What a beautiful day we had for the cross country races today - matched by the smiles of happiness and relief as children crossed the finish line. Congratulations to all who participated and gave it their best, and a big thank you to parents who came along to support and cheer on every student.
Placings are posted
here and are on our school website. Certificates for our top three placegetters in each year level will be presented at Pod 8's assembly this Friday.
Parents of year five and six students who have qualified for the Upper Clutha event next week will be contacted by email. Students will also be informed at school.
Let's hope the gorgeous weather continues for out 4th Snow/Schoolbased day on Thursday.
Please Slow Down
A reminder to parents to SLOW DOWN in all of our car parks and Pick up/Drop off areas and to put cellphones away. We are seeing a bit of slackness around some of our safety rules in these areas so please drive responsibly and keep our kids safe.
Also as we were having our weekly 'Tuesday chats' staff info sharing in the staffroom we noticed cars started rolling in to drop children off at 8.10am. Please note that we do not expect children here at school that early and aim more for an 8.30am drop off please. This morning there would not have been staff in pods to supervise.
Dental Care
The mobile dental unit is about to be parked up down at the dental clinic to provide more support for our dental therapist to catch up on children who are booked in for care and checks. Hopefully this will mean more children getting access at a faster pace. When you are taking your child down to the dental clinic, please come in to the office first and sign your children out and then back in again.
If you need to contact the Dental Therapist please
ring 443 -7185 directly.
Fathers Day Breakie
If you haven't got your ticket for our annual Fathers Day Breakie get in quick as the PTA need to make sure they order in enough bacon and bread etc to cater for the numbers. The kids and dads always enjoy this event so see you between 8am and 8.30am for breakfast on Friday.
Pod 8 Assembly
It's the Pod 8 assembly this week and the
certificates from the Cross Country event today will also be given out at this time.
Murray Gadd - Writing Professional Development Facilitator Extraordinaire
Murray is in school next week working with teachers and small groups of children. He will deliver a 'Gifted Writers' workshop to staff on Tuesday and present to the Board on Monday night. He is with us Monday to Wednesday. This is his last time working with us in school as part of this writing PLD contract, which was for 2023 only, as our final meeting will be via Zoom.
Bob Bickerton - Musician
Bob Bickerton is a musician of many talents - he plays the guitar and many other more 'unusual instruments'; and also sings. He is performing on Wednesday 6th September all day working with 2 pods at a time.
Incredible Years Teacher Programme
Five of our teachers, from middle and senior school have been working on this training programme this year. Most of our junior teachers (and some who have now moved to other areas of the school) have taken part in this training over the last few years. You may be interested in what this programme is all about.
'The Incredible Years Teacher (IYT) programme provides teachers with approaches to help create a more positive learning environment for their students. It is based on strengthening teacher classroom management strategies, promoting children’s pro social behaviour and school engagement. IYT is delivered by a Resource Teacher Learning and Behaviour (RTLB).'
The programme covers:
- Building positive relationships with students
- proactively preventing behaviour problems
- using attention, encouragement and praise to turn behaviour around
- motivating students by giving them incentives
- helping students learn social skills, empathy, and problem-solving
- using appropriate consequences for undesirable behaviour.
This programme fits in perfectly within our Positive Behaviour for Learning Framework (PB4L) so it has been great to be able to offer this Ministry Funded programme to our teachers in the middle and senior school. They will of course use this learning to share with their pod and to embed new practices to support children's learning and behaviour. There is also an Incredible Years programme for parents which focuses on positive parenting skills. We usually advertise this, when it is available, in our newsletter so please watch out for it. The programme is packed with practical, easy to use tools for working with your children, especially if you are going through a rough patch with them as all of us parents do at times.
Strategic Direction Survey
Today's responses to our survey which parents completed earlier this term are included below, two of these are around the health curriculum. This is only the start of our health curriculum review which had been planned for pre-Covid but put on hold. Please note at this stage staff are looking at the latest Ministry updates, and with the Board and in consultation with the community, we will be refreshing our local health education plan.
The flyers that have been distributed by Family First have absolutely nothing to do with our review. The staff and Board will be looking at these updates to ensure we are familiar with the Ministry requirements and the NZ Education Act changes in 2020. Here is a
link to the Ministry's Health Curriculum documents. The primary curriculum levels are 1 and 2, these relate to year 0 to 6.
The responses below are unedited so parents can see the range of responses. Sometimes schools are accused of 'doctoring' or only including positive responses; this is our way of being fully transparent so you can see what 20% (our response rate) of our community is thinking. Some of these responses are at either end of the spectrum. As always in considering these and future consultation around the health curriculum updates we will not be doing anything radical.
At this stage we are focusing on updating our full teaching staff on any new information the Ministry is providing around goals and expectations of schools. We will also start sending this information out to parents about these updates in chunks over the next term and into 2024 in our newsletters, emails, meetings etc.
Just remember we will always be guided by what is best for our kids and common sense. We have a strong family ethic at WPS and we cater for any diversity or sensitive issues on an individual basis with parents, families and teachers, not as a classroom lesson or school wide plan. We individualise kids' learning and they live the learning at school, where we strive to ensure all kids feel secure and confident about who they are.
Have a great week and enjoy that sunshine.
