Giving Thanks Together

Our Travel to Bethlehem and Aussie Christmas Party was a wonderful evening, filled with students and staff retelling the true story of Christmas, celebrating our students’ efforts in their learning this year and great fellowship with one another. As I drove home from this evening, I rejoiced and gave thanks to God for the school year, our wonderful students, exceptional staff and our families that partner with us. 

You can see more photos from the event here.

I have been pondering about the meaning of ‘thankfulness’ and the way our media and the world encourages the notion of ‘giving thanks’. There has been a wide range of research on gratitude and research suggests that giving thanks makes you happier. If you Google, ‘the benefits of being thankful’, you will be led to hundreds of articles confirming the many benefits of being thankful. Harvard Medical School found that gratitude is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness. Gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.

Today Kmart and newsagencies are filled with gratitude journals and as a society, we are very aware of our need to give thanks. Joe Carter, a well-known Christian author, suggests that our gratitude can easily become individualistic and we neglect the fact that giving thanks is a community project, where we together publicly give thanks to God. True gratitude is directed at our God, the giver of every good and perfect gift.

‘Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.’ James 1:17

 As a community, I encourage you to take the time to join me in rejoicing and giving thanks to God for his faithfulness and confess that we have nothing apart from Him.

Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good.
His love endures forever.
Give thanks to the God of gods.
His love endures forever.
Give thanks to the Lord of lords:
His love endures forever.
Psalm 136:1-3

I pray that these holidays as you join with family and friends to gather to eat, drink and share gifts that you will make time to retell The Christmas Story and give thanks for the love of a God who was prepared to send His son in order to redeem us! 

Miss Bethany Armstrong - Principal

Student Forums

Many of our parents and carers would have participated in this year’s Parent Satisfaction Surveys. These surveys, conducted annually, provide our parents and carers with an opportunity to rate the school in key areas and provide the school’s leadership with valuable feedback and information on what’s currently working well at the school and what could be improved.

This year for the first time, we also provided our students in Year 5 and 6 with an opportunity to participate in a Student Satisfaction Survey. Students completed these surveys in Term 3.

Recently, the CEO of Christian Schools Tasmania, Mr David Gillman and I met with all students in Years 5 and 6 to talk with them (in an informal setting) about the results of the survey. During this meeting, students were asked to provide honest feedback to Mr Gillman and myself on things that they felt were important to them as students at Northern Christian School, including things that they believed were working well and things that we could maybe improve on as a school.

Our Year 5 and 6 students provided us with some great feedback on many areas, including what a ‘great’ teacher looks like, whether bullying was an issue at the school, how safe students felt at Northern and whether the school provided enough opportunities for leadership development. Mr Gillman commented to me after this student forum that he was extremely impressed with the level of maturity that was demonstrated by our students saying that he thought we had “an awesome bunch of kids at Northern”!

Miss Bethany Armstrong - Principal

Prep News

Prep has had a wonderful term filled with many fun activities. Early in the term, we had a Geography excursion. We looked at all the shops and different buildings in Bridgewater and talked about what people do there. After Recess at the park, we travelled to the top of Mount Wellington. We were able to see all three bridges which cross the Derwent River in the Hobart area. The children were amazed by the view.

A few weeks ago we shared the story of Tiddalik the Frog. Tiddalik was a greedy frog who drank all the water in Australia leaving all the other animals thirsty. The story tells us about the different things the animals did to try and make Tiddalik laugh so that all the water would come out of him. Each child retold the story in their own words. Everyone made a frog and created an Aboriginal style background for the frog to be displayed on.

Now Christmas is nearly upon us. We have been looking at the amazing story of Christmas from the Bible. It is incredible that the Saviour of the world was born in a stable where the animals lived. We are working hard to complete some Christmas tree crafts to take home and put on our Christmas trees!

Mrs Adrienne Bitt - Prep Teacher

Northern Parent Satisfaction Surveys

I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who participated in the recent Parent Satisfaction Surveys in Term 3. These surveys are an extremely valuable tool for us to obtain feedback from our parents; feedback that allows us to better understand what our key stakeholders – you – are feeling about many aspects of the school.

We also use our Parent Satisfaction Surveys to help us as a school to:

• Celebrate strengths

• Identify challenges

• Establish goals

• Set priorities

The 2019 survey saw 58 families participate. This was a significant increase from 2018. The survey had a number of statements which probe different aspects of school life and provided us with feedback that we are going to use to improve our service to you and your children.

Of importance to note is the response to the last, and possibly most important, survey statement: “Overall, I am very satisfied with my decision to send my child/ren to this school.” The results indicate that the vast majority of parents are to a substantial extent satisfied with sending their child/ren to Northern Christian School.

Our goal is to have one hundred per cent of our families highly satisfied with the education we provide and we are endeavouring to resolve the issues that have been raised.

For example: Our survey results indicated that parents believe that students need to be better prepared to leave school for further studies.

In response to this, in 2020 we will be building our partnership with Emmanuel Christian School to better prepare our Year 6 students for high school.

In 2020 we will continue to focus on and report back to you on other areas of improvement.

Thank you again for taking the time to complete the Parent Satisfaction Surveys. We greatly appreciate your feedback and we encourage you to use the feedback section on our website. We’d love to hear from you!

Kinder News

In Kindergarten this week we have been reviewing the story of Jesus’ birth. Learning about the reason why Christmas is celebrated is important to us. Jesus' birth was a monumental event that changed history and is celebrated still to this day. Following on from our school performance last week with Travel to Bethlehem we had been learning to tell the story ourselves.

Over the past week we made some props to help us in the retelling. Then in the classroom we put together the story and practiced using our puppets of Mary, Joseph and Jesus. It was wonderful to see and hear all the students having a go sharing the story. You may wish to ask them to share the story with you at home. I know that they would love to share it with you.

Mr Sam Whittle - Kinder Teacher

Opt in for Newsletter

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If you would still like to receive a printed version please contact our office via email.