Official School Opening and Books For Breakfast

The Front of the School: The left pic is of the new admin. building and the right pic is of the addition joining the hall to the admin. part. - it is all one piece. You can see the church in the background of the r.h. pic.

This week was National Book Week in Australia (Aug 20-26) along with the Official Opening of the new buildings of St. Joseph's. Needless to say, it was a busy week!

The new school "addition" was part of a country wide initiative of the federal government. Each "school board" was allotted a chunk of millions to be spent on each school to use on capital projects. For our school, this meant new infants classrooms (K-3) and a new administration building as well as a "breezeway" to join the administration building to the hall.
The ground broke about 22 months ago and despite the usual building hiccups, 2 floods and a plague of mice, the official opening finally happened!
I took some pictures of the new buildings to show you. In a nutshell, the school is still comprised of 5 main buildings on one plot of land, bordered by a street at either end. The church is next door to one side and a lane way to the other. The new buildings are very colourful and the infants really seem to be enjoying their new space. Click on any pic to see it larger.

Above L-R breezeway leading to the library and hall; the library; the office; the hall.

Above L-R: Breakout area in infants wing (K-2) with computer pods; Walkway between buildings to the admin office; Year 1 classroom.

St. Joseph's had its first "Books for Breakfast" event this week as part of National Book Week. It was combined with dressing like your favourite book character and the traditional Book Parade(which I think must be Aussie's answer to Halloween as it is much more wholesome and no candy is involved!) We had a fantastic turnout and the costumes were really creative! Jacob dressed as Charlie form Charlie and the chocolate factory - he even made me write out the ENTIRE message from Willy Wonka on his Golden Ticket. I dressed as Goldilocks as we have been studying Narrative Writing and creating our own point of view pieces based on Goldilocks and the Three Bears (look for examples of those on my classes blog next week). Jack came along for Books for Breakfast and the Parade dressed as Spiderman. Classes also visited the public library this week as part of Book Week. The library is within walking distance which makes it easily accessible for visiting. It was great fun and especially meaningful this year as the school library has been closed for over a year due to all of the construction. Incidentally, we received more timely good news this week as all books (over 4000) that were lost in the flood were claimed by insurance to the tune of over $100000 - let the ordering begin! I'm learning about many Australian children's favourite books and becoming a fan of some favourite stories. I am missing some of my favourites here though such as David Shannon and Jan Brett and of course, Robert Munsch and so many others (although I did find a copy of "I Love You Forever".) I may have to have some books "imported" to add to their collection! We had a fantastic turn out for Books for Breakfast and there has been discussion of continuing this event in future. The P&F supplied fruit, juice, coffee, tea, muffins and "pikelets" which are mini pancakes. You can see some pics below of that event.

Clockwise from Left: Goldilocks and Spidey; Bogus AKA Jarrod(Fantastic Mr. Fox) and Mary Poppins AKA Marie and Goldilocks and Charlie and Spidey; Jacob in the Book Parade; My Year 3 Class