School ‘Open’ under Level 3:
School will be available for children of essential workers who do not have an adult at home to supervise them. As the vast majority of the children will be learning from home, the learning available at school will be the same as the distance learning. With the need for physical distancing at school, teachers will really only be able to supervise children while they engage with the learning independently. It will not be a normal teaching situation. If your child needs to attend school because you are an essential worker and there is no one to supervise them at home, please contact me directly.
Learning from Home:
The teachers have prepared learning at home which follows on from the learning children have been doing since they returned to school after the previous rāhui lockdown. It will be presented similarly to last time, on google slides.
As before, there will be daily online hui where children can ‘meet’ up with each other and their teachers. Details about this are in the google slides.
Assemblies and sharing of learning will continue on the school’s Facebook page.
As before, the learning is invitational. It would be wonderful if your child could complete lots of the learning and attend hui etc. We do appreciate, however, that everyone’s circumstances are different and what you and your child can manage will vary from family to family. That is absolutely fine – the last thing we wish to do is to create more stress for your whānau.
Background to the Learning:
The theme is, ‘Same Storm Different Boats’. This is a metaphor and a response to the previous lockdown - we all weathered the storm together but apart, and we learnt new skills, discovered passions and thought about what kind of a world we want to live in.
Since returning to school, we have been involved in a ‘dramatic inquiry’ in an imaginary world in which we all weathered a storm at sea and found a message in a bottle from someone who had been through a different storm and had arrived safely on an unknown island, despite losing their sails. The letter urged us to keep going to find the island and to look out for the tattered sails. Along the way we found pieces of the sails and decided to use the fragments to mark our new passions, skills and ideas. You may have been at the assembly when the reconstructed sails were shown or you may have read about them in the newsletter.
During the journey, the children imagined facing problems like losing their way and facing unknown disturbances like the kraken. The children eventually triumphed over adversity by navigating, using Matariki, and finding the way at last to the island. The person who wrote the letter was already gone but the children shared all their new skills, passions and ideas with each other and left the sail fragments as a gift and sign of hope for a better world.
This term we are imagining that we are a company of documentary makers (Bayswater Studios) and we received a letter from an imaginary foundation (the Foundation for the Betterment of Humankind) asking us to produce a documentary about a story worth telling. This is the story about a group of children who made the world a better place by weathering a storm... So a lot of their learning will have authentic tasks that are set in the imaginary world of Bayswater Studios.
Getting Help:
If you have difficulty accessing the home learning, hui or assemblies etc please contact your child’s class teacher by email.
or contact Marianne (she’s better at the technical stuff then me!) or Lindsay.
He waka eke noa: kia kaha, kia māia, kia manawanui!
We are all in this together - be strong, be steadfast!