Our first full week at Columba has been a full one! I've loved meeting families associated with Columba and prospective students in Waimumu today and am already looking forward to the Wānaka Show too. It will be great to connect with families at our Athletics Sports and "Meet and Greet" next week.

It's our first full week and we have hit the ground running.  It's great to see so many students signing up to participate in sports, service and arts opportunities.

My three top highlights of the week have been:

Tikanga Tuesday - a weekly PD session for ALL staff, lead by Matua Price. Building on our first ever Staff Only Day, we are continuing to meet regularly as the entire Columba staff team to build our understanding of te Reo and Tikanga. 

On Wednesday, I taught my first music class for this year and it was a real blast. Our new entrants Thea, Marley, Indie, Kavin and Archer and I had a great time singing, experimenting with instruments and moving to the music.

On Thursday, we received the very generous donation of a new car to use.  We are very grateful to the Tilyard family for making this happen, ngā mihi nui. The car has been wrapped with some action pictures of students involved in sport, so please make sure you wave when you see it on the road.

For the last two days I have been at Field Days in Waimumu. This has been a wonderful opportunity to chat to both present and prospective whānau. The weather was changeable but the conversation was the same - how Columba College is a great place to be for academia, sport, culture and instilling an ethos of service, citizenship and being life-long learners. I loved being able to spread that word about our awesome College around Southland.