Matariki Reflections

Once again, we are prompted to pause, reflect, be grateful and make plans for the future during Matariki. In doing this, I took the opportunity to read through the reflection I had written at this time last year. It was full of excitement for the property development we were finally going to get. Over the last twelve months we have all learned that things can be taken away far quicker than they are given with Ministry of Education property!

However, we can choose how we respond to unfairness. One of our school values is resilience and it is important that we all live our values. So, we will face the challenges of working within a frustrating system with relentless resilience! We now have much more control over the property projects that are happening and that is exciting. Already work has started to ensure our school will have a fresh new look for the start of 2025, our students will come back after these holidays to a redesigned senior sandpit, roofing repairs are underway and I am not safe from a mid winter swim in our new pool yet! (The lining of our new pool is sitting in the carpark of Hays Plumbing in Motueka if anyone wants a sneak preview!)

Our community celebration of Matariki was amazing. Thank you for coming together as a community to celebrate both our kura and Matariki. The huge amount of work it takes to make this evening seem effortless cannot be stressed enough. I am so grateful to have a staff team willing to put in the time, effort and enthusiasm to pull it off. We are blessed to have such a dedicated and professional team working for our tamariki. I'd like to acknowledge Heidi and her whānau (and anyone she knows!) who all jump in year after year to provide the expertise and the people power to cook and serve our whole school community. Kanui te maioha mo to mahi nui ki a whānau whānui Trott.

Our tamariki loved sharing their learning with you from the "Game Changer" inquiries that had been undertaken during the term. Wasn't it wonderful to see the range of outcomes and contexts different teams had approached the topic from? Who would have thought our youngest students could create such an amazing mini golf course! This is a great example of how one 'topic' for an inquiry can be personalised to meet different needs across the school by our skilled kaiako.

We await the release of the new curriculum in English next term with anticipation. We are very keen to see what it contains as it will be compulsory to implement it from Term 1 2025 and we want to be as prepared for this as possible. As we have already embraced a Structured Literacy approach to teaching literacy across the school I feel hopeful that the new curriculum will not mean large scale changes for us as a school. We are continuing our professional learning around Structured Literacy with facilitated workshops for staff on assessment in Structured Literacy over the next two terms.

We have so much to be grateful for, and to look forward to at Māpua School. Thank you for being part of that and for supporting us to give all of our tamariki the best possible educational experience we can.

Ngā mihi maioha

(Thank you with appreciation)

Sharon