Wednesday 8 November Newsletter

Newsletter – Wednesday 8 November

Kia ora, Talofa, Malo e leleli, Kia orana, Fakalofa lahi Atu, Taloha Ni, Ni sa bula, 你好, Namaste, 안녕하세요, Hola, Xin chao, السلام عليكم. 

Welcome

Silverdale School Board are pleased to advise that we have selected Robbie Chui as our new Board Member – Parent Representative, to fill the casual vacancy that resulted from a previous member moving overseas. Robbie will attend his first Hui as a Board Member at our Board hui on Monday 4  December. Robbie brings a wealth of commercial knowledge and experience with him from working in the learning and development field, with specialised expertise in educational technology and change management. He also speaks English and Mandarinand has a daughter in Year 3 and his son will start school in Term 1, 2024. He will be a great addition to our team and help us continue in our work to support the school. 

Welcome Robbie!

Gumboot Friday

Thank you to everyone who supported Gumboot Friday last week. We were able to raise $567.40 for I am Hope Foundation.

Welcome

Welcome to Sophie Henderson who started with us this week. Our current roll is 851.

Happy Birthday 

Happy birthday to Carter Green, Hannah Zhong, Mischa Janse Van Rensburg, Benjamin Tuohy, Vinson Zeng, James Liu, Mario Tavunawi, Julz Rasmussen, Christopher Patton, Julie Gong, Ayaan Pillai, Oliver Bowern, Mackenzie Mills, Austin Li, Kaitlyn Venter, Alyssa Wannenburg and Aedan Bowden.

Crocs and Jibbitz Trading 

With the weather getting warmer and children wearing Crocs to school we have noticed children trading Jibbitz. The trading of Jibbitz is not allowed at school. Please remind your children of this, thank you.

Silverdale School Pōhiri Process

Every term on the first Monday we have a Pōhiri for everyone at Silverdale School who starts school with us. Children and staff who start with us during the term from Week 2 will have their Pōhiri the following term. Click on the link that’s attached to the newsletter to get a better understanding of our Pōhiri Process. 

Help shape the future of our school.

Below are our draft 2024 – 2025 Strategic Goals. Once these strategic goals have been confirmed then a strategic plan document will be developed.  A strategic plan tells people what the school wants to achieve in the future and how it plans to get there. This strategic plan will then be shared with the community for consultation. Once the consultation period has finished then this document will become our strategic plan for 2024 and 2025.

If you have any comments on the below Draft 2024 – 2025 Strategic Goals please email Cameron cameronlockie@silverdaleprimary.school.nz

Draft 2024 – 2025 Strategic Goals

1. Enhance our literacy programmes so that every learner/ākonga gains sound literacy skills.
2. Enhance our numeracy programmes so that every learner/ākonga gains sound numeracy skills.
3. Meaningfully incorporate te reo Māori and tikanga Māori into every daylife of our school.
4. Reduce barriers to education for all, including for Māori and Pacific learners/ākonga, disabled learners/ākonga and those with learning support needs.
5. To promote the wellbeing of all learners/ākonga and staff across our school/kura.

Principal Awards

Congratulations to the following children who received principal awards at last week’s assembly.

KERI Awards

Well done to the following children who received Caught by KERI awards at this week’s assembly. 

Assembly Presenters

Congratulations to our assembly presenters.

Enviroschools Reflection 2023

Silverdale School is an enviroschool. What is an enviroschool, it is an environmental action based programme where young people are empowered to design and lead sustainability projects in their schools, neighbourhoods and country.

Below is our enviroschool reflection for 2023. This reflection was written by the children and Pip Holland.

