Newsletter 9, Term 3 Week 4 2020

18 Padnell Crescent Newlands Wellington 6037

Newsletter 9 – Term 3, Week 4

Friday 14 August 2020

School Photos – Monday 17 August under Level 2 – access keys to view photos and purchase online will be issued following photos being taken.  See newsletter below for details.

There’s nothing better than freshly grown veges! Lynnda and our student gardening club proudly presented me with a lettuce sandwich last week – best lettuce I’ve tasted for a long time. Message to self – must buy some Vegemite! They also made a delicious drink using two huge lemons from one of their new fruit trees. Great green fingers gardening crew!

School Library

Last week Claire the Librarian and I visited Paper Plus and Schrödinger’s Books in Petone to purchase new books for our library. Thank you to both of these businesses for generously offering us a 20% discount on our purchases. Our students and teachers gave us a great list to hunt for and you will be pleased to know that we managed to find some wonderful books, including those that celebrate 50 years since landing on the moon, and the Principal’s Choice: Little Frida by Anthony Browne (based on the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo). We will have them on our shelves shortly for all our students to enjoy. Next term our librarians will be joining us to choose more books to add our awesome collection.

Claire and her student librarians who run lunchtime library sessions: Eddy, Alana, Esha, Ben, Eden and Darsheka

WCC Waste Heroes Programme

Our WCC programme is really ramping up with free music classes for every child in the school over the last 3 weeks. Together, our students have been creating a music video about waste and how to Reduce waste, Reuse and Recycle. You can view the finished video on www.musicvideoeducation.com Waste Red/Learn Rewa Rewa School – great work everyone! Our huge thanks to the Wellington City Council for this wonderful (free) community programme.

Celebrating Our Diverse Community

We have families at our school who come from a wide range of countries from all around the globe, many of whom speak languages other than English. These include Brazil, Cambodia, Chile, China, the Cook Islands, Egypt, England, Fiji, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Japan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Niue, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Samoa, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tonga and Vietnam.

We recognize that sometimes it can be hard to find ways of meeting others in our community so we have two events on the calendar for this term to encourage our families to meet each other. They are:

  • Later this term we will be having a celebration evening that we hope all our families will attend. The purpose of this will be to meet each other, celebrate our uniqueness e.g. by wearing national costumes (if you’re lucky enough to have one), bring food to share, perform a song or dance or just tell your story about where you come from.
  • We are starting a Friendship Club – 2.30pm each Wednesday afternoon in the staffroom. We welcome any of our parents to meet each over a cuppa and biscuit to make connections – we would love to see you there. If there is a parent who would like to be the host for this, we would love to hear from you.

Board of Trustees News

3-Way Interviews

We had an amazing turnout last week for our 3-Way Parent/Student/Teacher interviews. Developing a sound home and school partnership is the key to our students’ success. Some of the data gathered from this evening:

Whero         96% turnout

Kowhai        90% turnout

Kahurangi   79% turnout

Māori          18/22 turnout

Pasifika        7/9 turnout

Thank you to our teaching team for the huge number of hours you put into preparing for these and for making yourselves available for an additional 8 hours over two evenings.

Mid-Year Data

Curriculum leaders presented Mid-Year Data to the Board at Tuesday night’s meeting in Reading, Writing and Maths. Overall, the Board is very pleased with the progress being made across the school and noted we are on target to reach our goals by the end of the year. The results, in general:

Reading

88% of students are working At or Above their expected curriculum level

83% of Māori students

100% of Pasifika students

Writing

90% of students are working At or Above their expected curriculum level

87% of Māori students

100% of Pasifika students

Maths

89% of students are working At or Above their expected curriculum level

82% of Māori students

100% of Pasifika students

Parents are welcome to email office@rewarewa.school.nz for a copy of the full board report.

Māori Tikanga and Te Reo

As part of our commitment to the Treaty of Waitangi, and acknowledgement of our tangata whenua, the Board is undertaking training each meeting to develop their own knowledge of te ao Māori. This includes writing our own mihi, learning the school’s karakia and opening our meetings with a whakatoki. We are using the Hautū Review tool to measure our progress against the area of   cultural responsiveness so that we can identify how we, as elected representatives, can improve our service to the community that we proudly serve.

