Week 10 newsletter for term 4!

Here we are community, the last week of school for 2016!!!  The year has gone so very fast and has been filled with lots of hard work, learning, laughs, sport, success, and a whole lots of experiences that adds to our richness as a school and learning community.

We have had an exciting week with our senior leavers assembly on Tuesday and our final Celebration assembly on Wednesday.  It has been so nice to celebrate our students success for the year and share this with our whanau.  We have also farewelled some of our staff who are moving into other roles both in Tauranga and around NZ, and we wish them every success for their futures.

Last Friday we had an amazing treat with the PTA putting on a FUNDAY for our children.  The highlight of the day was a new slippery slide that is 45 metres long by 5 metres wide that fits perfectly on our big hill leading onto the school field.  Our entire school had the opportunity to use the water slide and the kids absolutely loved it..and possibly some teachers too!  The PTA also gave our children a Juicie, a hot sausage, and a donut!  We were able to open up the school pool and had games on the courts too.  It was such a fun afternoon and lot’s of children came up afterwards and thanked us for the fun. Great to see our children having such lovely manners, which is so important in life.

School Property Developments

We have spent a lot of time this year working with the Ministry of  Education developing a plan for our property for the next 10 years.  This is a big job and has involved looking ahead in terms of our expected growth as a school and community.  In 2017 we will be having a few exciting developments.  Over the summer break our school will be repainted and with a change of colour will be clean and sharp, and link in with our school and house colours.  We also have planned a major modernisation of our toilet block and also of Rooms Rimu, Tawa, and Rata.  This will be so exciting and is anticipated to occur in term 3.  Finally we also have two new classrooms set to arrive onsite mid year, which are planned to be placed on the bank of the field in front of Room Pohutukawa.  Lot’s to be excited for and a lot of work ahead.

Our roll has remained relatively stable in 2016 although that does not reflect the huge number of enrolments we have had during the year.  We have had 118 enrolments for an actual gain on the roll of approx 30 kids.  We have seen a lot of families affected by the property market and rental property sales this year causing a lot of people some challenges in terms of finding local accommodation. 

It is projected that our school will continue to grow as our community develops and new housing continues to spread across the hills.  Welcome Bay is an exciting and diverse community to be a part of, and with developments such as the underpass at Maungatapu I believe Welcome Bay will continue to be a highly desirable area to live in years to come.

Our focus areas for 2016 include continued development into our model of collaboration within school to enhance achievement and support excellent teacher practice.  We will also continue to develop more collaboration between our community of schools, a Ministry initiative, developing a community of schools with eight schools including the intermediate and colleges.  The focus of this will be to collectively look at how we can lift our capabilities as a group of schools to support increased student engagement, progress, and achievement.  We have some exciting developments in Science next year, having accessed the House of Science resources this year, and also have a teacher who will be on a science scholarship in terms 3 & 4.

Teaching teams for 2017

Every year we work hard to 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:

Hub 1 is called First Flight New Entrant and Year 1	Class	Hub 2 is called Take Flight Year 2 & 3	Class
Hub Guardian – Mrs Absalom Teacher: Mrs McKinlay Teacher: Mrs Bishop Teacher: Mrs  Kendrick	Toetoe Hub 1	Hub Guardian – Mrs Daniels Teacher: Miss McGovern Teacher: Mrs Honeyfield and Mrs Anthony	Hub 2
Hub 3 is called Flight Path Year 3 & 4	Class	Hub 4 is called Flight Deck Year 5 & 6	Class
Hub Guardian – Mr Stirling Teacher: Ms Christian Teacher: Mrs Mellor	Pohutukawa Karaka Kowhai	Hub Guardian – Miss Fly Teacher: Mr Buller Teacher: Mrs Barker	Hub 4

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 2016

Thanks to all of our school community who have supported our fundraising events in 2016.  Through fundraising the PTA have raised approximately $7,000 this year.

These funds have enabled us to make a total of $6,730.00 of donations to the school this year for the following:

Hub Donations 2016  $4,000.00 (used by teachers to subsidise transport costs etc for trips)

Hub 1 Sand/Water Toys  $1000.00

Garden improvements  $630.00

Table Tennis Tables  $600.00

School Guitar  $500.00

 

We have also invested in a large 45m x 5m waterslide enjoyed by the children (and some adults) at the PTA Fun Friday last week which we intend to utilise for fundraising events in 2017.

As well as the hard work of our committee of seven we would not be able to raise these funds without the support of businesses, we would particularly like to acknowledge the support of the following businesses:

Coupland’s Bakery, Gate Pa – who cook and box our pies for Pie Day Friday

Arbor Reman Limited – who donate 30 cubic metres of firewood for us to sell each year

Raymond Transport Limited – for delivering the container of firewood

MSL Builders Limited – for lending us their tip truck to help with firewood deliveries

Hellers Sausages in Schools – who donated 960 sausages at no cost

The Warehouse, Tauranga Crossing – who provided the noodles for our slide at cost

Tarpaulin Makers, Mt Maunganui – who gave a generous discount on the manufacture of our slide

We are always in need of extra help so if you or a business you are involved in could help us with fundraising in 2017 please let us know welcomebaypta@gmail.com

 

 

On behalf of all of the staff and Board of Trustees, we would like to wish everyone out there a very safe and happy Christmas and New year and look forward to all of our children returning safe and ready for learning in 2017!

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