Week 6, Term 2 Newsletter

To once again hear laughter and chatter in the playground and see your children’s smiling faces is just lovely. Our teachers are really enjoying the spontaneity and warmth of face to face teaching, rather than the abstract online experience everyone has been involved in over recent weeks. Thank you for sharing your children with us! Unlike the national average, we have 95% attendance this week.  

Thank you for all the preparation and support you have given your children over these unusual times – the transition back to school with strange new procedures and being dropped and picked up at the gate has really run happily and smoothly from our point of view, thanks to the children being well adjusted and prepared.

Firstly, can we say – “Thank you – well done and congratulations!” for all the learning and teaching support you provided over lockdown. Most of our students have come back very ready to learn and positive about school in general. New IT skills have been learnt and levels do not seem to have slipped back as they can do over holiday periods. I hope you have also enjoyed your learning and teaching experiences. 

At this stage, we are concentrating on settling all of our students back into a school routine and making sure they are happy and relaxed about their learning. Then we plan to get stuck into the forward momentum of solid teaching. Normally at this time of year, teachers would be assessing students abilities in preparation for mid-year reports and conferences happening at the start of next term. Right now, we feel you probably know your children’s learning abilities and needs better than you have ever done before! We plan to leave the testing for testing sake for a while and will look at different assessment dates and practices when everything settles into a more normal way of life. 

As always, if you are concerned about your child/ren in any way please contact your classroom teacher so that we can support your child as best we can.

We do have a few families continuing to work from home during Level 2, due to family situations with elderly and at-risk family members in their bubbles. That is your decision and we are happy to support if possible.

You can appreciate – preparing, teaching and marking for a class of 20 – 30 students face to face does not leave much time to also have an online platform for a few home learners. To help cover this the Government’s ‘Home Learning TV’ will be continuing for all of Level 2 and has many great teaching and learning programmes suitable to support extra learning. 

If you can spend time on Reading, Writing and Mathematics that would be great. Do some reading with your child, reading to, and reading together are all beneficial – generally enjoying books. Talk about maths when cooking etc and practice basic facts.  Have a writing opportunity, maybe a story or journal the day’s activities. All these will help keep your child’s learning supported. Your teacher may also be able to link you into some relevant Matiffic and reading sites, or give you some readers from school. They may be able to explain the class learning topic, so please touch base with your teacher and see if they can support in some way but don’t expect a structured individualised programme.

Unfortunately we are unable to share any details about when netball & hockey will be resuming under Level 2. As soon as we are advised we will let our school families know. Thank you for your patience.

A huge thank you to both giftpackaging.co.nz who, rather than rely on Courier delivery, personally delivered an order to us themselves, and Captain Compost, who have donated and delivered stones for a syndicate-wide art project. We are most grateful for your kindness!