Last newsletter for term 3!

We have had such a busy term filled with some great experiences from Super Scientists through to our wonderful senior drama performance.  We’ve also had some wonderful results with our sports teams and it was great to be able to thank our coaches and parents at last week’s sports assembly.

Last week we also had many of our students participate in the Ice Skating opportunity that was provided for our children by our amazing school PTA and the Selwyn Ridge school equivalent in a collab fundraiser.  We would like to say a massive thank you to our PTA who worked so hard behind the scenes to make this happen.  Many would not know about how the hours that go into making these kinds of opportunities happen for our kids by the PTA, they do it all for our children and we are so massively appreciative.  If you can get involved with the PTA, please let them know as many hands make light work, and all of the effort and funds raised goes directly to our students.

Last week all schools also had the teacher union meeting on Wednesday and we would like to thank all of our parents and community for being supportive of this important meeting, even though it was a disruption to the week.  It was extremely important that our staff attended as we need to ensure that as a profession we fight for what is best for kids.  This time it is about our funding model which has many implications in terms of class sizes and the experienced teachers being retained in schools.  The model of bulk funding has been used in NZ before and was not successful, so we want to ensure that our education system continues to keep future focussed and not repeat past failures making system wide decisions simply based on economics.  Thanks for your support as our community.

This Friday is our termly Celebration Assembly and we are excited to honour five students from each Hub who have worked really hard to demonstrate one of the five Welcome Bay Learner attributes.  We will also be privileged to see a performance from our Junior Kapa haka team, our dance group, and also a repeat performance from our Choir who recently performed at Baycourt and made us very proud.

Remember that this Sunday is Daylight Savings, so exciting to be heading back into summer.  Enjoy the term break with the kids and we hope that you can create some nice memories as a family.  Have a safe few weeks away and we look forward to seeing all of our tamariki return to school ready for learning next term.

Collaborative Practice continued 🙂

In recent years Welcome Bay School has been working on developing ways of teaching and learning that are built around high levels of collaboration.  As a result we have had some pretty positive things occur including lots of schools visiting us to see how we are approaching a collaborative model of teaching of learning.

Why Collaboration and shared learning environments?

The majority of New Zealand’s school buildings were built between 1950 and the 70s, our school was built in 1979. Since then, teaching practice and student learning needs have changed significantly. New technologies and building materials allow for new, vibrant and well connected learning spaces. All students deserve to be taught in these new “modern learning environments”, and benefit from new teaching methods. We are fortunate at our school to have a variation of spaces that allow us to challenge our practice as teachers to benefit kids.  The Innovative Learning Environment (ILE) was introduced in 2010.

Source: Ministry of Education

Long gone are the days where students are sitting in the same place all day every day and doing the same thing  with the same teacher.  Our classroom environments with walls removed, flexible furniture, lot’s of technology available, teachers working together are some of the changes noticeable, but behind all of this are years of thinking and work focused on how learning has changed, research plus a determined focus on preparing these students for a world that is already vastly different from the one we knew as kids, and is continually and quickly changing.

Why do things need to change? I went to school and turned out fine…

There are enormous changes within society and today’s learners will live in a world which is difficult to imagine. The emergence of new technologies and their exponential rate of development dramatically change the way we live, work and carry out our day to day living today. Our current students will enter into jobs that haven’t even been thought of yet and they will face a range of unknown problems. Children can now learn anywhere, anytime from anyone, and are no longer just reliant on teachers, parents or the library for information.

It is no longer enough for students to just learn facts and information. To thrive in this changing world, they need to know how to access knowledge, communicate well, be creative thinkers and collaborate. We work hard to develop these skills and attributes through our “Welcome Bay Learner”, which encompasses our birds and their dispositions.  Information on these can be found on our school website at the following link:

https://welcomebay.school.nz/welcome-bay-learner/

PTA News –

Remember to share with everyone you know about the newsletter format, we had a 50% open rate last week from 149 families and it would be great to grow this each week.  Remember you can access the newsletter via an email link or directly through our website via the “Our school information” drop down menu.

Have a great week.

Kindest regards,

Nik House – Principal