Happy Settled Children and Staff Everyone has settled back into school so well and managing mask wearing or social distancing very well indeed, as did everyone at our dance performance last Friday. Our younger students have shown, and said, they are keen to wear masks and despite misgivings, are doing it very well; knowing when to pull up the mask and knowing when they have space to be able to pull it down. Thanks for your support with this. Class learning is well underway as are our specialist intervention groups and other programmes such as instrumental lessons (Pod 7 and 4), panto auditions, Kapahaka, PALs and other leadership groups, Jump Jam, choir (soon to kick start), Seasons for Growth and Growing Taller sessions. We are all go, and loving being back! (Not so much today with all of this rain). Dance Week We all had a ball learning dances and sharing a performance day with parents. And all in masks! So thank you so much for coming along with your masks...99% turn out there too or using social distancing. That meant we could proceed with the day and keep everyone safe and happy. Now we are getting ready for Wanna Be a Star, so we would love you to support your children in getting ready for the Pod competition (semi finals) in 5-6 weeks with the finals in Week 8. Pod leaders will be inviting parents to be an audience for the Pod semi-finals for Wanna Be a Star and of course we will welcome parents along to the final. Maths PLD Rob Profitt White was in school last week working with our maths lead teachers and he also spent a day with the cluster leads from our UC primary schools. Our staff are delighted with the way he is working with them to enhance their classroom maths programmes - and bring more fun and challenge into everyday maths. Rob will be back at the end of term to work with the maths leads and leadership team to develop a new look assessment framework for maths. YEAR 6s at a Roadshow - this Friday 5th August The Key to Life Charitable Trust (founded by Mike King) and the I Am Hope In-School programme is coming this Friday. They travel New Zealand speaking in schools with the aim of normalising mental health, encouraging young people to reach out for help, giving examples of tools to keep themselves well and to see hope through sharing our own journeys. The content is all centred around bullying, resilience and kindness. They will be sharing the new books that have been developed as a resource to support I am Hope.
This books in schools’ session features the reading of a picture book (co-written by Mike) 'TR & Mack the Hopeful Black Dog' to the students, followed by an open discussion and question session around bullying, the importance of kindness, and supporting and accepting their peers. The session will run for around 30-45 minutes including the time for discussion and questions.
This is at no cost to our school and we will make sure we have a good look at the resources with a view to purchasing them for students and parents alike, as required.
Survey Results from last term's Parent Survey Over the next 3 newsletters I will share the results of the Parent Survey. We had just over 100 families respond from 360 families which is a 36% hit rate. Thank you to everyone who responded as your scoring and written responses have provided us with lots of quality data about what we have done well and therefore will keep doing and how we can continue to improve our response to this Covid thing that just seems to keep popping up. This week, you will find in this link, the results of the quantitative questions that required a response in the form of a rating - these are in graph form. Also Questions 3 and 4 have been summarised under the key word and the larger the word then the greater the number of responses. Next week and the week following, I will provide a summary of the short answer questions. Once again thank you for taking part in the survey. | 
