Newsletter Thursday 4th August 2022

I have enjoyed seeing the children returning to a new term full of enthusiasm and energy. I have already seen examples of our children showing our school values. In the last two weeks we have awarded the following children PRIDE certificates: Yiger Han, Yuyu Lei, Rico Nielson, Amelia Newman, Rory Rees, Lachlan Mckeown, Riley Pike, Jett Cortese, Tom Hulme, Zac Bould, Israel Partridge, Alicia Yang, Ella Bromley, Ava Zhang, Mattheu Nicolaychuk.

Quiz Night

It was wonderful to see so many parents and friends of the school at the PTA quiz night. It was also great to see so many past parents supporting our school. It has been a long time since we have been able to get together as a community, and I thoroughly enjoyed the evening. The amazing efforts of our PTA raised over $9000 for our school! I would like to acknowledge the hard work of Gaynor Topham, Claire Steele and the PTA team on the night for making the event so special. 

Whānau Afternoon

I am really pleased we can go ahead with our Whānau Afternoon. We are having to make one or two small alterations to enable this to proceed, but I know you will support them, in order to allow this event to go ahead. 

The afternoon begins at 1.30pm in the hall, where we will be sharing our Greenhithe Local Curriculum, which includes the New Aotearoa/NZ Histories curriculum, sharing our Wellbeing programme information and asking for some responses to some feedback questions to help with the future planning for our school. Your feedback is important to our future planning! 

At 2pm, you will be able to go into the classroom of your child to see and maybe even participate in the learning activity they are doing. In order to enable this activity to run we ask the following:

• Only ONE parent of Whānau member per child.
• All adults are required to wear a mask to enter a classroom, if you have an exemption, please present it.

Attendance at School

As we come to the end of the second week back, I am pleased to see our rates of attendance are very high at the moment. I’d like to thank our parent community for supporting us. We continue to follow the Ministry guidelines on ventilation, to try to ensure we keep viruses, including covid, flu and the nasty colds we have circulating at bay!

We continue to follow Ministry guidance on mask use as I mentioned last week.  We are continuing to strongly recommend mask use in years 4-6. We encourage other children throughout the school to wear their masks.  Please note that this recommendation does not include any situation where mask wearing might not be practicable, such as while eating and drinking, indoor sport, where it will have a significant impact on teaching and learning (for example, students with particular learning needs), certain activities such as singing outside, and P.E. 

If your child does get Covid or is isolating please let us know, as we are still sending our information letters to year groups. As with all of the other winter illnesses, if your child is showing cold or flu symptoms, please keep them at home.

Lunchroom Area

You may have noticed that the old lunchroom is now gone! We are replacing this with an area of veggie gardens, seating and plants. This area we hope will be a nice quieter area for children at lunchtimes and break times, while also allowing children to get involved with some garden projects! A huge thank you to Bunnings in Silverdale and Mairangi Bay and Tania Bromley for their support with getting the resources to make this area a great space for our children. While we have been held up with the recent rain, we look forward to this area being completed in the near future!

Community Connections

Over the last few weeks of term 2 some of our year 4 students have been taking part in a local education programme through Whitebait Connection. The students have been learning about our local environment in Greenhithe and our local stream near Oakford Crescent. The students have been able to go down to the stream to test the water quality and collect some of the creatures that live in and around the water. On returning to school they devised an action to support our stream to help keep it clean and to make our community aware. One group decided to organise an Art Competition over the recent school holidays. Here are the winners from the junior, middle and senior school. Congratulations and well done to everyone who took part, thank you for helping to support our local stream.

Sports Corner     Korero hākinakina

RIPPA

On Tuesday our Rippa children competed in their second and final tournament at Moire Park, Massey. They had a great day with lots of teamwork and great skills on show. Thank you so much to parents who helped transport the children and special thanks to the following parents who managed/coached a team.

Scott Rees, Pamela Wilson, Claire Steele and Melanie Highet.

Here are some photos from the Rippa Tournament.

Community Notices

Before and After School Care

If you would require before or after school care for your child please contact the services below.

Before School Care: [email protected]/Lorna – 021 108 9904

After School Care, Jiggerbobs: Karen – 027 223 5934

Private Music Lessons at School

Piano Lessons: Susan – 021 378 007

Guitar/Drum Lessons: [email protected]

Uniform Shop

Tuesday 2.45pm – 3.15pm

Kidz Can Music

Hi there to all Greenithe Students.  Kidz Can Music Company, your local Music School is able to offer students the opportunity to learn Piano during the school day.  You may choose a private lesson or in a small group.

Private $27.00 per week, Group Lessons $18.00 per week

We are now open for new enrolments for term three (limited number of spaces)

For more information regarding times please contact:

Susan Fraser on 410 1506 or 021 378 007 – [email protected]

Yummy Apple Stickers

This is the last term to collect stickers off Yummy Apples.  Please keep collecting so the school can redeem the stickers for sports equipment.  The sports equipment re-stocks the PE shed that children use at lunch times.