1. Principals News - Week 6, Term 1 2020

What's Been Happening
Swimming sports were a great success last week.  Thank you to Mrs Brien for organising everything and staff and parents for doing all the jobs that make it possible.  There are lots more pictures on our Facebook page.

The junior school have been swimming.
Our teachers have been busy with professional development.  They have started working on investigating further teaching methods in writing (seniors) and reading (juniors) to help support some of our learners.  Junior teachers have attended phonics training and our senior leadership team is training in coaching leadership.  Mrs Misiloi continues to attend the Pasifika cluster meetings as does Mrs Stringer.

Relationships
Our year 8s are developing their leadership relationships.  Sometimes this is about reflecting and improving.  Our physical activity leaders have started to plan and prepare physical activity lessons for some of our younger children.  This is learning for our older children too because they have to make physical skills explicit and engage in the necessary literacy (reading and writing and oral language) to prepare and organise the learning.  They engage the capability of critical inquiry which at year 8 includes being able to:

• Challenge their own and others’ ideas using evidence.
• Respond positively to change and alternative perspectives.

Also our year 8 and year Kakapo class have started a joint learning inquiry into our school garden.  This is using our school Enviroschool context in order to engage in authentic learning.  As the project progresses they will use their literacy and maths skills as well as learning about science, project planning and critical thinking as they review and refine their work.

Learning about Jesus
All classes are presently learning about Jesus.  Please help your children at home by talking with them about Jesus or asking them to explain what they are learning.  Support for parents to give you an overview of their learning is on our RE blog which includes some videos you could share with your children.

Thank you to all parents who have supported us with helping to walk to swimming, with senior swimming sports, volunteering to be Winter sports' coaches.

God bless and aroha,
Lorraine Frances-Rees