FRIDAY 1 APRIL

Kia ora, Talofa Lava, Greetings, Malo e Lelei, Kia Orana, Bonjour, Nǐ hǎo, Hallo, Hola, Kon'nichiwa, Namaste, As-salāmu ʿalaykum

Welcome to our new students in Room 2 - Georgia Ledingham, James Stewart, Emerson Livingston, Lula Bates, Sky Paulsen and Jack Phipps.

FROM THE PRINCIPAL

Kia ora Muritai Whānau, 

We hope this email finds you safe and well - We realise we continue to have some learners and staff currently isolating and/or Covid-19 positive, and it will have been a very challenging time in your household over the last few weeks. We are thinking of you all and offer our support should there be anything that we can help you with. 

We continue to have small amounts of daily Covid-19 case numbers across our students and staff and this continues to be slow and steady, which is exactly what we’ve been working so hard to maintain.  

We have been prepared for this phase, and our learners continue to be adaptable and resilient, at times needing to visit a new class or to have a new teacher. We equip our learners to handle change by teaching them about having a growth mindset and being resilient.  

Here is a breakdown of the Muritai School Stages of Response so you are clear on our decision making process and how this will affect our staff, children and whanau. 

Stages of response to COVID at Muritai 

With COVID present in our community and within Muritai school we have to prepare our response to the amount of children and teachers we have available. Here are our four stages and responses to different possible scenarios at Muritai School. During this time when we have active covid cases present in our school, we thank our parents for continuing to drop children off at the school gates, and avoiding coming on site during school hours. 

• Stage 1 

School runs as normal under Red Restrictions. Some classes will have another teacher, 

• Stage 2 

School runs as normal under Red Restrictions with some minor changes to classroom programmes. Some classes will have another teacher, some classes may have to join together, Children at home who are well, can complete the home learning or team learning grid activities. 

• Stage 3 

When we have unmanageable class sizes due to teacher absence or the situation arises that we have large numbers of students away and working from home in isolation, then we would move to ‘hybrid learning’. This is where children will complete a specialised grid that can be accessed from home or school. Adaptive measures will be put in place to allow staff to manage the hybrid learning, to connect online as well as run classes here at school. An example of this might be some classes are merged, while one teacher is released to connect with learners at home, Some teachers may be doing this whilst isolating at home.

This is what Hybrid Learning looks like for our teams:

Year 0-4 (Korora and Tui): Hybrid learning will be an extension of the our Home Learning Grids via Seesaw, with the addition of online meetings (Yr3/4 Google Meets  and Yr0-2 Zoom), pre-recorded learning media with a range of engaging learning tasks that can be completed at home or school.

Year 5-8 (Kereru and Kahu): Weekly learning is directed by our Hybrid Learning Grids. The extension on this would be the addition of regular online meetings to support and guide our learners through material being delivered. 

• Stage 4 

School is closed when there is not enough staff at school to provide learning programmes and all learning will therefore be completed from the Hybrid Learning Grids from home. Providing our staff are well and isolating at home, this stage may also include online Zooms for Year 0-2 and Google Meets from Year 3-8. 

As mentioned in previous newsletters, we all do need to be prepared, should we unexpectedly have many staff and students away at once, and have to move to Stage 3 and hybrid learning for a period of time.  This would mean that your child was learning from home similar to a ‘lockdown’ as we’ve experienced over the past two years.  As a staff we have prepared for this and are ready for this should the need occur. With our health and safety measures in place of carefully monitoring all cases of Covid throughout the school,  mask wearing, excellent ventilation, our CO2 monitors, air purifiers now installed in every classroom and along with our usual hand hygiene and cough and sneeze etiquette, we are doing all that we can to keep learning as ‘normal’ as possible under the current conditions. 

With the new changes that have been announced and the removal of vaccination mandates for the education sector as well as changes to come for QR code posters and vaccine passes, you may be wondering what that might look like for us at school, and what that might mean for you as parents. We are very conscious that you have been ‘outside of the gates’  for some time now, and we are hoping to welcome you back into the school soon.  Our plans for now are around continuing to manage the active cases inside our school, in the successful way we’ve had all along - by being careful.  We will review these measures in early Term 2, and are starting to plan our reconnection in person with the hope of being able to plan some fun school events for all in the near future.  Our plan is to have a slow and steady integration back to ‘normal’, with the health and safety of all, guiding all decision making. 

