Thursday 1 April 2021

Principal's News Term 1 Week 9 2021

Our School Upgrades

I met with our project manager last week and the surveyors are going to be in the school in the upcoming holiday.

Our Board property committee will be meeting with the architects early next term.

By next term we really need to have our community thinking hard about who we are, what we want to preserve and what our future might look like.  I am hoping the children will be able to create a museum display for their families and our community to look at. A museum about us, who we are, where we came from, and what our stories are. This could be an opportunity to bring the community together and get some thorough consultation for our future.


Work will begin mid to end 2022 but by term 3 this year, at the very latest, we need to have some very strong ideas about what we’re about and where we’re going so that we can have meaningful input.


Holy Week

This week we are celebrating Holy Week.  This is the roller coaster ride from when Jesus entered Jerusalem and was hailed a a triumphant King on Palm Sunday through to the crucifixion on Friday and Resurrection on Sunday.


On Monday morning the junior school led us with a Palm Sunday reenactment.  On Wednesday we remembered the Last Supper where Jesus consecrated the bread and wine and gave it to us as His Body and Blood.  Today (Thursday) our intermediate students will be leading us with the stations of the cross starting at 2.15pm in the school playground.  Please join us for this.

Holy Week and Easter celebrations at St Patrick's Basilica:
Holy Thursday 7pm,
Good. Friday 3pm s
Saturday Easter vigil 8pm
Sunday Easter Mass 9.30am



Learning

I'm so proud of the learning our team have put together this term.  We have made a deliberate attempt to get the children thinking about our inquiry learning "Our Past Determines Our Future."  The Ministry of Education has put out the new history curriculum as a draft for feedback - this hadn't been released when we planned our inquiry for 2021 and we didn't know we would be spot on with taking steps towards what the Ministry has since put out as good practice.

This term was all about "multistructural" knowledge - finding out some information and gaining some experiences so that we have something to work with.  We have investigated how history has been collected, chosen, curated, preserved and displayed at:

  • The museum

  • The precinct

  • The art gallery

  • The marae (and Moeraki boulders)

  • The church archives

  • The parish centre (upstairs)

  • Our school


Our next step with this learning next term will be to support the children into some higher level thinking about these things.  They will also be wanting to find out about their particular family's history, when your family came to New Zealand (including the tangata whenua), what you brought, and how you decided what was important to preserve for a new place.  We will be celebrating ALL of our personal journies and histories.  

At some point we are going to need to talk extensively with you, the parents, and our community as we will have to make decisions about our building.  As I wrote above, I met with our property project manager last week and our architects will be very open to hearing about what is important to our community.  I believe with the learning the children are doing this year, by term 3 they will have some substantial input into what is important to us, who we are, how we preserve the past and what the future might look like and I hope our families will too.  This may not be directly reflected in the architectural plans but will be reflected in the tone and presentation of our new buildings.

I can also see some science learning in Planet Earth and Beyond coming up.  We always have a big science focus in term 3 and due to our history investigation there are many children getting very interested in our local landscape and topology, building products, limestone, calcification - etc all good inroads to some substantial scientific learning.












Many Easter Blessings to all our families

Aroha and God Bless
Lorraine Frances-Rees

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