What a joyous few weeks it has been in the Junior School, filled with colour, imagination and adventure, from the pages of our favourite books to the wide open skies of the Coorong.
Book Week: Celebrating a Love of Reading
Book Week is always one of the highlights of our Junior School calendar, and this year was no exception. Beyond the costumes and the fun, Book Week gives us a chance to pause and reflect on why we do what we do every single day in our classrooms and our Library: building strong literacy foundations and, just as importantly, nurturing in our girls a genuine, lifelong love of reading.
Literacy is the foundation upon which all other learning is built. When our girls learn to read fluently and with confidence, doors open: to knowledge, to empathy, to imagination and to the ability to understand and shape the world around them. But we want more for our girls than competence alone. We want them to love books, to lose themselves in a story, to seek out a favourite author, to see reading as a source of comfort, wonder and joy long after they leave our care. That is the deeper work of Book Week, and of every English lesson, library visit and bedtime story shared along the way.
Our annual Book Week Parade itself was, as always, an absolute delight. Watching our girls stride, twirl and giggle their way through the hall as their favourite characters, some brave, some funny, some a little bit magical, is one of the most heart-warming sights of the school year. It takes a village to bring a parade like this to life, and I want to extend my sincere thanks to our wonderful staff for their creativity and organisation, to the girls for embracing the day with such enthusiasm and to our families for the time, effort and love that went into every costume. Events like this remind us what a special community we belong to.
Adventures at Crawford: Year 5 Camp to the Coorong
Recently, our Year 5 girls travelled for the first time to Crawford, our campus at the Coorong, for their Outdoor Education camp, and what an experience it was. Along with outstanding behaviour, I was so proud to hear stories of the courage, curiosity and spirit of adventure our girls brought to every activity, whether they were navigating new and challenging activities, caring for the rare plants we propagate at Crawford or embracing being away from their families and out of their comfort zones.
I could not be prouder of how our girls approached the camp. They met each challenge with bravery, good humour and genuine determination, discovering in many instances just how capable they are.
Experiences like Crawford matter enormously, and not only for the memories they create. Outdoor education offers something our classrooms, for all their strengths, simply cannot replicate. Away from routine and screens, in the company of their peers and the natural world, our girls build resilience by facing genuine challenges and working through them. They develop a real sense of their own capability, discovering that they can do hard things and often more than they thought possible. They learn to trust themselves and each other, to solve problems creatively, to lead and to follow, and to find quiet moments of reflection in the vastness of the Coorong landscape. These dispositions – courage, independence, teamwork, adaptability and a willingness to give things a go – will serve our girls well far beyond their time at Crawford and, indeed, far beyond their years at school.
Book Week and the Crawford camp might, on the surface, seem worlds apart. But both, in their own way, speak to the same aspiration we hold for every girl in our Junior School: that she grows into a curious, courageous and capable young woman, equally comfortable lost in a good book as she is with sand between her toes and the wind in her hair.
