Year 7s Welcome

Our new Year 7 cohort have settled really well into high school life at PBC. It was disappointing to cancel our Year 7 night due to the crazy weather that we had and the impact that had on moving around the school. Unfortunately what we had planned would not have been possible. The content that we planned to cover in the Hall can be found here on our website. Some of my key messages were around how to set up healthy routines with laptops at home. I encourage families to support an hour of screen free time before bed as well as setting up a family charging station in a common area so that devices and laptops are out of bedrooms during the night. An hour a night on the laptop for homework will be enough time. Games cannot be downloaded on devices however an educational version of Minecraft is on there. Please encourage your child to take care of their device as essentially it is their property. If you have any questions about the laptops please contact us on the parent support email and we will direct your enquiry to the right person. 

Mobile phones

Students should leave these at home as they cannot be used in classrooms. We are also encouraging the development of personal social skills and active play by asking students in Year 7 and 8 to not use mobile phones or laptops in the playground. Quiet individual activities on devices can be done in the library at breaks. Thank you to those parents who have been in contact about how supportive they are of this. 

Character Strengths

Over the last few weeks we have been re-introducing character strengths. As part of the CARE curriculum students have again completed a short online survey answering 120 questions about themselves to identify a personalised ranking of the 24 character strengths.

These 24 character strengths are displayed in the image below.

We are encouraging students to know, share and build on their top five strengths and these may change with growth and development.  The term weakness isn’t used but more likely we would describe these as strengths that are less prominent in our character or which could be further developed in an active way to be the best version of ourselves we can be.

I would encourage you to complete the online survey yourself at www.viacharacter.org  and to discuss your own character strengths with your child. Lessons and personal experiences shared about how these character strengths have supported you over your life will be valuable and relevant at this time.  

We will continue to build on these concepts of self in our weekly CARE curriculum lesson and transferring this knowledge to other learning areas.

Uniform

PBC SH is a uniform school and all students enrolling here are expected to accept and support these standards of dress as determined by the Executive Principal and supported by the PBC P&C. This policy is an integral part of our school security program and support the Department of Education, Training and Education Workplace Health and Safety policy. The full uniform code is available from the school website (www.pbc-shs.eq.edu.au.

In Junior Secondary our focus is on

• correct polishable black shoes
• compulsory PBC red socks
• jewellery compliance - 1 small discreet earring in each ear, a wrist watch is optional and no visible facial piercings

Non-compliance of our uniform code will result in disciplinary action.