Dear Parents / Caregivers,
Just a couple of updates / omissions from the newsletter last week;
To clarify the comments I made recently in the newsletter about how we manage behaviour concerns. St Martins is an inclusive school and all of our students are valued members of our school whānau. We work hard to help all of our students to be successful in their learning and relationships. Most importantly, we value our partnerships with parents / whānau. We can’t do our jobs without your support.
The safety and wellbeing of students and staff is very important to us. We work hard to ensure that our students experience a calm and settled environment for learning. All of the time, we work to support positive behaviour, and prevent challenging behaviour. Part of this is ensuring that we have good school-wide systems in place that benefit everybody, as well as individual plans for students who need these. RTLB and MOE specialists support us with that planning.
Generally, where there is an incident of challenging behaviour we do the following:
- Use planned strategies to calm the situation.
- Give clear information about the behaviour that should stop, and what the child should do instead.
- Make sure that other children are safe, and are able to continue with their work.
However, if your child has an individual plan that includes making contact with you during an incident of challenging behaviour, then we will phone you to help us manage the situation.
STAFFING
We would like to congratulate Dani Boxall on her recent appointment to take a classroom position teaching Y7/8s at Linwood College. Dani has been teaching Drama, Dance and Music during classroom release time (two days for each class per term) as well as some groups. We know that Dani will enjoy being back in the classroom and wish her all the best. Thanks for all you have done at St Martins School.
We will continue the performing arts aspects Dani was leading
Extension Performing Arts Company (Amy)
Show Choir (Katelyn and Lavinia)
At this stage we do not have a date for the film club so we will wait for some more information
Groups taken by other staff will also continue
Y5 / 6 Hip Hop
Y7 / 8 Hip Hop
Y1 – 4 music sessions
Extension Percussion group
Recorder Group
Itinerant music lessons
We are also considering a ukulele group and sending a team of 4 to an improv competition
SCHOOL DISCO
Please save the date of Friday 28th August. The Student Council with the wonderful support of the S’Mart Community will be holding the school disco. The Student Council will let us know the theme soon. As usual we would appreciate the support of parents on the night. Please watch out for the link we will send home soom to volunteer some time.
TEACHER ONLY DAY
We advertised a Teacher Only Day (ToD) on the calendar last week, however we didn’t put any detail in the newsletter about this. On Friday 4th September the school will be closed. This day will be used by the teaching staff to analyse the mid year data, to look at and develop further achievement targets for the remainder of the year.
We hope to see you at one of our assemblies on Friday focussing on Matariki. The NE – Y2 children will perform at the 1.30pm assembly, the Y3 / 4 children will perform at the 2.15pm assembly. The hall will have Matariki based artworks on display from each team, we will also be sharing some written pieces from each team.
Regards,
Andrew
