Newsletter 22nd July 2024
From the Principal
A warm welcome to our new students and their whanau.
Major School Events in Term 3
Life Education
Life Education is a Charitable Trust that delivers a flexible health programme to children in preschool, primary and intermediate schools, closely aligned with the Ministry of Education’s Health and Physical Education Curriculum and also the Science Curriculum.
The programme is delivered by experienced, registered teachers who have undergone additional training for this specialist role. Each session is delivered using multisensory teaching techniques to accommodate all learning styles and help with retention of knowledge.
The caravan will be onsite from the 5th to the 23rd of August.
Student Reports and 3 Way Conferences
You will receive your child’s mid-year progress report on Friday, 9th August. Please acknowledge and praise your child for the areas they have shown progress.
You will get the opportunity to discuss your child’s report with the class teacher at the 3-way conference on Wednesday, 14th and Thursday, 15th August. These are 15 minute interviews between the class teacher, the parent and the child. Bookings for this will open on Monday 29th July. You will receive more information about this in the first week back next term.
Other Events in Term 3
- Interschool cross country
- Senior school Te Tui trip
- Middle School speech and poetry finals
- Senior School speech finals
- Dance festival
- Cultural day
- Junior poetry festival
Ongoing Teacher Shortage
Auckland is currently experiencing a significant teacher shortage. It appears experienced teachers are leaving for several reasons including but limited to, the cost of housing, time spent in traffic, workload, and stress. The teacher shortage is most serious in Auckland.
This has also resulted in a shortage of relievers when staff are away. As a last resort we sometimes have to split classes for the day as our normal relievers are not available and the agency who supply relievers across Auckland also have none available. The decision to split a class is not taken lightly as it affects the education of the students and adds extra work and stress on the teachers involved. We appreciate your understanding should this occasionally happen to your child’s class.
Bullying
We remind the children that bullying is not acceptable and that we have zero tolerance. We have discussed what bullying is:
- It is deliberate (on purpose).
- It is repeated over a period of time.
- It is difficult for those being bullied to defend themselves.
- It can be difficult for those who bully to learn correct behaviour.
The last point is important because sometimes students have been bullied from a young age and see the behaviour as normal. The challenge is then to change the behaviour and protect the victim.
As a school we have also discussed strategies and where to go and ask for help such as peer mediators, teachers and their parents. All children should be happy and safe at school. Should you be concerned about your child, please see your child’s teacher in the first instance then either the team leader or Mrs Claire Stretch who oversees pastoral care. The message we share with the children is that together we can stop bullying.
Teacher Only Day - Term 4 - Advance Notice
When: Friday October 25th, 2024.
School will be closed for instruction
The Friday of Labour weekend we will be working with a consultant on the new curriculum changes that are coming in literacy and numeracy. ‘
Community Surveys
We will be sending out a few one minute surveys to get your feedback on what you believe our school does well or areas we can improve on. Please take the time to do these as your feedback is important.
Student Attendance and a Prize draw
Below are some graphs on the impact of absenteeism on your child’s learning
Below you can see the attendance rate then how this breaks down to how many days per fortnight your child is away, then how many per term and finally how many days of school your child has missed over a year.
Please be mindful of a day here and there that soon adds up and significantly can impact on your child’s learning and progress. This also applies to children coming in late each day as the time adds up and they miss quality learning time.
This term all students with 90% attendance or more go into the draw to win a $100 dollar voucher of their choice. There will be one each for junior, middle and senior school.
Kind regards
Fintan Kelly , Sue Kandasamy, Monique Browne
Celebrating Excellence
Room 13’s Flying Frenzy!!
This term, Room 13 has been learning about forces and motion. Our class loves to create inventions using paper so we decided to learn how to make a paper airplane and why, as well as how, it flies. Everyone in our class made predictions on how far our planes would fly based on learning about thrust, drag, gravity and lift and we all had a go at flying them against each other!
Stay tuned because this is the first step for our upcoming art exhibit!!
Room 14
In Term 2 Week 9 we celebrated Matariki! To celebrate the Maori New Year we decided to make kites.
First, we followed the instructions and decorated our kites with the '7 Sister Stars'. The Sister Stars are special stars in the sky that we see during Matariki.
After we finished decorating, we went outside to the school field and playgrounds. We threw our kites up high and ran as fast as we could. It was so exciting to see our kites soaring behind us.
As a part of our topic about 'Forces and Energy' we also learnt about forces that make a kite fly. There's something called 'lift' that pushes the kite up into the air. Then there's 'gravity' that tries to pull the kite back down. And 'drag' is the wind pushing against the kite. Learning about these forces helped us understand why our kites could fly.
We had so much fun flying our kites and learning about Matariki. It was a special day with our friends and our kites in the sky!
