Monday 8th May, 2023
All smiles at Orana Park.
Kia ora koutou,
A big thank you to Georgie and Kelly for taking our students on camp last week. Thanks to our parent helpers - Kurt, Patrick and Rachel. It looked like it was a lot of fun!
Hon Jan Tinetti, our Minister of Education, has contacted every school, after the Government's announcement to support schools attendance and engagement. She has said ‘School’s attendance and engagement has declined over the past decade, and COVID-19 has made things worse. This means our children and young people are missing out on learning, friendships and connections with their classmates and kaiako.’
The Ministry of Education has set student attendance targets for regular attendance and chronic and moderate absence. ERO will monitor each school’s progress towards achieving these goals. We have met with ERO to look at our data. The target for 2024 is to have 70% of our students attending 90% or more of the time, then in 2025 the target moves to 75%. In term one, we only had 45% of our students attending for 90% or more.
This week we will be sending out attendance letters to each family who had lower than 90% attendance in term one. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to discuss this further.
Ngā mihi
Penny Vincent
Tumuaki/Acting Principal
principal@omihi.school.nz
School Notices
Update on our Strategic Initiative:
Strengthen teacher capability in Structured Literacy and embed whole school approach
This year we are focusing on consolidating and extending our knowledge and practise in structured literacy at Omihi School. Our biggest area of focus this year is writing. We continue to build our children's understanding of a good sentence being the building block of our writing.
For our older children they are focused on clear structures of a paragraph and how to use their sentence skills effectively to write quality over quantity. For our younger children, they are focused on different sentence types and the correct punctuation and spelling knowledge to ensure the sentences they write are not only varied, but accurate as well.
An important lesson that we are focused on this year is that the planning and revising phases are the most important aspects of our writing, not just the actual act of doing the writing. As always, we encourage you to come and observe and ask questions about what we do and why we do it.
Raffle tickets
A reminder to please send the raffle ticket money and tickets back to school asap. The winners will be drawn at the BOT meeting next Monday.
Production
A reminder for children to please bring their scripts every day.
Cross Country
Please ensure your child has running shoes each day as we will be practising for the Small School’s cross country. This will be on Tuesday 6th June.
Preschooler morning
We welcome our preschoolers to join us on Wednesday 17th May from 9.00am - 10.30am. Please bring along a drink bottle and a snack for your child for morning tea.
ICAS Assessments
There is an option for your child to complete ICAS assessments in August this year. These are completely optional. Some parents like them for their child to practise tests for high school, and some like to get the results to use for applications for high school. The options of assessments are here, and here are the costs. If you would like to enter your child in any of these, please email Bryleigh by the 19th May.
Community Notices
2023 General Election
Our Kahiwi building is going to be a polling station this election day, Saturday 14 October 2023. The Electoral Commission is currently taking registrations of interest from people who are interested in working at polling stations on the day, and are keen for the staff to be members of the local community. If you are interested, please go to work.elections.nz for more information.
