Kia ora koutou. Talofa. Kia Orana. Malo e lelei. Bula vinaka. Fakaalofa atu. Namaste. Kumusta. Haere mai ki Te Kura Te Huruhuru Ao o Horomaka. Warm greetings to the Hornby High School community.

We can all go a long way with self belief. Put another way, it is unlikely we will achieve much if we don’t believe in ourselves, and our ability to ‘do the job’. We want every one of our rangatahi to see themselves as learners. We are all born amazing learners. Think about the things each human being learns in those first five years of life: to crawl, to stand, to walk, to run, to talk, to recognise whānau.. the list goes on. Those are incredible things, yet we take them for granted. All too often young people in general end up feeling that they can’t learn things, yet they lose sight of the things they have already learned.

It’s the same with creativity. We are all born with amazing creativity, yet somehow too many of us ‘grow out of it’. Sir Ken Robinson (take a look at his famous TeD Talk ‘Are schools killing creativity?’) tells the beautiful story of a visit he made to a preschool. A little girl was drawing a picture, and he stopped and asked her what she was drawing. She answered ‘I’m drawing God’. He said ‘But no-one knows what God looks like’ to which she replied ‘They will in a moment’. Extraordinary and boundless optimism and self belief.

Some say that schools educate the creativity out of us. I suspect this is true, and if so, what an absolute tragedy. Our kura vision ‘He puna auaha A centre of creative excellence’ is meant to be a statement of our aspiration not do that, but rather to encourage the boundless creativity that sits inside every young mind and heart.

Last week’s ‘reading flash mob’ was an example of us as a kura trying to be true to the vision. We took two old ideas and put them together to come up with something new (the reading flash mob), and that’s how we can define creativity (it’s certainly what we mean when we use the word ‘create’ in our Manaiakalani kaupapa).

Our reading is our window on the world and our own imagination. Our flash mob was also an exercise in applying a mirror to the idea of self belief, the desire to have every one of our young people seeing themselves as readers and learners. Our aim was for Hornby learners to see themselves in the picture as readers.

You can help. Read to your children. Or if that isn’t entirely comfortable for you, tell them stories. All cultures have a strong oral/spoken tradition to their storytelling. Tell your stories, make up stories, it doesn’t matter it they are real cultural myths and legends, or ‘nonsense stories’ you make up on the spur of the moment, be inventive. You will find some great photos of our young people reading on my Principal’s Blog, and on our Facebook page, if you haven’t already seen them.

Please make sure you follow us on Facebook for the latest and most up to date news https://www.facebook.com/hornbyhighschool/ , and on our website www.hornby.school.nz . You can also follow my thinking our education journey at Hornby High School, and more generally, on my blog at https://whakataukihewakaekenoa.blogspot.co.nz/

Kia tau te mauri

Robin Sutton

Tumuaki