Kia ora Papanui Primary whānau

I hope you are all doing well.

We have come to the end of week 9 already and the Easter break is upon us! I hope you all get some time to connect with your whānau and friends over the long weekend. I am looking forward to hanging out with my family doing nothing in particular but just spending time together. With our busy lives these days, the weeks turn into months and so when we get a chance like this weekend it is important to make the most of it. Our kids will all be grown up before we know it!

Just a reminder that school will be finishing at 12:30pm next Wednesday (3rd April) as teachers have a union meeting. We will be asking that whānau pick tamariki up early on this day or make arrangements for their care. Please contact the office or myself directly if you need your children to remain at school for the afternoon. A small number of staff will be available to supervise them, however we can only care for a small number of children and need certainty about who is remaining at school. 

Our senior learners have been doing a great job this term safely running road patrol each day. A massive thanks also to our parents who support with this; they are Amy Bristowe, Aimee Henery, Andrea Scott and Joss Clark. We are still unfortunately getting a lot of u-turns in front of the school and parents not using the Kea crossing before and after school. It is really important that everybody uses the crossing as this models for our tamariki the safe thing to do. If you need to turn around outside of school, please drive a few hundred meters past the school to complete this maneuver.

Last Thursday we held our second board meeting for the year. Each term our teachers put together a short presentation for the board showing just some of the learning that has been taking place in their classrooms. Here is a snapshot...

In a couple of weeks time teachers will be posting the first learning post on HERO. The post will be focused on maths and will have some feedback and feed forward from your child's teacher. Feedback meaning what they have done well and feedforward meaning what they are working on next or how they could improve. You will receive a notification to let you know when it has been posted. Over the year we will be posting learning samples from each area of the curriculum. Maths,English(reading and writing), Science,Social sciences,Technology,Health and PE, Te Reo/ Te Ao Māori and The Arts. 

I also wanted to say a great big thanks for all of your generous support for the Friends of Papanui Easter raffle. There were some very excited and happy people in our community coming into collect their easter baskets full of goodies this past week. Thanks to the Friends of Papanui team for all of your organisation.

Finally, I hope you have a great long easter weekend spending time with your loved ones:)

Kia kaha te menemene - keep smiling

Ben Galletly

Principal/Tumuake