FROM THE SCHOOL

It has been another busy start to our year at Muritai School. Whilst we have had to deal with issues that the pandemic has thrown our way, we have mitigated this and had many successes to start 2022. Our Get Set Go units have allowed us to build class and team cultures to ensure learning success across the school. 

We have had 3 Essemblies (electronic assemblies) to celebrate the work that students have done in the initial stages of the year. These Essemblies will become live to allow parents to join and view from Term 2, to continue to find ways for us to connect with each other and celebrate all of the amazing things happening at Muritai School. 

All beginning of the year academic testing has been completed to ensure we have a good understanding of students' development stages and staff have started their professional development on structured literacy, which is being delivered to all classes across the entire school. We are really excited to be offering this to all students across the school and are all beginning to explore the content and learning material. We will have updates in future newsletters about our progress and celebrations with this new learning approach to literacy achievement. 

Recently we ignited the current unit of inquiry called “A Moving World” which is tied to the new history curriculum that will be coming out in 2023. We are focusing on Change as our overarching concept with a focus on the need to “adapt to survive and thrive”. Each syndicate, once again, has planned around these themes to meet the needs of developmental age appropriate for understanding. Each team will share a Team newsletter next week outlining some of this term's celebrations and information. 

As we approach the end of the term, we will be working towards a natural conclusion on some of our learning goals for Term One, whilst others like Inquiry carry over to Term 2. We continue to discuss ways that we can involve our community in our learning culture. We are pleased to announce a community and whanau engagement group as one of our staff theme teams for 2022. This team is one of many staff teams that are working towards our school wide goals tied to our strategic plan under the headings of ….

• Empowerment in Learning 

• Partnership in Learning 

• Environment in Learning  

Our other theme teams that will be meeting regularly are….

• Structured Literacy- Our professional development focus.

• PB4L - Positive behaviours for learning

• Community and Whānau Engagement (as discussed above)

• Wellbeing- Staff, Student and Community

• E-Learning- supporting the curriculum in the digital world

• Muritai Curriculum - Inquiry process 

• Writing Progressions- Understanding students’ writing progressions to allow for well established goals and development schoolwide. 

• Muritai School Spaces- making the most of our environment, inside and out. 

We look forward to updating you on the growth that we make in these areas later in the year. 

As always we are only an email away, please do not hesitate to make contact with your child’s/children’s teacher. We take our role of creating a child centred approach to learning seriously, making all decisions in our teams with the children at the forefront of our minds. 

Kindest regards,

Muritai School Senior Leadership Team

Bec, Maureen, Jon, Jamie and Jess

Nuts:

We have an increasing number of students attending our school who are severely allergic to nuts.  We are an inclusive school and want to provide all students with a safe school environment.

To support us with this, please could you consider the items that your child has in their lunchboxes for morning tea and lunch. 

We ask that you do not send any peanut, cashew, brazil or obvious nut products e.g. peanut butter with your child.  If your child has eaten these before coming to school, please ensure that their face and hands have been thoroughly washed before they arrive at school.

These precautionary measures will help us ensure that the students with these allergies have less of a chance of exposure to nuts thus avoiding a life threatening reaction and meaning all of our students are able to be safe.

Home & School

This year the Home & School Committee is fundraising to purchase new and improved kitchen appliances for the school hall refurbishment. If anyone has access / contacts for discounted kitchen appliances, please contact Gen Packer genevievepacker@icloud.com. 

 

COMMUNITY NOTICES  - Please  Note the following notices have been requested to be published and are not necessarily  endorsed by us as a school.  In the spirit of community we include these digitally for you to peruse. 

World Series Indoor Cricket

You’ll love It and your cricket skills will go to a whole new level

Indoor Cricket played Saturday afternoons over the winter months

Check out our website and see what Amelia Kerr has to say about World Series

www.worldseriescricket.co.nz

 

Come and join your local family club for a season of soccer!!  Register your children to play for Eastbourne Football Club

The EFC Club Committee is excited to announce that registrations for the fast-approaching 2022 soccer season are open! 

Junior Season Dates are: 7 May – 10 Sept 2022

For more information about how to sign up, please email Morag (Houston) at info@efc.org.nz or T. 021 150 7997.

For more EFC Club information, see: http://efc.org.nz/; or www.facebook.com/eastbournefootballclub.

For Junior enquiries, contact Jeremy Field or Morag Houston.