News from the Principal - Week 8

It has been a challenging week of staff and student sickness this week. Thank you for keeping your children at home when they are unwell and following up with notifying their absence to the School Office. We have had several staff away with influenza also and we are sorry we had to cancel our School Assembly on Monday. On Tuesday and Wednesday, I attended the Canterbury Primary Principals Conference. The highlights of the conference for me were learning from Nigel Latta who is a very friendly, funny, knowledgeable psychologist, about 'Leading a School through weird and stressful times' and being the winner of the major prize draw - A Samsung 27" TV monitor from Matific to use as well as an ASB Overnight Bag full of goodies for our students.

Congratulations to our Whītau INVENTIONATOR team

On Monday and Tuesday five of our Whītau School students, Charlotte Hogervoost, Zayden Arps, Sammy Cave, Rayyan Ali and Tāne Norton who participated in Inventionator run by Core Education.

Inventionator is a virtual event run by CORE Education and was designed for gifted ākonga (learners) who want to PLAY, THINK and DESIGN innovative solutions to real-life problems online.

Our Year 5 and 6 students collaboratively worked with others from around New Zealand to prepare and present a pitch about an idea of their choice. Each group had support from a mentor and the judging panel. One of our Whītau School teams  - Charlotte, Rayyan, Sammy and Zayden has made it through to the final. Their team, The Raining Axolotls, pitched a fantastic idea on ‘How to Create More Water for Africa.’ We will keep you posted on their progress!

Well done to all of our Inventionators for your two days of online collaborative, future focused learning. We hope you continue to dream big! We look forward to sharing the results for the Raining Axolotls in next week's newsletter.

Congratulations to our Gymnast, Chelsea Edwards

Hi, I'm Chelsea and I represented Whītau School for the Canterbury Primary Schools Gymnastics competition on Wednesday. It was really fun and really nerve raking. I was nervous the whole time. I did really good for my first bronze competition. It was mostly hard for me because I didn't know the routines. I wasn't told how to do them yet as I have only had 3 classes in the bronze group. I didn't know what to do so I just copied the others and got pretty good scores I think. I came 17th place out of 43 girls. My scores were all above 8 and it's out of 10. That's all I can think of and thank you for reading this lovely gymnastics comp review. I was happy to represent our school and show our school values as a leader. Thank you Mrs Heads for entering me.

Do remember to pop in and see Miss Collins, Mr Turner or I should you have any questions or require any support for your child's learning and behaviour at school. 

Ngā mihi nui

Sandra Dentice

Principal | Tumuaki

sandra@whitau.school.nz