Kia ora Whanau,

The highlight for this week has clearly been Harold the Giraffe and Maria's visit in the Life Education Trust bus. The children really enjoyed the interactive lessons on various topics such as relationships, feeling and healthy bodies. Your child should have brought home a booklet with a few activities from the visits. These home activities can be used as a prompt for discussion with home so that you can find out a little more about their visit.

We have seen another spike this week in illness amongst the school, and a few more COVID cases. Unfortunately, epidemiologists are predicting a high possibility of communities contracting significant flu at the same time, and on top of COVID this winter. We do not want this for our children, staff and families which is why we will continue to be vigilant and maintain our current protocols. I wasn't terribly clear about assemblies last update, and I apologise for this. We are gong ahead with Friday Assemblies with the children, however we cannot invite families to join us, or even start schoolwide singing just yet. This is simply to avoid the need for large congregations and children having to pass through large numbers of adults, the same reason we also ask adults to mask up on school grounds so that our children can come and go from school with limited contact. We do really appreciate your patience with us and support.

On a completely different note, it is great to hear all about our children's feats as weekend winter sports start up again. Please feel very welcome to send any photos, or bring trophies/certificates along to school on a Monday morning so that we can help them celebrate their success with their class.

Ka mihi nui,

Gareth Swete

This week the trophy went home with Braxton.

We were very excited to have our turn in the Life Education truck classroom this week!

We had heard that Harold the Giraffe would be in there to help us with our learning, so when we finally got to meet him, it was so exciting. He was thrilled to meet us too, and even wanted to be in our photo, outside of the classroom! Can you spot him?

The focus of our learning this week has been around “Feelings”. How to read the feelings of other people, as we see their faces, and then discussions around what we can do about it, if we, or someone else has some feelings, that we could help them through.

As you can see from our photos, we talked about strategies to help us deal with our own feelings. I thought I would share them with you, the whanau of our tamariki, because they might be some strategies you and your child could discuss at home, and try out when needed.

BLOW:

B - Breathe! Hold your thumb up like a candle and breathe in through your nose, then as you breathe out, blow out the ‘candle’.

L - Let it out! Do something physical to ‘let out’ whatever it is that is worrying/stressing us out. Dance, wriggle, shake - whatever it takes, to let out that negative energy!

O - Open up! Talk to someone you trust. The pictures on the wall were all people that we discussed could be good options for the tamariki to talk to if needed, if they had that person or pet available.

W - Work together! Do something with someone else, or with a group. When we do things together, we feel stronger and things aren’t as hard as when we do them on our own.

I hope this is helpful! Please ask your kids what they remember about each one. They were so good at giving answers and suggestions and participating in the interactive and engaging lessons that Maria and Harold kindly provided for us.

Report by Mrs Campbell

I think it is fair to say that Harrold and the Life Education bus has been the highlight for many of us this week. We have been learning about what makes a good friend and what makes a good leader. One takeaway message we discussed after our first trip was “You don’t have to be a friend to be friendly”. We have written and published the first of our three stories about our past, present and future and are currently working on our present. Next week we will begin working on our future - we will even get to see what we will look like when we are old! I am really proud of how well the children are able to use the correct tense in each piece of writing. You may have heard your children talking about Miss Carston recently. She is studying to become a teacher through the University of Canterbury and we are very privileged to have her in our class supporting the children with their learning (while the children supporting her with her learning!) for another 3 weeks. Last Thursday we began a series of Arts rotations. The children are working in Whanau groups with a mixture of children from all 3 Junior classes. Your children will have 3 Thursday sessions in each class focusing on Drama (Tāwhirimātea), Dance (Hine-Rau-Wharangi) and Music (Papatūānuku). This is such a great opportunity for your children to learn through the Arts while getting to know (or reconnect) with other teachers and children.

Below are a couple of photos of our visit to the Life Education bus to see Harold.

Report by Mrs Swete

This week - even though we had met Harold on the Life Education bus many times before, we were very excited to see him again! The focus for Tane Mahuta’s Life Education sessions this week were managing/defining feelings and learning about empathy. During our sessions we spent time thinking and learning about the different zones that feelings fall into. These zones were the green zone: when you’re feeling good, calm and ready to learn; the blue zone: when you’re feeling sad, sick, down or bored; the yellow zone: when you’re feeling worried, anxious, silly energy and sometimes excited; and the red zone: when you’re feeling angry, annoyed and maybe feel like lashing out! We identified all these feelings and categorised them and then thought about strategies we could use when we’re feeling these certain emotions that would help us feel better.

In order to organise this thinking we separated out different strategies and matched them with the different coloured zones. Some of the strategies that we identified that helped us when we were in the red, yellow or blue zones were: spending time with a safe person, taking a break, spending time with a pet, drawing a picture or taking a walk in nature. We also learned that out of these strategies, there were not ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ strategies to choose when it comes to managing our emotions. If someone is feeling frustrated and taking a walk helps them, great! But if someone else feels frustrated and taking a walk doesn’t help them, but spending time with a safe person does - then that is also totally fine! We learned that we all have different strategies that work for us when it comes to managing our emotions.

Thank you Maria and Harold for coming along and helping us with this important learning!

Report by Miss Tenci