Amesbury Digest - 8th February 2021

Kia ora koutou,

Welcome back to a brand new school year, and our tenth year in operation as a school, woohoo! It has been lovely seeing our students returning back to school, or starting with us for the first time, after the long break. Students and staff have all seemed so enthusiastic as they returned, and there was lots of excited chatter as summer news was shared on the first day.

It is another big, exciting year for our school: getting the building of our wonderful new hub underway; learning to use our new Hero system as staff, students and parents; operating with two principals, with myself as Operational Principal, and Lesley as Projects Principal, working with the Ministry of Education and with leaders and teachers in our school and our wider cluster of schools around effective leadership; working as a Kāhui Akō - a cluster of local schools sharing expertise, skills and strengths to produce greater outcomes for ngā ākonga, our students. Lots of fabulous things are going on this year, and I am sure we will see great outcomes for our students and our community as a result.

Some of you may have noticed our fabulous new chess storage seating that has been installed over the summer break around our chess board matting in the central courtyard. This storage means that our giant chess set can be easily and independently accessed by students during break times. It has been wonderful to see students doing this every break time - the chess pieces are proving very popular at the moment, which we are pleased about. We have also had base pads installed on one of the concrete courts for outdoor basketball posts. The posts will be installed in the next couple of weeks, and we anticipate that these will also be very well received and very well used.

Our new learning system, LINC-Ed Hero, is operational across the school. Teachers are using it for attendance, student information, and most importantly, to track learning progress, show evidence of learning, and set learning goals. All of our school communications will now come through Hero. You will get email notifications of these notices and messages, but to be able to access all of the information available on Hero about your child/ren, you will need to be signed up on Hero. Here is the link to an article with more information about our move to Hero. We are running information sessions on Tues 16th Feb (third week of term) to introduce parents to Hero in more detail.

Signing up to Hero: If you have not yet done this, please follow this link to set of easy steps to follow for signing up to Hero. You need to use the email address we have on record for you. If you wish to change this email address, or add a new address, please let Rachel, in the office, know.

We have our Meet ‘n’ Greet event coming up on Friday evening (12th Feb). This is a good opportunity to meet the teachers and teams who work with your child/ren, and also to meet other parents at school. There will be pizza and a sausage sizzle available, along with supervision available for children, to allow you to attend the team presentations. Please see the information attached to this digest about the event, and we hope to see many of you there.

I hope you all have a lovely long Waitangi Day weekend, and a good week ahead.

Ngā mihi nui,

Urs Cunningham (Operational Principal)