22 May 2020

Post date: Jun 02, 2020 11:2:34 PM

It was a glorious feeling on Monday morning welcoming our tamariki back through the gate! It felt like the start of the year - but not!

My first job was to do the rounds of all the classes and get a feel for how the troops were settling back into school. The first question came from a Tautoru darling "Jude, what's happened to your hair?!" Well, where do I start with that one!

The seniors were then off to the beach to get involved in games and learning with each other, smiles and excited chatter being the main feature of the day.

As I mentioned in last week's Newsletter, I am keen to extract the 'panning for gold', the gems of what has come from this unique period of time from yourselves, staff and children together and publish it in an upcoming Newsletter, so that we can capture any magic before it's forgotten. Ka mau te wehi!

Thanks so much for sharing thoughts with Base Group teachers already - we would love some more - so please get in touch with them this week, if you can.

This week has very much been about reestablishing, reconnecting and rebuilding. I also know many teachers are keen to get assessing where children are at in the three Rs - Reading, Writing and Maths as well. But we were not going to lay that on the children the first week back!

We totally hit the ground running this year and were thrilled with how we were planning for groups of students and were excited about the progress being made against our academic targets. In fact, I remember saying to the teachers "I have never witnessed so much progress in the first 2 months of a school year". Then NZ stopped still.

So much learning has been happening in homes, in all sorts of exciting and interesting ways, and I also know the teachers are itching to see where things sit now and just keep moving forward. Teachers have been writing mid-year student reports which feel a little odd at the moment, odd and sort of outdated. I guess that's just the way it is this term and we will have to just go with that as we want to stick to timeframes.

This term, you are invited to attend a catch up with the Base Group teacher via Zoom. More detail can be found in this Newsletter. (NB. Autahi is on a different cycle.)

Again, we thank you for your home learning efforts. I'm sure there were many times you felt you may internally combust, but we are just so grateful for the way our community responded.

It's just so glorious to be back and, by the looks on your faces this week, you think so too!