Dear Parents and Caregivers, 

Welcome to Term 2. We hope you have had a wonderful holiday and have enjoyed spending time together with your children. We are all really looking forward to welcoming them back to school for another busy term ahead. Teachers have been busy planning some wonderful learning experiences for them to be engaged in and are looking forward to getting underway. 

With regard to Covid settings, we wanted to give you an update on what the move to Orange means for Muritai School. 

Our continuing focus is on the health, safety and wellbeing of our staff and students at Muritai School. The announcement from the Ministry of Education has removed some of the restrictions that we have seen previously at the Red level response to COVID 19. It is highly advised that many of our protection measures are maintained in the operation of day to day schooling. We will continue to keep other appropriate health and safety measures and protections in place at school that we know slow the spread of COVID-19. These include ensuring our indoor spaces are well-ventilated, maintaining good hand hygiene and cough and sneeze etiquette, appropriate physical distancing whenever we can, CO2 monitors and Air purifiers in each classroom and, most importantly, staff and students staying at home if sick. 

Covid remains present in our community.  Our measures for protecting our students, staff, parents and wider community members are at the heart of all decisions made.  Whilst there is never a perfect fit for these protection measures for all members of our community, we have continued with what we believe offers due care under the current guidelines and also enables us to begin to offer some additional activities of connection and togetherness.  

At Orange, face masks are no longer required at school. However, public health advice is that masks continue to be strongly encouraged when indoors. 

Even though face masks are no longer required at school, we are advised that wearing a mask is a key health measure that slows the spread of COVID-19 in indoor settings. Therefore…

• We strongly encourage face masks to continue to be worn by children and staff in Years 4 and above when indoors. All students, including Years 1-3 are supported to wear a mask if they would like to. 

• We also ask that your child (if they are Year 4+) continues to bring a mask to school every day. There may be times that we’ll ask them to wear a mask, too – for example, when we are having an assembly in the hall. If there are a high number of cases at school or in the community, we may ask that masks be worn in classrooms for a time.

• All students 12 years and older must wear masks on all buses, including public and school chartered buses. 

• Visitors, including parents and caregivers, are strongly encouraged to wear a mask when coming indoors.

We are pleased to invite you back on our school site before and after school each day, and we know you’ll be keen to step back into the grounds!  One of the positives that we’ve been made aware of from many parents over the past two years, are the comments around the independence and self management children have demonstrated by being dropped and picked up at the school gates - or even making their own way to school each day.  We encourage you to do what is right for you and your whanau, however we do strongly encourage you to wear a mask when coming into Muritai School. 

With Orange having no limits of indoor group numbers we are excited to be having Muritai school planned events this term, such as assemblies, Learning Partnership meetings, Matariki celebrations, buddy classes etc. Children will be able to mix across classes for team and whole school assemblies, EOTC events and we welcome the Kahu team back across the road during lunchtimes. 

Here are some Muritai School events for Term 2 

Learning Conversations Term 2

Early in Term 2 we will hold our ‘Learning Conversations’.  These are meetings to meet with the teacher to continue to build a connection between whanau and school, and to share beginning of the year achievement and progress, share any celebrations and needs, and together come up with goals for the year.

Date Week 4 Tuesday 24th / Thursday 26th May from 3:10 - 5:30

Please check your emails for details of how to book 

Competitive Cross Country Term 2

Children will be spending time over the next 3 weeks building their fitness through daily PE and running. We are excited to be running the Competitive Cross Country on Thursday 19th May from 9:30am-12:30pm. The Year 4-8 South/East Zones Cross Country event will be On Tuesday 24th May week 4. More information will come home in the following weeks about these events.

 

Whole School Assemblies 

We are thrilled to be able to have whole school assemblies this term and look forward to meeting you and celebrating all the amazing learning happening around school. Here are the dates for each of the whole school assemblies this term.

Week 2 Friday 13th May 1:45pm - 2:30pm - KĀHU

Week 4 Friday 27th May 1:45pm - 2:30pm - TŪĪ

Week 6  Friday 10th June 10:00am - 10:30am - Mihi Whakatau (Welcoming any new students to Muritai) 

Week 8 Thursday 23rd June 1:45pm - 2:30pm (Friday Matariki) - KORORĀ

Week 10 Friday 8th July 1:45pm - 2:30pm - KERERŪ

To be able to manage the amount of people in attendance we will invite the parents and whanau of the team leading the assembly only to be audience members. We strongly recommend that masks are worn for these assemblies

 

A Moving World Inquiry #1

We will be carrying on with the current inquiry for another 4 weeks of Term 2 before we hold our WOW Week and launch Inquiry #2

Please keep your eye on the school newsletter for any upcoming events!

We are looking forward to a few less restrictions and returning to school life that is a bit closer to normal.

