PLEASE READ this important message from our Acting Principal, Susan McRoberts

Dear Parents

A fortnight is a long time between newsletters and such a lot has happened. I know we are overloaded with information at the moment, but the messages below are important not only for Health and Safety but also for our sense of community. School will be open tomorrow and Wednesday. Online learning will commence Thursday.

ALERT LEVEL 4

As you know there have been cancellations of just about everything. Children are obviously disappointed when their sports and cultural activities are not on, but it will be important to downplay this and look for the upside, more time at home after school, less rushing around in traffic. Time to prepare dinner together. Children still also need opportunities to burn off some energy, so they will benefit from getting out of the house and running around also.

ANXIETY

With all that is going on it is understandable that children will worry. Again it is important that they are not exposed to a steady diet of Covid19 news.

SCHOOL CLOSURE and CONTINUING EDUCATION

We have plans in place to support student’s learning. These will be shared with you in detail via email once they are finalised, as due to the very short notice we are still fine tuning.

However, here are some general guides so that you have an idea of what to expect :

We want to keep the work interesting, manageable and use familiar technology.

We are planning to supply work for children via the SeeSaw app and/or Google Chrome, depending on what the particular students are familiar with. We will also continue to use the Maths and Spelling apps that students are currently using.

Teachers have already been working with students to ensure they are confident with the technology that may be used.

We can share specific tasks with our classes, mark it with feedback, and enable most students to ask questions of us.

The expectation is that children will be at “home school” so even if they are not physically here the work still needs to be done. However the time that they do it will be flexible, to accommodate your family’s needs and numbers of devices etc. so we won't be running “video streaming “ lessons and the like.

The amount of work will not require your child to be at “home school” all day. 2-3 hours spread across the day will probably suffice, again depending on the age of your child and also your family circumstances. In short it will be what you can manage!

Work will be different for children of different ages abilities.

Not all the work will require your child to be on a device. For instance they may have tasks to do that you/they could photograph and then share their result.

We will make Chromebooks available for Y3 and above should you need them. Please consider this as we want to make sure we have enough to go around. Any device you have for Y3 upwards needs to be able to access Google Chrome.

You will need to come into school, sign a user agreement at the office and uplift a chromebook and a charger. Please read the user agreement so that you know what rules your child needs to abide by. We will be putting the agreement online also.

We do not have a large supply of ipads.

We would like children to take home the books that teachers specify and stationery so that as teachers we can tell them which book to put physical work in , and you can also see what they have previously been working on, struggling with .

The experts say it is useful to have a “formal learning area” set aside for their school work, but this may not be possible in all situations. We do have a quantity of desks and chairs on the stage which parents are free to have as they are surplus to needs. Collect any time you want.

We realise that parents are not all natural teachers, and our plan is to keep it simple and achievable. Remember older siblings can be helpful as teachers too!

Please also remember we can use Facebook for parents to share ideas of what they are doing with their children should we have a longer term closure. This is important for our sense of community, so long as it doesn’t become competitive!

We certainly don’t want to foster FOMO around who is being the best

“home teacher”!!

THANK YOU

To all the amazing parents who supplied the interesting items and delicious food at our inaugural CultureFest. You were truly amazing. Thank you also to the children who represented their cultures so proudly and entertained us in such style. You are all stars!

To Penny Robinson, aunt of Emma and Jake Khull and Jackson Corrigan, who landed her RNZAF helicopter on our field with such style, and noise! The children couldn’t really believe it was happening and talked about it for days.

Stay safe everyone

Kia Kaha,

Susan McRoberts