Nau mai haere mai, teenaa koutou katoa!

Welcome back everyone! It’s been lovely to see all the children, full of smiles and stories of their holiday adventures. Our staff managed a lovely break too and are feeling enthusiastic for the year ahead. 

While we were busy planning for RED level before the students arrived back, we also had staff onsite preparing their learning environments, planning and engaging in Professional Learning. There was a little bit of fun squeezed in too with a full staff scavenger hunt around Hamilton. 

After we got over the excitement of the scavenger hunt, the staff engaged in some Professional Learning and discussion around communication skills for effective teams. Mark Osborne first introduced the common stages of effective teams to us back in 2015 and he uses the terms ‘forming, storming, norming to performing’. The ‘storming’ phase is always the most uncomfortable and we found it worthwhile to focus on strategies that we can utilize during this stage.

The next day, our staff experienced being in “The Learning Pit” first hand with our Professional Learning session with Kate Horton. You may have heard your children talk about ‘The Learning Pit’. It’s when something is new, challenging and may feel overwhelming. Kate took us through a ‘learn by doing’ activity and we got to experience the feelings of being overwhelmed, frustrated and stressed. We had the benefit of trying the challenge two more times and we used strategies such as reflecting, thinking critically, collaborating, and improving our communication in order to get through the task and perform at the end. 

We were able to relate this learning to our vision which says “to equip students with the learning capacity to thrive in our complicated world”  Having strategies and skills such as our Puketaha 6 C’s and tools such as our Puketaha Learning Model and Self Determined Learner Profile, is what will help support our learners to be able to work through challenge, work through the ‘storming’ phase and come out the other side hopefully with deeper learning and understandings. Our teachers are always looking for ways to bring our 6 C’s to the forefront of learning and use them to strengthen learning across the Curriculum.

Looking at the term ahead, we have planned to hold most of our typical Term 1 events, although there may be slight adjustments to how they are run. One event we were not able to run was the Family Picnic where we like to introduce all the teachers. We hope you enjoyed our video on Dojo instead and thank you for all the compliments on our acting skills. We will let you know more about the events and how they will run as they come up. 

Thank you all for a great start to the year and as always, please feel free to get in touch with us if you have anything you would like to discuss. We look forward to the year ahead!

Ngaa mihi,

Nyree Olliver

Acting Principal