Sustainable communities

We do a lot towards sustainable communities at Silverdale School, but we think the 5 areas we do this best in are:

• Country Show Day – Country Show Day happens every year around the 28th of October. It’s a school fundraiser that earns money to help us improve our school. We couldn’t do this day without the amazing support of our community, with local stall holders, food trucks, volunteers and our awesome PTA! It’s also a day when our community comes together and we work as a team.
• Parent helpers – it’s not just at Country Show Day that we have parent helpers. They help out our school so much that they help us out on school trips, at Garden to Table, for working bees, interschools competitions and even camp! They must really love us!
• Working with local experts – we have so many amazing experts in our community. This year we have worked with The Whitebait Connection, Forest and Bird, Restore Hibiscus Bays, Trees for Survival, Million Trees Programme, The Local Council, Whaea Lee-Ann, The Pacifica Dance Group and the police among others. How lucky are we!
• Buddy Classes – As well as connecting with people and groups from our community, we also like to build relationships in our school. One way we do this is with buddy classes. Our senior classes spend time reading, playing games, doing experiments and many other fun activities with our junior classes. All the kids love it, it’s like tuakana teina, where we learn from each other.
• Kindergarten – as well as building friendships in our own school, we are also starting to create a big buddy like thing with Silverdale Kindergarten. Mātua Mark goes over to the kindy every week to sing waiata with the kids there, which they love! Team Te Ōhanga have also started to work with the kindy teachers and next year we are going to work with the kindy kids to help restore our bush! 

Even though we are already doing so much, there is still more we can do. We think that our next steps should be to work more with Orewa College, put on drama shows for our community and hopefully one day be able to create a community recipe book. Watch this space!

Te ao Māori

You have already seen some of the tūmeke mahi that we do at Silverdale School for te ao Māori, but here’s our top 5:

• Hine toa & mau rakau – some of the children at Silverdale School do hine toa and mau rakau. The boys learn taiaha and are learning the basic āhai or movements and to supply these to a wero/challenge rather than actually sparing or fighting and are enhancing their mana. As well as 3 of our teachers helping us to learn this, we also have a local tohunga, Whaea Leeanne come in to teach us.
• Te Reo lessons – each week we get to learn Te Reo in class. The Te Ao Māori team create super slides to help us learn which can include waiata, Māori games, learning about place names, quizzes, tikanga and of course the language. 
• Matariki – we love Matariki at Silverdale School! For a whole week we get to celebrate and learn about Matariki. We get to learn about the different stories behind it, play games, learn waiata, cook kai and design, make and fly our own kites!
• Rongoā garden – last term and this term we researched, designed and built, with the help of Bunnings, a rongoā garden. This is a garden that we will grow and use Māori medicinal plants. We have finished building it, and are now working with some local experts to get some plants to put in it. 

Our next steps we hope to do will be going on more marae trips, involving more whanau for our Matariki celebrations and learning and playing more Maori games at school.

Empowered learners

Silverdale School already makes us feel pretty empowered, but are 5 best reasons for this are:

• Assembly hosts – it’s not the teachers that run our assemblies, it’s the kids! Every assembly 2 kids host the whole assembly and get to say their pepeha. We also have a group of kapahaka stars that go on stage to help the rest of the school do the actions for our waiata.
• Trapping group – every week a group of super brave kids go out and set traps to try and catch the rats and possums that are so bad for our environment. They set tracking tunnels as well to see what kind of animals are hanging out in our school bush. The birds, lizards, insects and plants must be so grateful!
• Travel Wise – Mrs Franklin works with some of our senior kids to help keep our kids safe when they’re crossing the road at the start and end of school, they encourage us to get to school without using a car and set up a walking school bus. Our recent no car day was a huge success!
• Enviro Group – and of course…us! We get to decide what we want to work on in our group and we get to get our hands dirty making gardens, getting rid of invasive weeds, planting, monitoring our stream, doing rubbish clean ups and so much more. 

We think our next steps are sharing our work more with the community, doing enviro workshops for other students and encouraging others to pick up rubbish they find.

Respect for Diversity of People and Cultures

Below are our 5 most important things that we have been doing associated with our guiding principle: respect for diversity of people and cultures. 

• SALT – SALT is a local organisation that helps people who can find school a bit tricky by being a bit like a big buddy and coming into school to hang out with them for a bit. This really helps those kids have a bit of time to just be themselves and helps them to be more confident with who they are.
• School Counsellor  –  someone else who can help kids who are finding things hard is our school counsellor. She works with those who need it to work through their problems and help make school and life a little less scary. 
• Sign language – Mrs Dixon is amazing at sign language, and she is helping the school to learn it as well. We now do our national anthem in sign language as well as singing it. Our teachers also get to learn one new piece of sign language each week which they can then teach to us.
• Respecting cultural boundaries – we have so many different cultures at our school, which means different ways of thinking about things sometimes, and that’s ok. Examples of this are things like being able to fast for Ramadan without having to worry about doing sports, wearing your cultural jewellery or item of clothing, speaking your own language and celebrating different cultural events. What is really good about it is that we all get to learn about different cultures.

