Dear Parents, Caregivers and Friends of St Mary’s School,

The second last week of the term and what a busy time it is.

I attended, along with a number of parents and teachers, pupils and our school choir, Father Vaughan Hook’s ordination on Friday night, and what a special occasion it was. Father Vaughan has noted on several occasions how proud he had been of his education at both St Mary’s and as it was then, The Taieri High School. Father Vaughan was Head Boy at St Mary’s when he was in Year Eight, and feels the leadership opportunities that he was given at such a relatively young age helped to enable him to achieve what he has in later life.

We have begun our performances of our end of year concert, with the matinee going off very smoothly and I am sure that the evening performances will also be a tribute to the hard work and effort of the staff.

In his book ‘Outliers’ the author Malcolm Gladwell noted that a study carried out in American schools showed that children who continued with their education during their summer break were the children who were most likely to achieve well at school, up to 25% more likely in fact.

So just continuing on with my message from last week, please encourage your children to continue to read during the holidays. Buying books as Christmas presents is a good idea, but remember all children right up to intermediate age like to be read to, especially a story that is topical. I am reading the Hobbit to my daughter Emily at the moment. She chose this because she liked watching the Lord of the Rings films and wanted to know what happened in the Hobbit before she saw the film—this comes our next year.

As with most longer books it takes a while to get into it but now that we have she reminds me every night that it’s story time, and lets face it reading a good book is far more beneficial than watching some of the programmes on T.V.

Have a great week,

Mike Brosnahan.