Kia ora koutou.
Hasn’t the last two weeks been a wild ride? Our thoughts remain with those who have been displaced and with those who have serious messes to clean up. Thankfully this has not had a widespread impact on our immediate community. Some of our families have been affected and we also have some who continue cleaning up the messes and some helping their whanau to clean up as well. We have a couple of families who are doing both. As always, we are here for a cup of tea or a chat if you need some time out. Some of whanau have indicated to me that they are doing okay and don’t need too much support, but wish to thank you all for your kindness and compassion.
Thanks to you all
I will echo this thankyou from above. We had unwavering support from a huge number of families who thanked me and our staff in person for managing to keep our school open for our whanau. This was a decision not made lightly and was one that had our students and community at the fore. There was some misleading information in the media about what Civil Defence was recommending or not recommending with regards to school closures. For those in doubt, please be assured that we followed all advice and had plans for the traffic issues, or if emergency closure was required during one of the days. These worked pretty well for our community and allowed for high levels of attendance during the event. Once again, thank you for your support
Covid situation
We have moved our assessment from daily to weekly due to the low levels of Covid in our school. We still have very low numbers isolating or infected.
Structured Literacy
Many of you may have seen this in the news of late. Our school has been working on this for some time. While we have work across our school happening in this area. It is important to note the Better Start Literacy Approach we are undertaking with students in Te Rito (Rms 6, 7, and 8). This is a structured approach to literacy to support children’s early reading, writing and oral language success. Its development has been led by internationally leading researchers in phonological awareness and children’s oral language and literacy development. It has been specifically designed for our New Zealand educational context and controlled research trials have proven its effectiveness. We are looking forward to sharing more about this approach with you in the coming months including how it it supporting our students in their literacy learning and development.
Learning Conferences
Learning conferences are planned for Week 1 of Term 3. Should you need to meet or contact your child’s teacher beforehand, please feel free to do so. Bookings details will be included in my next message.
Policy Review Term 3
This Term we are reviewing Student Well-Being and Safety and Staff Well-Being and Safety. A reminder that our policy can be found by going to the policy page on our school website. The review page can be found on the home page of our policy site. I will include an overview of our concerns and complaints as a reminder (click here). Please refer to this if you wish to raise a concern with someone here (please never raise a concern directly with a student!).
Reporting Development - STAFF ONLY DAY
Just another reminder that on Friday the 16th of September we will have a Staff Only Day to attempt to finalise a new reporting system for our whanau. It is unlikely that this will be ready for the end of the year. I will share more on this in the coming weeks.
Staffing changes
We have two of our teachers leaving us next year. Our congratulations to Kirsty Shinn and Jennie Bate who will be leaving us to start their respective families. Both work in our Manaaki Team (Yr 5 and 6) and contribute a great deal in our teams and across our school. Both will be sorely missed. We wish them and their partners the very best as they head off on the parenting journey! We will make staffing announcements for next year in Term 4.
Are you planning on leaving us?
We are in the throes of planning our classroom structure for next year and will need some idea of who is leaving. This will inform decisions around taking out of zone enrolments and determining how many classes at each year level that we will require. Please let us know if this will be you. Also - please encourage families in our zone to let us know that they will be joining us next year (if they have not already). This will make our planning for 2023 so much easier!
Staffing 2023 and Class Placements…
This old chestnut again! Yep - we will be going through this process soon. If you have any information that may support class placement for your child, please let your child’s teacher know this prior to the 28th of October. We will not take requests for particular teachers due to the difficulties this causes for all of us, and that there are likely to be some staffing changes over the remainder of the year. I will continue to provide reminders of this in the coming months.
Finally… Junior Playground update
We are expecting that the junior playground will be worked on over the next school holidays. The Board has approved the project to re mat this area with soft fall safety matting and complete some landscaping in this area. The work will be lead by Nelmac.
:-)
Isaac
Coming up in Term 3:
12-14 September - National Monitoring Study at EGS (Week 8)
16th September - STAFF ONLY DAY
20th September - Yr 3 and 4 Hockey Tournament (Week 9)
22nd September - First meeting of our New Board.
27th September - Yr 5 and 6 Hockey Tournament (Week 10)
30th September - Term Ends at 3pm
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