Kia ora koutou

A big thanks to parents and whanau for attending our Agent C production. Aren’t your children amazing! At Amesbury School we often do things differently from the norm. This is one example. It would have been so much easier to have purchased the rights to a script with songs and choreography already created, carried out auditions and then put on the show with some of our better performing students involved. However, instead of that, our teachers and students were given an open ended brief by Derek, Jee and Mike, and the students created the content, choreography, music etc. for the show and every student participated in it AND it took place all around the school. What an effort! Big thanks to our Agent Cs who all performed incredibly well as they took groups of parents on the walk down memory lane. Particular thanks to Jack Arnold for his incredible performances and to Jee, Derek and Mike for their leadership and production capability. The quirkiness that pervaded the show was definitely them!                                                            

I want to go back briefly to the last community evening and to the presentation that I gave entitled, "Changing our thinking for changing times; and why schools need to change". Firstly, I want to thank those of you who attended the two sessions for your high levels of engagement. As I looked out across the audience, your engagement with the ideas was very obvious and very encouraging for me. Secondly, I want to say that I have continued to develop some of the ideas and I have put them out to a broader education audience (at the recent NZTech conference, for example). The most tweeted aspect of my presentation related to the paradox that in this time of rapid technological change - especially the rapid advance in artificial intelligence and machine learning - our response needs to be to embrace the technological change AND humanise education more. We need to explore what is uniquely human and embrace and enhance that. Here is a link to an article that I have written that explores these ideas further....just in case you want to re-engage with the ideas. 

 Just wanting to give you a heads up that we are moving to an online shop with our community. This means we will be transitioning to online ordering and payments for all school transactions.This will eventually include trips, camps, uniforms, co-curricular lessons, lunch orders, fundraising activities and more. Further information will follow in the next few weeks. This will certainly be more efficient for us, and, we think it will be more convenient for you.

Here at Amesbury School, we wish you all the very best for a refreshing, restful and safe holiday. See you all next term!

Ka kite ano

Lesley