Check, check and check again

Wearing red at Peregian Springs State School

Yesterday was 'Day for Daniel' - a day when we all wear some red (a colour that has become synonymous with child safety) to promote awareness of the protection of children in our community. Daniel Morcombe was abducted at the end of 2003. Our children have lived with his disappearance all their lives. We, as parents and teachers, have lived with the tragedy and the heartbreaking sadness of the Morcombe family for nearly ten years. A sentiment this strong tends to create a climate of fear and a tendency to overprotect our kids by hovering over them, warning them and tethering them to us closely.

When you think your child has disappeared it is a gut wrenching, heart stopping, sickening feeling of total panic and loss of all rational reasoning. Shortly after Daniel disappeared my daughter (ten at the time) was supposed to be catching the bus from school just 3km into Noosa Junction to where my husband works - simple, just get on the bus outside the school, there's a teacher on duty, sit next to someone you know, get off the bus at the stop outside Dad's office - what could go wrong?

At 4.00pm Rick rings me (I was in Brisbane) and then came the news - 'have you got Maddie? She hasn't come here. I've been looking for her all over the Junction. I've rung the school. I've rung the bus company. We don't know where she is.' It was like a heart attack. I was at least a two hour drive away and Rick was in a mad panic.

After half an hour of madness, phone calls, checking with friends, checking with Maddie's friends, and rechecking all over again while trying not to scream at everyone who said 'no, we haven't seen her', we finally located her at the bus depot in Tewantin.

What the bus company hadn't told us was that the school bus went to the high school where she was supposed to get off and get on a different bus that went to the Junction. As the bus she was on sailed past the end of the Sunshine Beach Road she told the driver she needed to get off. 'No, we don't stop here - you'll have to stay on', she was told. Well, at least it was a happy ending. There is a bit more to this story that I'll tell another time but the point I'm trying to make is that as parents we need to check and check and check AND we also need to make sure our children are building the skills of resilience, self-reliance and problem solving.

Hovering, tethering and warning frightens them - as a parent said to me this week 'Gwen, they think there's a paedophile on every corner'. Of course, there isn't but our kids need to be able to recognise the signs that tell them something is a 'bit off' and then have some behaviours they have practised to remove themselves from the situation. Our student protection lessons at school are about this very thing and on Assembly on Friday 3L demonstrated this brilliantly with their three little skits.

So Day for Daniel is over again for another year, our awareness is heightened and our safety skills are honed...and at 4.10pm as we were all packing up at the end of a week in comes a Dad 'My daughter didn't get of the bus. We don't know where she is'.

Thankfully, another happy ending - she had missed her stop and had to stay on!

Stories from the Past - Living with our History

Over the last 15 to 20 years the teaching of history has had the potential to be a sadly neglected part of the general curriculum. It has still been there, as part of Studies of Society and Environment, but teachers had to look hard to find it. Teaching historical enquiry requires skill and an interest in the past. And so, over time and with a greater focus being placed on other areas of curriculum teaching and learning in history has faded away.

In 2013 all schools will be implementing history as a subject in its own right once again. And I am so excited about this. Having a sense of history is so important to understanding who we are and how we came to be this way, and for understanding who others are and how they came to be the way they are. For example, we cannot hope to understand the culture of Australian born Vietnamese families without knowing the stories of the Vietnam War and horrors endured in getting to Australia. And similarly, white Australians cannot partner effectively with our Indigenous peoples in building their (and our) futures without an appreciation of the ancient time they walked the land and the more modern times of white settlement.

And our youngest students cannot develop a sense of who they are without hearing and appreciating the stories of their own families and communities.

As a new school we will have to work hard for many years to build a history, to create a group of stories about how we came to be. My last school, Pomona SS, was over a hundred years old - the Resource Centre was full of artefacts from a time gone by - photographs of staff and students stretching back to the 1920s, tuckshop menus from the 1960s, a Tug-A-War trophy from one of the first King of the Mountain races. The things we learned about our school and the town of Pomona when we dug up a Time Capsule buried since the mid 1980s was a joy.

