End of Term Round Up

The end of term has come around very fast! One of the highlights for me this term was my visit to the Groynes with the Year 7/8 students. What a fabulous learning experience - catching and classifying invertebrates and learning abut our waterways.

Progress and Achievement Tests (PAT)

Parent Teacher Meetings were held on Monday and Tuesday of this week. Thanks so much to all of you who were able to come in and discuss your children's progress.

We continue to upgrade our reporting in the Hero app and for Year 5-8 students this time we were able to provide the Reading Comprehension and Maths Progress and Achievement Test (PAT) results. For those students who have been at our school for the last few years you will notice that one of the graphs shows progress over time.

These are standardised tests therefore you get a comparison of where your child is in relation to other children of the same age in NZ. Teachers use these tests to help determine next steps for students.

Later this year we will add the easTTle results for Writing - this is another standardised test that we use to help us to determine next steps for students and we will add the Progress and Acheivement Test results for our Year 4 students.

We use PAT and e-asTTle twice a year, and have done for the last six years. We collate the results for our school, cluster and the whole Manaiakalani network. We look into the data to see the story it telling us about the programmes we are running and whether we need to make changes in order to accelerate achievement.

Government Policy

Yesterday all schools received an email from Minister of Education Hon Erica Stanford stating:

Schools and kura will transition to using one of three assessment tools for Year 3 – 8 progression monitoring.

Schools and kura will do twice-yearly assessments for students in Years 3 – 8 to monitor their progress in reading, writing, maths, pānui, tuhituhi and pāngarau. These assessments are a light-touch check-in, enhancing the rich, in-school formative and summative assessments teachers and kaiako already undertake.

› e-asTTle: for both The New Zealand Curriculum and Te Marautanga o Aotearoa.

› Progressive Achievement Tests (PAT): for the New Zealand Curriculum.

› Te Waharoa Ararau (TWA): for Te Marautanga o Aotearoa.

We are really pleased to say that we are already using the tools here at Te Maire St Francis of Assisi and have been doing this for the last 6 years at least.

Blogging

As you know, the internet is a fantastic resource for learning and exploration. However, it's important to be aware of potential risks children may encounter online. To ensure a safe and positive online experience for our students, we're conducting an audit of the children's blogs. We know that it is important to review our practice from time to time to ensure that we are following school policies and procedures set by our Board.

This audit has been prompted by some questions we have received about safe online practice. Whenever we receive questions about policy or procedure we take it seriously and review our practice and documentation.

Until the audit is complete we have changed the settings on each of the student blogs to private. Blogs can still be accessed by the students and the teachers - but no-one else unless they have the link and password.

We hope to get the audit completed as quickly as possible so that we can back to blogging.

We aim to create a space where students can express themselves creatively while learning responsible online behaviour.

We will report back to you on our findings in the upcoming term.

Winter Learning Journey

We have had a couple of queries about the Winter Learning Journey and how will this work if the blogs can't be accessed.

Students can still access the activities on the link below and can still post these on their blogs. We will make sure that at some stage the students get comments and acknowledgement for their efforts.

The Te Ara Tūhura Leaders of Learning, in collaboration with students, have put together a range of activities for students to complete over the (month) holidays. The activities are based around WINTER . You can find the activities on our Winter Learning Journey Site.

Well done if you have made it to the end of this article - the last thing from me this term.

Sabbatical

I have been awarded a sabbatical next term and I want to thank the Board for their support in this.

The Primary Principals' Sabbatical gives Principals time to reflect, rejuvenate and undertake professional learning. I feel very lucky to have been awarded this time and will be using it to investigate what we can learn from the way writing is taught in other schools in NZ, comparing to how it is taught in our kura with a focus on enhancing our programmes and accelerating achievement in this area.

On this note I will be away from our kura for the term - leaving things in the very capable hands of Rebecca Methven. Rebecca will be Acting Tumuaki for Term 3.

Best wishes for the upcoming term.

Jo