Matariki is being celebrated in our classrooms and the students are learning about the meaning and significance of this celebration. Matariki has two meanings, both of which refer to the cluster of stars. Mata Riki means Tiny Eyes, and Mata Ariki means Eyes of God. Matariki is celebrated with education, remembrance and the planting of new trees and crops signaling new beginnings. The students in Room 1 have celebrated by making this beautiful korowai as part of their unit on How We Express Ourselves.

This week saw the ever-popular Tough Guy Tough Girl Challenge at Riverhead, an event our students really enjoyed. A huge thank you to Louise Lavulo for arranging this - read more about the challenge later in this newsletter. Another great event was Wheels Day on Wednesday. It was fun and a bit chaotic on the courts as they all cycled, scooted and skated around. The children were really enthusiastic yet still looked out for others and showed good road sense. Thank you to Melanie Dixon for organising this.

You may have heard that primary school principals have voted to reject the government’s offer for settlement of our negotiations, and may be wondering why we did that and what it means for our school? While we are all really happy that our teachers won back parity with their secondary colleagues, the same wasn’t offered to primary principals. We think that if parity with secondary is fair for teachers, then surely it’s fair for principals. Also, the teachers offer would have seen some principals in smaller schools paid less than some teachers in larger schools. As a sign of our concern, principals have voted to withdraw additional work such as taskforce groups and reporting to the Ministry, between July 8 and August 16. This will not impact the day to day running of our school.

As the last day of Term 2 is here, I would like to wish all our families a very happy and safe holiday. It’s hard to believe we are halfway through the school year already! School closes at the usual time of 3pm today (after the Year 3 led assembly) and reopens on Monday 22 July.

You may like to pop a note in your calendars that Parent-teacher-student meetings are being held in Week 3 of next term, Thursday 8 August. These will run from 1pm–7pm, with the booking timetable opening up via an email home on the first day of next term. These are 10 minutes time slots where you and your child can talk with the classroom or specialist teacher about his or her learning and achievement.

Have a great holiday everyone, and keep safe.

Ngā mihi nui

Sue Cattell

Principal