8 April 2022

It's the end of another week and hard to believe it's just 4 days of school before the Easter/School Holiday break. Well, it's handed us a little bit of everything this term, hasn't it? It's also given us some opportunities. Teachers who have found themselves isolating as family contacts have been provided some headspace to go deep into their own learning and teachers left holding the Worser Bay School 'fort' have had to put the 'all of our children' philosophy we have here into action. Yes, words do create worlds!

The inaugural 'Worser Bay Zine' is on track and the hunch we had about needing to experiment with switching some of our children onto Literacy through a different medium is showing great preliminary results.

Teachers will be busy starting to write Student Progress Reports over the holidays. These 'Interim Reports' give you a sense of the whole child - a taste of how they are tracking in areas of Reading, Writing and Maths and, of great importance, what competencies they are exhibiting, what we are noticing about their strengths, their social and emotional growth and needs, their openness to taking a risk or making a mistake, their ability to be actively engaged, their focus, their contribution. Gone are the days of old, 'I'm an empty vessel - fill me up to the brim and just tell me what to do'. Our children need different skills for a different world.... and a fast moving one at that.

As promised, we have started on our movies to give you a deeper understanding of what all this 'stuff' is about. I thought I had better show the way and demonstrate that taking a calculated risk can be a good thing! The camera, on a tripod, delicately balanced on an ironing board was rather inventive, the shadows interesting .... but hopefully the message is clear.

You will be hearing a lot more about the refresh of our local curriculum as the year progresses.

This first clip will hopefully give you an insight into the Worser Bay story of where our Positive Education aka Student Wellbeing programme came from and the basic ingredients. Next up will be a snippet of 'children's voice' on this topic.

We will be finding times over the year to keep the conversation rolling, so please get as involved as you can.

Mā te huruhuru ka rere te manu

Adorn the bird with feathers so it can fly