So we are collecting historical artefacts for our 'museum' - phones, cameras, kitchen objects, bric a brac and letters from a time gone past. These objects give us a new appreciation of our families and sometimes reveal startling facts and knowledge.

I visited my parents in the last holidays and asked Mum if she had any artefacts. She brought out her memory box and produces a copy of the Daily Mirror from 20 July 1969 - the day man landed on the moon! It was still in one piece and you can go and look at it in our Resource Centre. And what can we learn from a newspaper that's 43 years old? Well, one thing is that some stories never change - besides the moon landing, the newspaper reports on bashings, poorly behaved football players and local youth making a nuisance of themselves after dark! But it is also clear that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in Apollo 11 using less technology than we carry in our iPhones today! And, oh yes, there was a third man on that mission who everyone seems to have forgotten - and he didn't even get a mention in the paper produced on the day this historic event occurred. Perhaps our history lessons next year will help children question why.

Common Courtesies... or just plain old fashioned good manners

I'm pretty big on good manners at school - or Common Courtesies, as we call them. Our Common Courtesies include greeting people when you first meet them for the day, saying please and thank you, knowing how to enter a room politely, using 'excuse me' in its correct context, using each other's names and a few others. At Peregian Springs we teach these to children explicitly, and everyone models their use. Our Common Courtesies are demonstrated everywhere everyday by students, teachers and other staff members - and we love it when parents reinforce these at home too.

Our students' manners is one of the things visitors to our school comment on nearly every week - visitors seem to be amazed at how polite and courteous our kids are. And I'm always terribly proud of them when they walk past me as I'm escorting a group of visitors and call out 'Good morning, Ms Sands', spontaneously and without any prompting! (This often happens in the supermarket in the afternoon too!)

Being consistent with our teaching of manners is important - those of you at Assembly on Friday would have heard me pull up the school and chastise them for talking and walking away while one of our Student Leaders was trying to close Assembly. I'm happy to say, I rarely have to do this, as mostly our kids are happy and polite students without being reminded. For me, though, setting and maintaining the standard is important.

Why do we think manners are important enough to teach? It's because a few common courtesies make the world a nicer place to be in - a smile improves a recipient's day; a please, a thank you and a polite knock on a door helps someone feel respected; the use of a person's name creates connection; and an 'excuse me' often leads to another feeling cared about.

Common Courtesies are the key to helping us function as a community - they demonstrate care and respect, and help us get along with each other harmoniously. A father said to me the other day about his son's discovery of the shower,  'He's just realised that smelling nice helps him get along with people better!' And this is what I think about manners - they help us get along with people better!

Stories kids tell...

Quite often we hear at school about something a child has told their parents their teacher has said or done that has caused a great deal of consternation in the home. My own daughter used to tell me stories about her teachers that would have made their hair curl, had I repeated them!

Most times parents come and ask us about the situation and we are able to put the story straight - many times the stories are quite funny; but occasionally a teacher will say to me in anguish 'how could they have thought I would have said/done/thought that?'

The thing is that kids sometimes (actually a lot of times) get things muddled. They are not liars and they are not lying - they are merely reporting something they have seen or heard from their perception. They don't have the depth of experience or the level of cognitive development that adults have to draw on to make conclusions about what they've seen or heard, and to give it perspective. And perspective is a wonderful thing to have when trying to make sense of something that has happened. From a small person's point of view things are louder, bigger and more exaggerated - and if your child has heard your own conversations about teachers, they may feel their story adds weight to any conclusions they think you have drawn.

So next time your child tells you a story about their teacher (or me!) and your first reaction is 'you've got to be joking - that couldn't have happened; remember - it probably didn't! At least not in the way your child saw it and reported it to you.

A good response to children's 'horror' stories from school is 'tell me more about that' - and then, just let it go or seek more information from your child's teacher.