Newsletter 24th February 2025
From the Principal
Welcome to our many new families who have joined our school community over the past few weeks.
School Picnic
A wonderful evening with so many families joining in. Events like these highlight the strength of community, thank you.
Congratulations
Mrs Claire Stretch with the arrival of Beau on 16th February.
You know what the great thing about babies is? They are like little bundles of hope. Like the future in a basket.” — Lish McBride
School Values
This term we focus on the value of kindness.
7 Random Acts of Kindness Kids Can Do at School
- Sit with someone new at lunch. Everyone deserves to feel included at school.
- Smile
- Giving someone your full attention.
- Thanking someone.
- Leave a note of encouragement
- Clean up around school without being asked to
- Help someone with their school work
How can we as adults model kindness to our children?
Help them understand what kindness means
Inspire their imagination
Thinking "What would that feel like?" is one of the most powerful habits we can instill in our children.
- Model kindness everywhere we go
- Encourage kind habits
- Help your children match the somewhat abstract concept of kindness with the many concrete verbs that enact it: sharing, volunteering, giving, including, comforting, supporting, championing, compromising, listening, and noticing when someone could use help—a classmate with a math problem, a family member with a chore, an older person who needs a seat on the bus.
- Understand that kindness isn’t always easy
- Pay attention to the effects of kindness
- Help your children notice how it feels to be kind—and how other people respond.
School Wide Contracts 2025
Each year we have several professional learning contracts below are a few of them
The Learner First
Mathematics Professional Development that is impactful, scalable, student centered, and sustainable.
Teachers’ knowledge of how children learn mathematics is a focus. Teachers are empowered to optimize existing resources and integrate high impact routines, creating an effective blend of teaching styles and a varied and inclusive repertoire of tasks.
The facilitators are mathematics experts who empower teachers to translate research into everyday classroom practice and become confident, creative communicators of mathematics.
Teachers will learn to create and implement balanced and high impact routines that have demonstrated capacity to improve both student performance and disposition as they explore mathematical skills, processes and competencies.
Structured Literacy
The Ministry is funding professional learning and development (PLD) for structured approaches to teaching literacy.
This will support our teachers to use structured literacy approaches including: oral language, phonemic knowledge, systematic synthetic phonics teaching and knowledge for decoding and spelling, handwriting, vocabulary, morphology, syntax, fluency, text structure, writing, and comprehension.
It will also support teachers to understand the principles of explicit teaching including: a gradual release of responsibility, being systematic, being precise, providing repeated and varied opportunities for learning, being cumulative, being diagnostic and responsive, and developing mastery and automaticity.
TEACHER ONLY DAYS
The Government has approved four teacher only days for schools this year to work on the new curriculum changes. We have had three teacher only days so far this year during the Christmas holidays.
We try to avoid taking days during term day but sometimes it is out of our control as the facilitators are not always available when we want them due to every primary school in NZ taking part.
The school will be closed on Monday March 10, 2025 for a literacy professional development day. Apologies for any inconvenience.
Fintan, Sue and Monique
Celebrating Excellence - Room 1 & 2
Room 2 have been learning about how to make number 7 using plastic counters. Here are some of our friends sharing their work
Room 1 has been learning about being kind. It is one of the PHS values.We read the book Rainbow Fish and discussed how we could be kind, just like Rainbow Fish learned to be. In Room 1 we enjoy working with each other during our learning. When we are kind we feel happy and so do others.
Sports News
Softball Field Day 2025
On Wednesday, 19th February, twenty four year 5 and 6 students took to the field for an exciting and action-packed day of softball. Both teams performed exceptionally well, showing off their skills, teamwork, and sportsmanship in every game. Their hard work paid off, with both teams winning most of their matches and representing the school with pride and determination.
We were lucky with the weather as the rain held off just long enough for the games to go ahead, adding to the excitement of the day. A special thanks goes out to the amazing parent helpers who gave up their time to support the teams, whether it was helping with transport, cheering on the sidelines, or organising equipment. Your support made a huge difference and helped make the day a success.
Congratulations to all the players for their fantastic effort and success.
Cultural Leaders news
Recently we acknowledged Lunar New Year with a lunchtime activity. The Cultural Leaders helped students make paper chain snakes to celebrate the Year of the Wood Snake. Throughout the year we will celebrate various different language weeks and cultural events. If you have a particular skill or interest in a culture and would like to share with students, please contact our Cultural Leader, Donna Hitchings (donnah@pakurangaheights.
Lost and Found
Found - Near PAC - last week, please call the office on 5769209 if this is yours
From the community
Fantail Pippins and Arawhai Brownies currently have space to take more girls aged 5-9.5 years, keen to join in on the fun that GirlGuiding NZ has to offer.
We offer a non-competitive learning environment that is open-minded and values-based. It’s a supportive place to grow confident, adventurous girls who are ready to be tomorrow’s leaders. We offer a programme where the girls themselves have a say in the activities they get to participate in and offer experiences like camps, crafts, and real-life experiences, rewarding them with badges as they learn new skills.
To register your interest and find out more about our rewarding programme, complete the form found here: Register Your Interest - GirlGuiding New Zealand - You be the Guide!