Dear Parents,

URStrong Friendology Parent/Student Workshops

With the guidance of our social worker, Mrs Lisa Mueller, the staff at St. Michael’s have recently been implementing the URStrong Friendology program. This skills-based program teaches students how to put a voice to their feelings, create healthy friendships, make healthy choices within their friendships, stand up for themselves and build a solid foundation for future relationships. Along with learning what’s normal in a friendship and the difference between healthy and unhealthy friendships, students also learn strategies for putting out common Friendship Fires™ (conflict-resolution) and how to combat mean-on-purpose behaviour.

We are especially fortunate to have Dana Kerford, the founder of URSTRONG, present these workshops to us Tuesday 11^th September which coincides with our Open Night and Book Fair.  We are able to offer two parent/student workshop sessions on Open Night where you as parents can become familiar with the concepts and language of this important program and work with your child to learn strategies that you can support your child with at home. To learn more, please watch a short video describing the impact of URSTRONG on children and parents around the globe here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_xtdWphUC4&feature=youtu.be

Tickets are $25 per person (students and parents both purchase a ticket), and the P&F have kindly agreed to provide a 50% discount for the first 100 tickets purchased.

Please see below for the workshop that’s right for you and your children:

• Language of Friendship Jr (Grades 1 & 2 + Parents): 4:00 to 5:30pm
• Language of Friendship (Grades 3-6 +Parents): 6:00 to 7:30pm

An email will be sent on Monday with details on how to register for this event.

I strongly encourage you to take the time to engage in a workshop with your child/ren to support them in developing these essential life skills.

New Newsletter Format

We hope you enjoyed our new newsletter format last week – we have received some great feedback from parents. The new format aims to be more modern and user-friendly. We are also now able to access analytics about how many people are reading various parts of the newsletter so that we can continually work to enhance the newsletter and cater to parent needs and interests. Thank you to our wonderful assistant principals who worked hard to achieve this great outcome. We’d love to hear more feedback about how you are finding the changes.

School Banking – Change of Venue 

Now that we have a lovely refurbished multipurpose room, please be advised that from next week school banking will be held in the multipurpose room once again. Thank you to our wonderful parents who co-ordinate this important initiative so that our students can learn to learn about money and develop good saving habits.

Mrs Siobhan Galos
Principal