, falls before the everlasting mercy of Christ.
Jack-o-the Lanterns, roaming forever between heaven and earth, holding his pumpkin lantern high, is a one-man morality tale associated with Halloween. Jack is smart enough to outwit the devil himself, but it is not enough to get him into heaven. Jack was so self-centred that he never helped another human being. He used his giftedness only for himself. While Jack knew about faith and the power of the Cross, he failed to take up his cross and follow Jesus.
Fr Bill points to the irony of our modern world which really discounts faith, the interior life and organised religion, yet plays this cultural game of secular Halloween. But the spiritual, in fact, sneaks in, as secular people flirt on Halloween with the possibilities of another world and, as Fr Bill puts it, Halloween “scratches a growing spiritual itch without losing face.” He says it shows that our very one-dimensional secular world still needs fulfilment and peace – something deeper.
Halloween, like Christmas, is becoming very commercial. As a result, we do not even come close to thinking of it in terms of faith and religion. To help us make the connection, Fr Bausch suggests:
First, before going out “trick or treating,” why not gather the family to offer a prayer for deceased members and friends, people of our past who meant something to us and whose influence is still with us.
Second, bring out the family album for the triduum of Halloween, All Saints, and All Souls; put it on the coffee table with a little lit candle in front of it. This makes a statement to your children or grandchildren that we all come from a long line of people who loved us and that Halloween is sacred time as well as fun time, that we are part of their journey as they are of ours.
Third, on All Saints Day, possibly around the dinner table, have family members research the saint after whom they are named and tell everyone something about him or her.
Finally, you might bring some of the things you may get by going around tricking or treating to a nursing home or send to the St Vincent de Paul Society.
Halloween, All Saints, All Souls: is especially a time of faith but can also have a touch of “trick or treat” fun! [Fr William Bausch “Once Upon a Gospel” Pp 572-574.]
Halloween also invites us to talk openly about death which is a taboo topic for so many, almost as if it were not a real fact of life! You and I need to press the "pause" button in our crowded lives to reflect on our own mortality, with all the spiritual and practical consequences that go with it.
Fortunately each year the Church gives us two feasts, All Hallows (Saints) and All Souls (the Commemoration of all the Faithful who have departed) to do this.