St Patrick’s students had a wonderful day at the White Horse Opening in Waimate. The weather and views were beautiful, reminding us of how blessed we are. We are very proud of our school leaders who gave a wonderful talk created by all our ākonga. Thank you Mary Medida and JJ Kotobalavu.

Our Pou

JJ Kotobalavu

Our Pou is designed around our school.

Each class did a brainstorm on what was important about our school. We thought about our faith, learning, our interests, te reo and tikanga Māori.

For our faith we put a picture of our Church, the St Patrick’s Basilica and children going into Mass to pray and praise God. We used the three leaf clover as it is the shamrock, used by St Patrick to teach the people of Ireland about the Trinity (God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit). We also used symbols to represent our Catholic faith including the Bible, candle, cross, dove, and flame.

We love sport! We put basketball, soccer, and rugby balls on our Pou to show how much we love to play sport. We wanted to show the importance of te reo and tikanga Māori in our school. We used our Kapa Haka uniform design as it represents us. Our pattern is of the hammerhead shark, mangōpare because it represents our relentless determination, strength, vigour and fighting spirit.

We are proud of our St Patrick’s School Pou. We think that our Pou gives us a great reminder of what we value and what is important at our Catholic school.

Mary Medida

The students worked very hard over a year to create our Pou.

To create our Pou each class brainstormed our ideas and what we thought would be important on our Pou. The year 7-8 students created some designs and pictures of what they would like the Pou to look like. We worked carefully to make the final designs and create the stencils for each part of the Pou.

It was time to paint. Some students undercoated the Pou, another group painted on the stripes and another group again worked on painting the symbols, we choose as a school, onto the Pou.

We enjoyed being able to do all of the painting ourselves from the undercoat through to the final touch ups.

We would like to thank Waimate Together and everyone else that was involved in this great project that is now on display up here on White Horse Hill.