He mihi mahana ki a koutou katoa - Warm greetings to all.

Thank you to those who have returned their enviro - athon cards and money. The PTA has started counting and we are hoping for a whole lot more tomorrow!

This money is essential to the PTA to give to support the school and in the past we have raised up to $11,000 which is a significant amount of money.

We look forward to seeing how this year's athon goes and at assembly on  Friday 2 June we will draw the prizes.

Be aware we are starting to see an increase in the number of COVID cases in the school. If your child or anyone in your household is unwell please test. We are also aware that Canterbury has rising cases.

We now have staff catching COVID and we working hard to ensure there are as few disruptions to tamariki learning as possible. I will let you know from now if your child's classroom teacher has COVID. We aim to have a consistent reliever but with more cases appearing this might not always be possible.

Annual School Travel Survey

Can you spare 5 minutes to complete this survey. It gives the council and the school good information. We have used this information to help advocate for road safety issues around our Somerfield neighbourhood. You can see more information in another article but can access the link to the survey here.

Zone Cross Country

Best wishes to our 16 Year 5 and 6 who are competing at the Zone cross country next Wednesday. We'll keep our fingers crossed that it remains fine for them.

Friday is Pink Shirt Day.

Pink Shirt Day is about working together to stop bullying by celebrating diversity and promoting kindness and inclusiveness.

We all have the power to prevent bullying! Research shows more than half of bullying situations (57%) stop when tauira/students intervene.

At Somerfield Te Kura Warepo we work hard to ensure our culture of care based around our SMARTs. We find influences beyond our gates impact hugely on the type of play some undertake, the way tamariki speak to each other at times and attitudes that are sexist and racist. We promote our children to be "Everyday Upstanders."

Tomorrow our tamariki  can wear pink and bring a gold coin. This money will be donated to The Mental Health Foundation to reduce bullying.