From The Principal's Desk

17 May 2022

Dear parents and caregivers

It is so good to see you back on site! Thank you for your support,  we truly want to build a partnership with you and appreciate the number of children that are back at school.

The first two weeks of this term we kept the same break times as last term. We want our children to feel as confident as they can, be as connected as they can, while communicating effectively with their peers and caring for themselves and others. To do this we set the children up for success my explicitly teaching them about the areas they can play in and teaching/reminding them of the importance of sharing, taking turns, problem solving and co-operating with each other.

To celebrate this the whole school went out last week on Thursday afternoon to play together for 20 minutes. All of the teachers were present to help encourage and reinforce positive behaviour and plenty of seahorse reward tokens were given out to acknowledge this. It was so lovely seeing all the children out playing together so happily.

I spoke to one boy at the end of the day about how his day was, he said ‘it was great’. When I asked him what was great about it he said ‘playing’. I replied that we had had 3 opportunities to play that day, morning tea, lunch and the afternoon play and then asked him which one was the best and he replied the afternoon, ‘because everyone was out together’.  Mrs Bould commented this morning on how nice it was to see the older students helping the younger ones in the playground.

This week we have had the song “Happy” to signal our start to the learning at 9.00am. We have the Eye of the Tiger song to bring the children in from lunch and our bird song to indicate the end of the day. The rest of the day the classes are learning. One of the things that COVID taught us is that we can teach to the learning and not teach and learn to a bell.

If you do not want to come into school we understand that too, as many parents have commented on the resilience of their children and how great they are at coming into school by themselves. Independence is something we are always working on. Children can be collaborative with others and co-operate with their peers, they also need to know when to make good choices by themselves and know what works for them.

Year 3 are off to Omana on Thursday as we are able to begin our trips again. Things won’t return to normal, we have learnt a lot from COVID and continue to do so, I think we now have the ‘new normal’ where we make the most of what we have learnt.

We are looking forward to our Cultural day next week. In class we have been learning about each other and where we came from. Sharing our traditional clothing from different countries as well as our food will be exciting and something for the students and staff to look forward to.

Thank you also for your understanding around the supply of our girls winter uniform. Things do get held up and we will need to extend the wearing of the summer uniform to include tights and the school jumper until the demand can be  met.

Ventilation is still an important part of our approach to keeping up our health and safety routines. Teachers will be having windows open a bit in the weeks ahead to provide the fresh air needed for all. Because of this students are allowed to wear their jackets inside as we understand as the weather gets colder children still need to keep warm.

We have assessed where we are in orange and thankfully to date we have not had to split any classes and have been able to cover any teacher absences.

We look forward to working together this term.

Colleen Margison
Principal/Tumuaki

Learning to Navigate our Changing World

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