Wednesday, 9 April 2025

Kia ora koutou,

Here we are at the end of the term already! We have had 10 successful weeks now and are really happy with how the term has gone. Schools across the country are all working to adapt to the sweeping changes across education, and I feel particularly proud of our TK team who have rolled with these changes with grace and resilience. We are supportive of the new curriculum roll-outs and believe that these will add more clarity to learning pathways for our students.

With the rapid change in weather, everyone has adapted well to the much wetter conditions, and obviously a welcome reprieve for our farmers. With wet weather predicted, please ensure your child keeps a back-up set of clothes to wear in their bag, particularly if they enjoy playing on the field during break times.

Tomorrow afternoon we are hosting our termly Open Afternoon where you are all invited on site from 2:15 pm - 3:00 pm. If you can't make this time, then a reminder that you are welcome to pop in some time before school or straight after school during week days.

On Friday we have our Harvest Festival Fun Day. Please see the important information within this newsletter about this.

On behalf of our TK Team, we wish you a happy Easter, and will see you all back after the break.

Juliet Dickinson
Principal

PS Thank you Rachel for this wonderful rainbow shot - we love it!

Kia ora e te whānau,
Here we are in the last week of Term 1, meaning that we are a quarter of the way through the school year already. It has been a very busy and positive start to the year with the likes of swimming sports and school camps taking place, alongside bedding in the Ministry of Education’s new school curriculum. I would like to thank Juliet, Cameron, the leadership team, and all the staff for their hard work and dedication in getting 2025 off to such a great start.

While the new curriculum has meant there are some changes taking place within classroom delivery and student assessment, the work done over the last few years (especially in professional development of our team) means that these changes are fitting reasonably seamlessly into what we already do. The school is benefiting now from the early adoption of structured literacy and focussing on mathematics, and we are well ahead of many other schools who are just starting to introduce these things now. This is recognised in the number of schools wishing to visit us to look at how we have implemented our structured literacy programme, and we have teachers (shout out to Justine Flynn and Amy Benton) being invited to present parts of our program at conferences within New Zealand and to share the knowledge internationally.

A key focus of the new government policies, and one that has had extensive media coverage over the last 12 months, is the improvement of school attendance with the set target being to have 80% of students attend school more than 90% of the time. The school is now operating under the Stepped Attendance Response (STAR) framework that the Ministry
of Education has put in place and is required to do weekly reporting on attendance. For the great majority of you this will have no impact, and our school is well ahead of national averages for attendance. The simple message for our families is that the best educational outcomes are gained by having your children at school as much as possible.

As you will be aware there are School Board elections taking place in September this year. This provides the opportunity for anybody interested in making a contribution to the school to stand for the board. For the first time Te Kōwhai School will be running these elections online through a certified Ministry of Education service provider. There will be further information on the elections in the coming months to advise you on how to stand and vote in these elections.

We were very pleased to be joined at our Board meeting last week by four parents who took the opportunity get an understanding of the what, why, and how of Board operations (for them it was exciting stuff like signing off the 10-year property plan and approving the draft 2024 financial statements). I would like the opportunity to thank them for their attendance, and trust that the experience will encourage them to put their name forward for election later in the year. This opportunity to attend a Board meeting will be available again at future meetings, and we will notify the dates for these closer to the time.

I hope that all our school families have an enjoyable and safe school holiday break, and we look forward to seeing you back in a couple of weeks as we head into term two.

Ngā mihi,
Craig Scott, on behalf of the Te Kōwhai School Board

Due to the weather last week, we postponed the games aspects of our Harvest Festival to this Friday.

We have re-worked this plan to ensure we have enough support throughout the day for our staff and students to have maximum fun. We will be doing our brief prizegiving from 9:10 am.

Timeline below: (parents and whānau welcome to any of the timetabled events below).

11:30 - 12:40 LC4-6 students playing games (LC1 - LC3 will be in class as usual).

12:40 Lunchtime (full school)

1:05 Lunch eating (full school)

1:20 Roll call (full school)

1:30 - 2:30 LC1-3 students playing games. LC1 and LC2 students can move around the games with a parent,
or they will be allocated a small group with a senior student supporting them. LC4-6 will be in
class during this time.

2:40 All classes on field to watch gunging

3:00 Home time

If you have already ordered a sausage in bread via Kindo, this will be sent to the classroom during lunch eating time (1:05 pm). However, the FoTKS will be operating the BBQ and having food sales from 11:30 - 3:00 pm with sausages, burgers, ice blocks and cupcakes available. These can be purchased with tickets throughout the day as well (including during the lunch break).

As this is one of our annual fundraisers, tickets are used to play the games, enter raffles and buy food. Tickets can be purchased before school on Thursday and Friday throughout the day.

As a guide the costs are: $2 per game, $2-$4 for food items, $1 for gunge votes.

To ensure we have enough prizes, can one prize per student please be sent to school (as per previous communications).

Thank you for your support, we hope your children enjoy the changed format for this year.