Our next steps we hope to do are having more cultural activities, inviting experts from the community to do cultural workshops and having a shared morning tea where to bring food from your own culture.

Learning for sustainability

The best things we have done across the school for learning for sustainability are:

• Garden to Table – GTT is where different classes come to the kitchen to cook 3 different things using ingredients that we have grown in the garden. We also get to learn about how to grow and take care of plants, make compost and look after worm farms.
• Worm farms – each class or pod has a special bin to collect food scraps for the worms. We learn about which foods are ok for worms and which aren’t. The pod has monitors who empty the bins into another bin, which then gets put into the worm farms. We then use the compost and worm tea from the worm farms to help grow our veggies and fruit trees.
• Tree planting – we work with Trees for Survival, where we get given lots of tiny native seedlings which we look after and help them grow. We then take these and plant them in people’s gardens from nearby communities. We also help the council to plant trees along Metro Park, which is just next door to us so we can watch them grow!
• Whitebait Connection – we worked with the Whitebait Connection at the start of the year. We learnt how to measure our stream to see how healthy it was, hunt for macroinvertebrates and inanga. We even found out that we have an inanga spawning ground right next to school! After working with them our action plan was to help restore the plants around our stream to help keep the banks stable and bring in more shade and habitats for our stream.

Our next steps we would like to do would be putting solar panels on the school roof to help use more renewable energy, making a small water collection system by the new outdoor classroom area to learn about water conservation and encourage our students to use more renewable materials to put their school lunches in.

Great news! Noel Leeming and Warehouse Stationery’s Friends and Family event is back and will run from the 30 October – 12 November.
This is a great opportunity to take advantage of some amazing deals as well as passing them onto your family, friends, and wider community.
Not only that, customers also get the opportunity to support their choice of three important charities: KidsCan, Starship, and I am Hope. With your help, 2.5% of total sales will be dedicated to these three great charities.

How to redeem the Friends & Family offer?  In-store or Online

• Head to your local Noel Leeming or Warehouse Stationery store and show the FLYER at the checkout, and let the salesperson know which charity you would like to support. You can print the flyer or show the flyer on your smartphone.
• On the flyer, you’ll find unique online voucher codes. Simply choose which charity you want to support and add the code at checkout to redeem this offer.  

ATHLETICS DAY 2023

On Thursday 2 November, 376 students converged on the athletic grounds at Metro Park. With weeks of practice at school, it was time to compete and display what we’d all been learning. This year, our Year 4 students joined the Year 5 and 6 students so they could get a feel of what is to come for next year.  

Every child on the day showed courage and determination to do their very best while cheering on classmates to achieve their best. Loads of smiles and some very tired little people by the end of a big day.

Results from the day and competitors for the Year 5 and 6 Inter School event will be published next week.

PTA Cookie Dough Fundraiser 

Our super yummy Cookie Dough fundraiser has launched and we need you to sign up and help us fundraise. It is super easy to take part as it is all done online – no cash and no paper order forms! 

All your sales will be tracked online and at the end you will receive a report showing who get’s what.

Orders close Sunday 19 November with cookies being delivered to school on Thursday 7 December.

School Uniform Co

From Monday 6 November to Friday 10 November, School Uniform Co will be closed during this period.

Available to answer any emails and calls if needed but there will be a delay with any orders over this period.

Thank you to our Newsletter Sponsors

Community Notices

Nanogirl (Dr Michelle Dickinson MNZM) is performing her world-renowned
live science theatre show on December 2nd at the Civic Theatre. Filled
with incredible live science, explosive engineering and lots of laughs, the
show is a fantastic way for the whole family to see science brought to life!
For more information and tickets, head to www.nanogirllive.co.nz