Tēnā koutou e te Whānau

Welcome to Term 3. I hope you had a safe and relaxing holiday break. I would like to extend a very warm welcome to all of the new students and families that have started at Halswell School Te Kura o Te Tauawa this week, along with Melissa Botha (T2) and Sara Carter (T4), who have both joined our teaching team.

Term 3 promises to be an exciting time with many planned events and activities. The main curriculum focus will be on the Health and Physical Education area of the curriculum. Part of this learning will relate to the Commonwealth Games that start in Birmingham tomorrow. We wish ex-Halswell School student Dame Sophie Pascoe all the best for her swimming events.

Speaking of being active, families may be interested in taking part in the new Wellbeing Bingo initiative developed by the Active Canterbury Network. Wellbeing Bingo is designed to encourage Cantabrians to re-establish and develop new activity habits. The event starts onMonday 1 August 2022 and runs for 5 weeks, until Sunday 4 September 2022.Cards are available from various locations across Christchurch, Selwyn and Waimakariri with a full list of locations on the Active Canterbury website, cards can also be downloaded from the site.

It was great to be able to welcome parents back into Learning Centres on Monday morning. We appreciate parents adhering to the mask requirements on the school grounds. You will have an opportunity to connect with your child(ren)'s T group teachers at next week's Learning Conferences on Tuesday 2 (2.00-6.30 pm) and Wednesday 3 August (3.30-8.00 pm). Please see the Learning Conference article in this newsletter if you haven't booked a conference yet. A reminder that normal classes will cease at 1.30pm on Tuesday. If you are unable to collect your child(ren) at this earlier time, please complete this Google Form, and we will provide supervision for them until 3pm. 

Finally, we were pleased to see our new school logo featured in a recent Stuff article that ranked the 50 greatest NZ logos. Author Toby Morris wrote, "I’m putting this one in there for all the thousands of school logos out there. Most of them, particularly for high schools, are snoozefest traditional crests or Latin lamps that blur into cold wallpaper and can probably never be changed. Our primary schools, on the other hand, seem to be in the process of at least attempting to keep up with the times. Craig Burton seems to be on a single-handed mission to design new logos for every school in the country, and I liked this one (Halswell School) as an example – bright, welcoming, and smart. I’d send my kids there if I was picking by logo".

This is fantastic recognition of all of the work that went into designing the new logo off the back of last year's community consultation process. We're delighted to get a mention. You can read the full article here. 

Ngā mihi nui 

Stuart Cameron

Principal