Planning for Peace!

This year we are excited to be implementing a new program in the Primary Campus called PeaceWiseKids.

This is a Christian program that equips young people to deal with challenging relationships and conflict in healthy, constructive and life-changing ways. In this program we will be teaching students key skills and strategies to having peaceful relationships and how to deal with difficult situations that arise in their day to day lives.  Students in Prep to Year 6 will have fortnightly lessons learning the principles, unpacking difficult situations and learning a shared vocabulary to use in the classroom, playground and even at home!

As we move through the program, students will see posters and flowcharts in the classroom and playground to help them remember the skills and strategies as they are learning to become peacemakers. This includes concepts such as the ‘5 A’s of Apology,’ ‘4 Choices of Forgiving’ and ‘Staying on Top of Conflict.’ 

Over the course of the year, students will work through the following three modules.

• Module 1: Understanding Conflict

• Module 2: Responding the Conflict

• Module 3: Peacemakers for Life

We started Module 1 last Thursday afternoon, looking at the question ‘What is conflict?’ During the course of this term we will unpack the following questions: Where does conflict come from? What is God’s peace plan for us? How can conflict be an opportunity? How do we become peacemakers?

We look forward to the journey of developing and improving peacemaking skills with our students this year. Please ask your children about their experiences and talk to class teachers if you would like more information about this program.

Andrew Nash - Deputy Principal, Head of Primary

First Day...

What are your memories of school?

Do you remember places - classrooms, corridors or yards? Do you remember people - teachers, friends and classmates? Perhaps you remember subjects and lessons? Or do you simply remember emotions – how you felt and responded to situations? 

As we get older some of our memories become more distant. We might remember fewer names, less about the lessons we enjoyed or endured, and a lot more about the feelings engendered by particular moments or places or relationships.

“Trying to do the best for our children when we can’t be there with them through every moment of their day, can be tough.”

Sometimes, when our own children begin their schooling or face challenges, it can be our emotional memory that guides our thinking. Let’s face it, it’s hard being a parent! Trying to do the best for our children when we can’t be there with them through every moment of their day, can be tough. Add on a layer of our own emotional memory of school and it can become a process of navigating our own as well as our child’s responses.

First days can be a particularly focussed time for those emotions. I have had to grapple with these myself at times. At the end of the day, I had to resolve the tension in my mind by realising that I can’t live their lives for them and there are many challenges that, if I remove the opportunity, I remove the chance for them to grow. Of course, there are many occasions when it is important for us to ask questions and to be involved in partnership with the School, but equally, there are times to perhaps just sit and listen without doing, a skill that I am still learning.

“Let’s face it, it’s hard being a parent!”

The Apostle Paul writes in the book of Romans, an incredible description of personal and spiritual growth. He begins with a statement that sounds strange to our ears, “…we also rejoice in our sufferings” and then goes on to explain “because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope”. For those seeking to following Jesus, the next verse should fill us with hope as Paul writes, “and hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us” (Romans 5:3-5).

I have had the pleasure of hearing many positive stories from our first few days this week. My favourite student reflection has been “good but tiring”. It has been exciting to welcome so many new and returning students to Calvin Christian School. Please pray for our students (and ourselves as parents) that there might be opportunity to take delight in new challenges. Our children, like us, are growing and maturing, being prepared for futures of hope and purpose in God.

Scott Ambrose - Principal

What can’t you live without?

Have you ever stopped to think about the things that you feel you absolutely need?

I find myself missing my ‘cuppa’ if I haven’t had one for a while, or a taste of something sweet after dinner, or simply missing the enjoyment that a quiet moment, preferably with some reading material, brings.

It is interesting how quickly we develop routines of taste and rituals of habit that run our lives. My children’s sense of what they absolutely cannot live without has sometimes surprised me. Apparently, a bowl of sweets on Saturday night whilst watching a movie is a quite essential part of life, or access to a social media connected device. The rituals that we develop grow quickly and can become all-consuming if we are not attentive to our time and areas of focus. Sometimes the passive decisions are the most powerful.

Amongst the first concepts I learnt in my Economics course were the terms ‘needs’ and ‘wants’. It seemed fairly simple then to categorise that things that were required for survival and the things that were not. However, what we can understand in our minds is not necessarily the way that we live. We can be very good at confusing our needs with our wants.

“My children’s sense of what they absolutely cannot live without has sometimes surprised me.”

The author Paul Tripp points out that when we start to call our ‘wants’ needs, then “we tell ourselves that we have to have them, that we cannot live without them, and that we have a right to demand them”. This leads us into a place where we evaluate our relationships with others and our sense of the love of God on whether they provide for our perceived ‘needs’.

An important part of our role as parents and educators, is nurturing a right sense of need in our young people. In part, this happens as we encourage the maturity that seeks the benefit of others above ourselves. It also occurs as we open their eyes to the incredible imbalance in resource across our world and the sometimes inverse relationship between wealth and contentedness (i.e. the more we have the more unhappy we seem to become). Next year’s Service-Based Learning trip to Indonesia for our Year 11 and 12 students is a wonderful example of a life and worldview changing opportunity, a chance to see what is truly required to lead to human flourishing.

As we are reminded in Scripture, “…I have learnt in whatever situation I am to be content” and “my God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus”. A real reason to celebrate this Christmas.

Scott Ambrose - Principal