School Photos – Monday 17 August

This year photographs will be available for you to view and order Online with PhotoLife Studios.

Within 1-2 weeks of photos being taken at school, your child will bring home a notice with their unique Access Key detailed on it.  This Access Key will display all the photographs of your child.  It is then an easy process for you to shop online and purchase the photographs you want.

If you place your order within three weeks of receiving your Access Key you will receive free delivery for your photo orders.  PhotoLife has agreed to despatch all the orders back to the school and your child will bring their photographs home.

Any orders placed after this three week period will be sent directly to your specified delivery address and will incur a $6.00 Postage & Packing charge.  You will see this message when you go online to view and order your photographs.

Postponed – Mihi Whakatau, Welcome to Families of 2020 Starters

Unfortunately, due to the shift to COVID-19 Level 2, we have had to postpone today’s mihi whakatau.  We look forward to hosting this at a later date.

Pre-Enrolments

To help us to manage our class sizes and teaching staff it is really helpful to receive pre-enrolments as soon as possible. This information helps the Board to forecast roll numbers and the number of places that may be available for out-of-zone enrolments. This is particularly important if you are the parent of a current student living out of zone and you have younger children you wish to enrol. A reminder that it is the Educational Legislative Act that determines how schools can/cannot accept out of zone enrolments, as well as ballot rules, not the Board or Principal.

Mark Williams (Board Chair), Naomi Godfrey, Ambresh Kapoor, Angela Schleif

New Road Patrol Parents

Where are you? We have never before had such as poor response to this community service. We desperately need to bring more people onboard as we know that several of our long-time volunteers will be moving on at the end of the year. Please consider this very worthwhile duty to undertake, even if it is just for a term.

Student Celebrations

Our Cross Country team of 15 students represented our school really well at the recent Northern Zone meet. Although we did not manage to secure a place in the Interzone championships, everyone tried their very best. Our huge thanks to parents Megan, Ambresh and Mark for transporting and supervising our students – and to Megan for washing the new school t-shirts. Congratulations to Esha, Cole, Benjamin, Eddy, Riki, Muhummed, Matilda, Brooklyn, Alex, Gino, Raffy, Ben and Mary (absent: Kash).

Home & School Parent Group

Items such as new school t-shirts and grants for the shade sails are just some of the ways that this important group of parents makes a difference for all our students. Other tasks include running the school disco, replacing our Adventure Playground, organising Scholastic Book club orders (which also benefits our library). This band of dedicated parents have contributed in so many ways over the last 6 years at our school. We would love to have more people, such as yourself, at our next meeting – the first one back since Covid-19 interrupted our stride. As long as we are still in Level 2, just come to the staffroom at 6pm, Wednesday 19 August. You don’t have to volunteer to do anything – your contribution might just be to meet others and to share some great ideas!

Thank you to those parents who regularly offer acts of kindness such as providing lunches, offering to pay for stationery and sunhats – your care towards others is greatly appreciated.

Upcoming Events…

Monday 17 August

Tuesday 8 September      5.30pm

Tuesday 8 – Wednesday 16 September

Friday 25 September       3pm

Monday 12 October        9am

Friday 13 November

Tuesday 15 December    1pm

School Photos

BOT Meeting

Bee Healthy Regional Dental Service onsite

End of Term 3

Start of Term 4

NIS 2021 Enrolments Orientation Morning

End of Term 4

Introducing Wellington Hindi School

Our school currently has approximately 80 students and 11 Hindi speaking teachers that include six qualified teachers at its three branches. For about 60% of our students and three of our teachers, Hindi is another language.

Branch locations

Our three branches are located in Wellington City, Lower Hutt and Newlands.  Operation will soon begin from Rewa Rewa School hall.

For further information or enrolment, contact:

Sunita Narayan, Operations Manager/Teacher sunita.d.narayan@gmail.com +64226427652

Vijeshni Rattan , Principal/Teacher vijeshni@hotmail.com +64210798243

https://www.facebook.com/groups/WellingtonHindiSchool/

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