Thursday 9th April - Message for Parents and Whanau
Kia ora koutou - Dear Parents and Whanau,
I trust you are all well within your bubbles and that your extended whanau are also coping with the opportunities and challenges of the current situation. The school ‘holidays’ officially come to an end next week with the first day of Term 2 and remote schooling beginning on Wednesday 15th April.
In order to support families with learning expectations alongside your existing routines, we will be introducing the following times:
We are trialling the idea of two separate hour-long learning sessions. This will break up the lesson time and enable students and parents the chance to add variety or additional routines. Parents are encouraged to pursue authentic learning experiences at home depending on their situations and resources.
These ‘class’ sessions will be times when your child will be expected to engage with the learning opportunities planned by their class teacher. Year 5-8 teachers will share learning directly with students using Google Classroom and Year 0-4 teachers will share learning with parents weekly using Google Slides. This will make use of hard copy materials already shared with you.
On the whole, class teachers will also be available to answer questions from parents and students between 10:30am and 11:30am each day and will continue to respond via email in a timely manner. Staff will not be available from 11:30am to 12:30pm as they will be participating in online meetings or related tasks.
It is our intention to help parents avoid feeling overwhelmed with too much content from school, and instead to better gauge the needs of your child. Please contact your class teachers to provide feedback - they are trying to provide meaningful learning opportunities in unusual circumstances. Please also feel free to share successful learning experiences that you have created for your whanau - teachers may well be able to pass these ideas on. Although we have a wonderful group of teachers, we do not have a monopoly on creativity and are always looking to share great learning.
We all anticipate a return to ‘normal’ schooling sooner rather than later. However, as we do not know when the Ministries of Health and Education will deem it safe for the lockdown to be reduced or removed, Parua Bay School will continue to provide remote teaching and learning. Remote learning on this scale is a relatively new space we are striving to make the most of, please be patient with us as we refine our provision for your tamariki. Thank you for all the great things you are doing to encourage learning.
Nga mihi mahana,
Mark Ashcroft
Principal
