Thank you for your support this week for our Samoan appeal. It is great to see students focussed on endeavouring to help others. During our Junior School Combined Chapel service this Friday Mr Wayne Ryan will be thanking our students and giving the students a clearer picture of where the items will be distributed and of some of the real stories about the effects the Tsunami had on people in Samoa.

Our Year 5 students this week were given a special interactive workshop presented by a teacher from “Human Connections” which aimed to help students develop resilience, integrity and self esteem.

This week I also had the honour of escorting Jordy Wattle and Mitchell Johnston both in 5Y to attend a Medal Ceremony at the University of NSW for the top achievers in the ICAS (International Competitions and Assessments for Schools) competitions. Jordy received a gold medallion for her results in the English competition while Mitchell received a gold medallion for his results in the Computer Skills competition. A super achievement for both students to be top in the State.

Earlier in the year, eight of our Year 6 students attended the da Vinci Decathlon at Knox where 44 schools competed in tasks covering the areas of Engineering, Art and Poetry, Science, Games of Strategy, English, Forensic Sleuths, Mathematics, General Knowledge and Code Breaking. Whilst the students were not outright winners in any of the single categories, their overall performance across the categories ranked them in fifth place. This is an outstanding result and we congratulate Isabel Bunting, Holly Gunther, Jordan Hargrove, Mia Holman, Christian Holman, Liam Hughes, Olivia Montgomery and Bridget Moyle for representing OFGS so ably.

This week also saw the introduction of our school's new website. With new graphics and a much easier, user friendly format, the site gives a great overview of our school. As previously mentioned, the schools’ intranet site (which can be reached by clicking the “parent portal” of the school website) is now the main source of obtaining teacher/year information. The regular class newsletters are now downloaded onto the school intranet. Please have a click on to these exciting areas! The new website can be viewed at www.ofgs.nsw.edu.au.