Welcome to Year 3 in 2012. I hope you are all as excited as we are about all of the things we will be learning this year. Our first job will be to revise the most important skills of all, and we will be talking about these a lot in the first few weeks.

These are: ORGANISATION because you need to be organised for learning with all the things you need, so that you don’t get distracted looking for things or delay starting your work because you don’t have what you need; CONFIDENCE because you need to have the courage and confidence to try new and difficult things and work with new people; PERSISTENCE because when things start getting a bit hard, or stop being fun, you still need to be able to keep going until you finish; GETTING ALONG because it is essential that all children in a class can work together, and they do not waste time and energy with negative comments or behaviour; and RESILIENCE because things do go wrong sometimes, and the most successful people are the ones who can find a solution and move on with the least fuss.

You will find that some of these things are easy for you. For example, some people just get along with everyone without even really trying. Other people are really organised and have all their things exactly where they need them and remember everything they have to do all the time. Some people are so confident that they will try anything no matter how hard it seems, and they don’t get put off even if they are unsuccessful. Usually though, everyone recognises one of these skills that they need to work on. It’s different for each person. During the first week of school we’ll be talking about our strengths and also about what we could get better at. We are really looking forward to finding about your character strengths and working out ways they can be used to help you with other things.