From The Principal's Desk

Dear Parents

Term 3 and I hope that all your family are well.

We received fantastic responses from our Student Led Conferences where parents were able to see and hear our children lead their learning. Thank you for the responses to the survey, they were overwhelmingly positive and parents expressed many benefits similar to the following:

• Great seeing my child sharing his learning and allowing me to see his own progress
• Could see the children are a lot more involved and understand the outcomes
• Amazing to hear from my child's perspective on his learning journey. Gives the child confidence
• She enjoyed sharing her work with me and showing me her goal for next term
• Building confidence with speaking, taking responsibility for learning. Pride in learning and knowing why
• As a staff we have read your responses and appreciate the time you took to write them.

ERO (Education Review Office) have published their report which is available on the ERO website. They stated:
Children are achieving very well. The school demonstrates strong progress toward achieving equity in educational outcomes, supported by effective, sustainable processes and practices.
Senior leaders and teachers have high expectations for children to succeed. The school's community strongly advocates for, and willingly supports the school in a variety of valuable ways. Parents have many opportunities to have input into the direction of the school and to know about their children's learning. Parents are highly supportive of the wide range of opportunities provided.

Over the next three years we will be working on the areas of student led learning and evaluation. Ensuring our children are developing their independence along with their ability to self-manage and self-regulate their learning. While looking at what we do, why we do it and the impact it has on our students and the outcomes we value.

Thank you to everyone for supporting our Book Fair. The book fair made sales of $5,807 for Scholastic. We were able to take 35% of that value as book rewards which resulted in 145 books given to the school by Scholastic, students selected these books for our library.
Further, students donated 83 books to our school. 23 books were donated from home and 60 from the book fair.
In total, we received 227 books.
-    51 picture books
-    39 nonfiction books
-    129 chapter books
-    5 graphic novels
-    3 Christmas books for the junior resource room
A set of blocks to use in the library at lunchtime was also donated by a student.
Our library is looking great and I hope that you have been able to share the space with your child/ren.

Unfortunately due to the amount of rain we have had we were unable to hold our school cross country this week but we were able to run the year 4-6 one today and the children participated well with determination and much support shown to others.

The back gate has now been fixed with a new drain so that water will no longer gather there, making it a lot safer and drier for access to school. We are now working on drainage by the external corner of the library. We are awaiting quotes for the Senior playground after the quality surveryors assessment and the hall renovations are proceeding nicely.

Thank you for supporting the sponsorship of our New Zealand- athon.  This along with the St Johns training and our term three inquiry 'be prepared' will assist your child to be well equipped for emergencies in the future.

Ngā mihi nui

Colleen Margison

Principal

News Bites

Kids Auckland Marathon - Sunday 29 October

12 weeks of training starts Monday 14 August - Monday and Wednesday 8.00am - 8.30am

Open to students 7 - 13 years old.

To enter click here

Select team - Mellons Bay School - Password - MBS2017Team. Cost is $26 enter predicted time - 12minutes

Please do not pay to the school account - direct entry/payment via the Auckland Marathon website