Each fortnight we add articles to share and advise the school community of events coming up.

Enjoy this week's information.

Kia ora whānau,

Welcome to Term 3. It was lovely seeing all the happy tamariki this morning, as they arrived at school. I hope you managed some nice family time over the holiday break.

We have a busy term ahead!

Firstly, our values focus is Resilience. We will be specifically teaching aspects of resilience over the term. 

'He moana pukepuke e ekengia e te waka'

A choppy sea can be navigated

Resilience is the ability to cope when things go wrong. Resilience can also be described as; bouncing back after difficult times, dealing with challenges and still holding our head high, giving things a go or trying our best, and being strong on the inside. For the next two weeks our first minor focus is using our WITS when we are annoyed or upset (walk away, ignore, tell someone). This scaffold provides the students skills to problem solve when things arise.

As a school, we have a health and wellbeing focus for the beginning of the term which will start with ‘Navigating the Journey - Te takahi i te ara.’ This Ministry of Education programme supports teachers to deliver comprehensive, age-appropriate, and engaging education about relationships and sexuality. It contains activities that are aligned with the intent of the health and physical education learning area of The New Zealand Curriculum and the Ministry of Education’s guidelines for relationship education and sexuality education. In Year 1&2 the main focus is on relationships, feelings, growing and changing and builds through the school to Year 7&8, where students explore relationships/social media, pubertal change and reproduction.

Each team will be emailing home an overview of what is being taught at their year level. Please feel free to pop in and chat to your child’s teacher if you have any questions, concerns or worries, or if you’d like a look through the resources.

In addition to our health focus this term, we will begin to work towards our Wearable Arts Showcase that will be held in the first part of Term 4. The learning this term, that will prepare us will have an enterprising and arts focus. Students will be learning about enterprising attributes (generating creative ideas, planning and organising, solving and preventing problems, working with others, managing resources etc) in the view of bringing an event like the Wearable Arts showcase together. We know giving students real life experiences will really build their skills in this area. Stay tuned for further details!

Last term, the PTA funded a sports coordinator role for the remainder of the year. This role was advertised before the end of the term. We are thrilled to announce that we have appointed Leigh Ginnever into the role. Leigh starts this week and we know that she is going to do an excellent job! Our first job is to audit sports equipment and uniforms and look at our long term sporting calendar.

Have a super week everyone!

Ngā mihi nui

Kate McClelland