Kia ora! Gosh it seems such a long time since we had a school newsletter! This term has certainly been unusual, and it is funny to think we are in Week 6 of Term 2 already. The term dates remain the same from now on, so we still finish on Friday 3 July. This means it is effectively a 12-week term, although only 7 weeks physically at school.

I would like to warmly welcome all the new students and their families to our school. Starting school in these times has been unusual but these children have shown great resilience, fitting in so well. We also welcome our newest teacher, Miss Rebekah Williams, who has started our new entrant classroom in Room 15.

I do want to say a huge thank you to our parent community and to our students. The way you engaged with the distance learning was fantastic, and I have had many examples shared with me that show happy, engaged children and families learning together. I think everyone became more proficient with SeeSaw and Zoom!!

Coming back to school at Level 2 has also been amazing. Again, a huge thank you to everyone at the school gates. It has been an easy transition for the children to come in on their own, and the few parents who did come in have signed in on the clipboard or with the SkoolLoop app quickly and efficiently. Thank you. Please note though, that these are the only two ways of contact tracing at our school. We cannot use the newly announced covid tracing app as the Ministry requires us to hold the information of who has been on site each day.

Thank you for promptly collecting your children at the end of each day, this has gone very smoothly. For the next few weeks, we will continue to ask that the Year 1 children are collected at 2.50pm, to ease the congestion at the gates, and the rest at 3pm. A reminder though, please don’t ask your children to play on the playground while they wait for you as they will be asked to wait at the office instead (or at Skids if it is past 3.30pm) as they cannot play there unsupervised. It has helped having this fine weather, and I do ask that you ensure your child has a good raincoat so that when the rain comes the same processes can still work. They won’t need to be walked in just because it is raining.

I want to acknowledge the amazing staff we have at our school, especially during this time of Covid-19. Our staff genuinely care about your children and their learning. This isn’t just the teachers, it includes the support staff, and in particular the learning assistants, who kept the support programmes going, even during distance learning. Thank you. I visited every class on Monday and it was such a joy to see how excited the students were to be back at school. I was lucky enough to be in The Hive when they tagged and released a butterfly that had just hatched!

Throughout the week the school has felt settled and calm, a place where well-being is uppermost in our thoughts and actions. We know that if children feel secure and their well-being nurtured, learning will flourish.

We had previously given advance notice of a teacher-only day on Friday 29 May (along with our other Kahui Ako schools), however this is now not happening at this time so school for us will be as usual. Our two-day professional learning workshop with TNIS that was due to have been held earlier this month, had been postponed and will now be held on July 20 and 21, the first two days of Term 3, meaning these days will be teacher-only days (no children at school).

We had planned to hold parent/teacher/student meetings on Wednesday 24 June and these will still go ahead. Information about booking these will come home shortly. These will start at 1pm and we ask that all children are picked up from school at 12.30pm that day. The mid-year school report on your child will come home on the last day of term. This will be in a different format due to the disruption to the usual teaching and assessment that would occur, although will still contain information on the key learning areas and how your child is progressing.

Have a lovely weekend everyone.

Ngā mihi nui

Sue Cattell

Principal