August Newsletter

21 st August 2020

Kia ora koutou

You will now be adjusting to a further period of Alert Level 2 and working through the impacts this will have for your family and whānau. It is pleasing to see how New Zealanders are responding to this latest outbreak by getting tested if unwell, and staying home.

While most of us are familiar with requirements at Alert Level 2, we will continue to emphasise the importance of:

Good hand hygiene and cough and sneeze etiquette
Staying away if sick
Keeping an appropriate physical distance from others
Cleaning and disinfecting our high touch surfaces daily
Displaying QR code posters at our entrances and encouraging all of our community to download the NZ COVID Tracer App and use it if they come on-site
Keeping a visitor register for anyone who cannot use the app and for other essential visitors

We know all these things will help to keep our community as safe as possible. Because of these measures being in place, your child does not need to wear a face-covering while at school.

If for some reason we end up in level 3, be assured that the school is prepared for home learning and home learning hard packs will be distributed to all students as well as online learning via the Seesaw app like we did last time. Parents can keep in contact via the messenger app which was really effective during the last lockdown.

Please keep connected with us, as you have been doing.

Ski Trip

Our school ski trip is only 2 weeks and 2 days away! We need to have this all paid for by next Friday at the very very latest. At the moment we have only 3 families that are all paid for. I would hate to have to tell families that they cannot come. I have had to cancel trips in the past because of missed payments. The school is not a bank and we cannot carry your debt. To date we have almost $1000 of outstanding debt (unpaid uniforms that the children are wearing, ski trip money, and stationery that they are using) If you are in severe financial hardship please arrange a time to talk with Lorraine or me to see what we can arrange. Next year we will change things and parents will have to go into town and purchase school stationery and uniforms themselves.

Parents that are coming on the trip are:

Denise Phillips, Adrienne and Matt Gread, Beatriz Marshall, Moana O’Hanlon, Rose Patterson, and Myself.

Rose and I will take all students in the hired 12 seater van from school on the 9th leaving school at 9 am sharp

I need parents that are joining us to carpool as there are only 5 of you. Could someone please arrange that for me?

Please note there will be no bus running on the 9th and 10th for our school so parents must arrange to drop off students and gear in the morning at 8 am and pick them up at 5pm on Thursday from school. (We will be in messenger contact with parents the whole time)

I will try to book 2 car parks near the lodge for our school. Another newsletter will come out next week checking you have everything you need.

Cross Country

We have changed the date of the school cross country. It is now Monday the 31st of August at 1pm. Hope to see you all here to support our students.

BBQ and Working Bee

18th September 4pm onward.

We will have a wee working bee to tidy up the bike track and areas around the school and then officially open our fabulous new outdoor learning area. I have invited the wonderful people who have contributed to the area by building our wooden car, planter box, and car track. I hope you will come and celebrate with us.

Teaching and Learning

The children have been enjoying having a turn at being ‘teacher for a day’. I have been very surprised at how serious they have taken this and the fun activities they have found to teach. Here is Lucas Marshall trying out the top job.

Solar System

I should have known that the topic ‘My World’ would be huge! We are so into learning about the solar system that half of the term has flown by already and we haven’t even started on focussing on Earth yet. Next week we will look at planet Earth. We will be learning about where countries are on a map, reading map co-ordinates and how we can look after our beautiful planet.

Crazy Hair Day

The children have asked for a crazy hair day on the last day of term, 25th September. We think this sounds like a great idea and a fun way to end the term.