Ross Willocks, Queenspark School Principal:

Book Week

What a fun weeklast week was when we had our book week. The children certainly enjoyed getting into book character mode on the Tuesday. Hopefully you have seen the photos on our facebook page. Thank you to Mrs Silver Hessey for her organisiation of this week.

Cross Country

Thank you for the positive feedback about our cross country events recently. It was great to see this positive publicity reach our local newspaper. We encourage all our children to take part and to aim for their personal best and to encourage their classmates along the way. This is exactly what we saw during these events. Well done to all our children.

Recent Learning Happenings

Whats been happening ? 

As reported by Kate and Leah ( School Media Team )

Room 23 and 24 have been learning about matter in Science and have been experimenting with dry ice to blow up things using water and steam !

Room 22 are learning about how to make icicles with bicarbonate soda, boiling water, wool, and a paper clip. They have also been learning how to edit a piece of text

Room 19 and 20 have been doing dancing rasins by experimenting with lemonade. They have also been doing the walking water experiment.

Room 14 have doing home experiments. One of their favourites is doing elephants toothpaste and this consisited of yeast, hydrogen paroxide and food colouring

Room 15 have been doing a community study. They have the SPCA visiting and tyhen a local libray and tghey are visiting bottle lake forest.

Year 1&2 have been focusing on relating to others and how to work as a team by cooperating with others,

Room 8 had a pet day recently where a dfifferent student brought a pet to school each day.

The nest have been going swimming on Thursdays and they have also been working on their self management skills and working with others

Hub 17 and 18 have working about matter in Science. They have been working with solids, liquids and gases in a “hands on” way. They have been learning about the Scientific vocabulary. Eg. particles

Hub 1 have been learning about the value of different art works and have been studying famous artists

Masterplanning - Building upgrade

You will have received an email regarding information outlining our MOE building process. We would like you to have a good read of this as it outines our building plans. This is a partnership between the MOE and school and takes account of the feedback we have had from parents, staff and children.

Please see the school office if you did not receive this information

International Students

For some time we have been exploring the possibility of getting our International Student up and running again. We have been working hard during the last six months to ensure that our International Student Code of Practice is up to date and meets all the requirements. We have been receiving a lot of inquiries from prospective families. We are currently processing a proposal to host 20 students next term.

Senior Production - The Pirates of the Curry Bean

The Year 7/8 students are busy practising their roles for their upcoming production. It is early days but the momentum for this is going to build as we head to show time early in term 4.

Hall lights and Lighting Bars

Great news ! Our new hall lights and lighting bars have been installed in the hall this week. This is really exciting as it means that we are well on the way to completing the original vision of the new hall to have full theatre capability.  

Congratulations and thank you to our hard working PTA who organised last year’s fair to raise the funds for this. We look foreward to seeing these lights in action at the senior school production.

Junior School Swimming

The children are well into their swimming programme at the Kaiapoi Aquatics Centre at the moment and we look forward to to seeing their great progress.

NZEI Union Meeting - 26 June: Children coming home 12.30 pm

The children are coming home early on this day at 12 30 (as per earlier notification). Please put this date in your diary.  MASH will open early on this day.  Please contact them if you wish to use their service - 03 366 9408.

Teacher Only Day - 5 June

A reminder that school will be closed on this day for teachers professional development. We plan to focus on Cultural Sustainability, Collaborative Practice and SOLO ( Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes) - Solo is a model of learning where teachers and students can classify learning outcomes from any learning activity into three levels of knowledge: Surface, deep and conceptual knowledge. We have visiting speakers who will run workshops for the staff. We are looking forward to a rewrading day of learning

Emotional Coaching

At this week’s staff meeting we focused on emotional coaching strategies for children. This is essentially teaching children to recognize a range of emotions and to develop an awareness and an understanding of an emotion that they might be experiencing at any point in time. The coaching strategies focus on these things and empowers children to develop effective self regulation skills. We plan to share some of these practical strategies with you on a regual basis.

Paper Plane Competition:

As usual our student council organised a fabulous paper plane competition at lunchtime.  Everyone had lots of fun.  There were lots of winners today but the overall winning plane travelled 25.5 Mtrs!  Go Joel O'Callaghan!!

Rawhiti Sport

This programme starts this Friday for our Year 5 - 8 children.  We look forward to hearing all their results at the end of the week!

Kind Regards

Ross Willocks

Principal