WITH beaming smiles and bright new uniforms, St Joseph’s Bulahdelah welcomed sixteen new students into kindergarten recently.

There were a few tears as parents sent their babies off to big school with most of the tears coming from the parents!

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This enrollment was by far the school’s largest new intake in many years, since well before COVID.

Gone are the days where school was about “chalk and talk”, with schools now focusing on meeting their learning needs at their level and working from there.

St Joseph’s Principal Amanda Pomplun told News Of The Area, “Last year we began for the first time Successful Foundations, which is based on this project based approach so it’s sort of a transition between early learning early childhood education and school.

“It’s a play based learning process so do you work in conjunction with the preschool.

“It’s just creating that link between what they’ve been doing and our curriculum and how that kind of meshes together.

“They do that for them in the morning session for two hours for about sevens weeks at the start of school and then after they do that in the morning session they do what’s called a play reflection so they’ll actually all come together and draw about what they did in their play for example,” said Mrs Pomplun.

There was lots of engaged activity all around as these new students embark on potentially another thirteen years of formal schooling.

With a new playground and new funding opportunities coming up it’s full steam ahead for another exciting year at St Joseph’s.

By John SAHYOUN