 

Ngā mihi,

Muritai School Senior Leadership Team 

DIARY DATES:

2 May         First day of Term 2

19 May         Dental Van at Muritai School

25 May         BOT meeting at 6.30

6 June         Queen’s Birthday holiday

13-17 June School Photos

22 June         BOT meeting at 6.30

24 June         Matariki holiday

8 July         Last day of Term 2

TERM DATES 2022:

Term 1  2 February to 14 April

Term 2  2 May to 8 July

Term 3  25 July to 30 September

Term 4  17 October to 15 December

FRIDAY 14 APRIL

Kia Ora Muritai Whānau

FROM THE SENIOR LEADERSHIP TEAM

It is the end of our first term of learning in 2022. It has been one to certainly keep us on our toes, whilst we have been used to moving into lockdowns in the past, starting the year with restrictions has certainly brought a whole new dimension to teaching and learning at Muritai School. We are pleased with the announcement of the move to the Orange setting and are currently looking into the directions from the Ministry of Education that we received last night. We will be reviewing their recommendations carefully before making decisions around changes to our day to day practices and will inform you of these changes in our COVID response plan later in the holidays ready to be implemented on the first day of Term 2.

Our students are to be commended for their ability to be flexible in their learning spaces; home, school or in a different class and/or different teacher over this past term. They have enjoyed a wide range of learning opportunities some of which have been shared with you via Imovies, newsletters, or Google Classroom and Seesaw platforms. We are so very lucky to have such a wonderful community who have put their trust in us to manage their tamariki’s learning whilst under the Red traffic light system. A big thanks also to our teachers and support staff for all the adaptations and changes to the ‘normal’ way of teaching and learning that have occurred to ensure that we have been able to maintain a business as usual approach during these unusual times. We really appreciate everything that they have done for each of the children at Muritai School as well as look after each other. 

Like you and your family, we are all very much looking forward to the Easter break, to enjoy company with our own families and friends, and to recharge for the coming Term 2 start. We are particularly proud of the work that our teachers and students have done over Term 1. We are definitely in a great place to start Term 2 with the essential groundwork having been done to ensure a positive teaching and learning focused programme continues throughout the rest of the year. We are also very aware of the need to balance this with social well being as we truly believe in a holistic approach to education in the primary years. 

We welcome Elena Forlong who will be teaching our newest cohort in Room 3 from next Term.  Elena is looking forward to joining our Korora team.  We also welcome Christiana Indarto and Sydney MacBeath as teacher aides who joined our support team recently.  We thank Susanna Anderson and Pip Wareing for supporting some of our learners and wish them all the best in their new ventures.

ANZAC day once again falls during the holiday break and, whilst there is no scheduled ANZAC parade this year, you may have noticed that we have the poppies on the gates and fences around the War Memorial. These were placed on the gates by our newly appointed head and deputy head students. 

Introducing - Our new Year 8 head students …

Head Students - Mackenzie Reddaway and Tom Neilson

Deputy Head Students - Bodhi Kane and AJ Durant 

Our warmest congratulations to Kenzie, Tom, AJ and Bodhi; we look forward to working with you throughout the year. We would also like to take this opportunity to thank our community for the support of the ANZAC poppy donations. 

We wish everyone a fabulous Easter break and holiday and look forward to our students and staff returning with fully charged batteries on Monday May 2nd. We hope that you keep well and safe and enjoy some special family time along with not forgetting the odd Easter treat. Please do not hesitate to contact us, via email if you have any questions with respect to your child’s learning. 

Thank you for your continued support.

Ngā mihi nui

FROM THE SCHOOL

Slippers at School

Please send a pair of slippers to school for your child/ren next term to be worn during Terms 2 and 3.  We ask that they put these on when they come into the school and after break times.  This is to save the cleaners from having to clean up mud throughout the school after they have been out on the field.  It also keeps their toes nice and cosy during the colder months.  Please name them as we will have a lot of slippers on the racks!

New Soccer Goals

Our soccer goals have arrived and are now up on the school field.  Children were enjoying games of football almost before we could get them set up on the field.  Many thanks to Jamie Power, Jon Mackie and Michael for putting them together and also Kurt Renner who instigated this project.  We look forward to seeing lots of children playing football over the holidays.

BasketBall Hoop

You may have noticed that we are missing a basketball hoop as this was damaged at the end of last year.  It has taken us a while to get a new basketball hoop and backboard but they have finally arrived.  We will be putting these up as soon as possible, however, we are having problems with the supports and it is taking us longer than we hoped.  

Home and School Recipe Book

The Home and School Committee will be fundraising to purchase new and improved kitchen appliances for the school hall refurbishment.  The first fundraiser for this year is a Muritai School Recipe Book.  See below for details:

DIARY DATES:

2 May First day of Term 2

19 May Dental Van at Muritai School

25 May BOT Meeting at 6.30

6 June Queen’s Birthday holiday

13 – 17 June School Photos

22 June BOT Meeting at 6.30

24 June Matariki holiday

8 July Last day of Term 2

TERM DATES:

Term 1  2 February to 14 April

Term 2  2 May to 8 July

Term 3  25 July to 30 September

Term 4  17 October to 15 December

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.