Term 1 | Week 6

Kia ora e te whānau,

I hope you are all well? We’ve reached week 6 of our term, and have made lots of progress in learning despite the potential for fast-paced change as many of the schools around us are impacted by COVID cases in their staff and students.

I’d like to confirm (again), that at the time of writing, the school has no active COVID cases. If you need to let us know about your child testing positive, you can call the office (03) 435 0650, or email [email protected] (monitored out of hours). We can help you to identify any school-based close contacts and notify them on your behalf.
If you would like to report a perceived breach of the government settings by the wider community in Twizel, please do this by following the steps on the Unite Against COVID site: covid19.govt.nz/news-and-data/report-a-breach rather than calling the school. It is very upsetting for our office staff to have to field calls from community members making accusations that we have active cases at school that we are not disclosing. This is not the case. Again, here is the procedure we’ll be following should a case arise (N.B. slight adaptations may apply as the government is now in phase 3 where casual contacts are no longer notified).

Last week, we released our online 2021 School Magazine / Yearbook. If you would like to pre-order a printed version, you are welcome to fill out our 'Register an Interest' Form here. We'll be selling them at the same price it costs to print them - $25 each.

Earlier this week, our newly formed PB4L-SW (Positive Behaviour for Learning - School-Wide) team met with John Taylor from the Ministry of Education to begin implementation. The in-school lead, Melissa McLellan will update the community soon with our intentions. The initial training helped us to establish our immediate needs and to develop some plans for the future. One of the key documents we’ll be working with is ‘Teaching for Positive Behaviour’ which can be viewed here. Part of the PB4L outcomes is, of course, the Peer Mediation Team that we already have in action at school. It has been great to see our young people gain the confidence and ability to role model our desired playground behaviours, and show others the way too. I’ve already observed and acknowledged strong whānaukataka and ārahi from the team.

At the time this newsletter is being sent, I am away in Christchurch with the Ministry of Education Property Team and architects attached to our rebuild project. They are facilitating a tour of three schools (Hillmorton Middle School, Mairehau Primary School and Kaiapoi High School) to help me conceptualise the possibilities for our new school, learning environments and grounds. I’ll let you know what this experience was like next week!

On Monday, we intend to farewell our M4 students as they embark on a 3-day tramp - this is the first of our Middle School Camps. I wish you well on your journey.

A reminder there is a Kāhui Ako Teacher Only Day scheduled for Thursday next week (17th March). This is an online workshop for our teachers across the Southern Area Schools, the highlight of which is a presentation from Joanne Quinn, a global leader and researcher from NPDL (New Pedagogies for Deeper Learning). I’m so glad we’ll be able to engage with her as she quite literally wrote the book on NPDL. I know this will have an impact on our future teaching and learning strategies. Thank you for your support in providing this essential time for teacher development.

He waka eke noa,

Kate Staniford
Tumuaki | Principal