Week 9 newsletter for term 4!

Can you believe we have this week and a part of next week until our Celebration Assembly and wrap up for the year! Time has just flown by and it has certainly been a busy year and term with lots of great things happening in and around our great school.

In the past week school has been a hive of activity with lots of children biking, swimming and running in training for our Try-athlon that has happened on Tuesday.  What a great event this has been and the kids have absolutely loved it. Photos from the day will be attached to next weeks newsletter. We would like to send out a huge thanks to all of the teachers who have put lots of time into organising this, and also to families for helping get bikes to school and so on.

We also had the Cool Banana’s show at school last Thursday, which is such a great production every single year.  The team from Cool Banana’s have been coming to our school for many years now and passed on to Mr Buller that each year our school just keeps getting better and better in terms of participation and the behaviour of our students. We are proud of our school and one of our little slogans is about working to be “better than before”, and every year this is our aim as a school, to constantly improve.  It is awesome when people provide feedback like that 🙂  During the show we had some great student performers who represented our school “acting” in excellence!

Some changes afoot…

School’s are dynamic places and every year there is change. Sometimes this means staff and teachers move to promotions or new schools for a variety of reasons.  As previously mentioned in an earlier newsletter, Mrs Hansen is moving to Queenstown to become the Deputy Principal at Remarkables School.

We also have Whaea Shirley moving on, although only just down the road to Tauranga Waldorf School.  Whaea Shirley has had all of her children attend this school and is passionate about their philosophy of education and she started her teacher degree and career with the mindset and goal to teach there.  An opportunity has arisen and she has been fortunate to win a position and whilst she will be missed, we are also excited that she can teach in a context that aligns to her belief system so nicely.  We thank her for all of her input over the last few years at Welcome Bay School and wish her all the very best at our friends down the road.

Mrs Veronese will also be heading back to Tauranga Intermediate, which is where she was prior to our school.  We thank Mrs Veronese for her input to our Maori curriculum, guiding and supporting staff, her involvement with Kapa haka and supporting Whaea Mem, and her contributions to our school.  We wish her well moving back into intermediate schooling, an age group she is passionate about 🙂

Mr Baldock will also be making official his retirement.  He finished as Caretaker at the end of term 1 and has continued to mow our school lawns and also support as a Teacher Aide from time to time, along with playing the guitar for Kapa haka.  He has now brought a caravan and is off to adventure around our beautiful NZ and we wish a well deserved summertime in life, as he tows his tinny around the coast line looking for the Kingi’s and Snapper!

Teaching teams for 2017

Every year we work hard to look for the best teachers in our school and also develop great teams, especially with our focus on collaboration, where teachers work so closely together to get the most out of each other’s talents and skills for our kids.  We have worked really hard to develop a collaborative approach where teachers have a shared responsibility for student learning and achievement, can learn from one another utilising each other’s strengths, can provide greater opportunities for children, increase transparency of teaching practice, and achieve greater accuracy in terms of making decisions about students and their learning!  We have many schools visiting our school throughout the year, approx 30 schools this year, to observe the systems we have in place for working collaboratively, and see how our kids are learning within what is an emerging practice in education with which we have tried to be on the cutting edge.

In 2017 our teaching teams will be:

We are looking forward to an exciting year ahead in 2017 and have a great team of teachers looking forward to continuing to develop on the great progress we have made in recent years.  Our school focus for the year will be “CONNECT” and our learning focus areas will be linked, where possible, to this concept.  It is looking like it is going to be exciting!

PTA News

PTA AGM Meeting – Wednesday 14 December

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