Kia ora koutou,

Peter Pan production rehearsal in full swing!

On Tuesday and Wednesday last week Georgie and I were lucky enough to attend the CPPA leadership conference. Dr Natalie Flynn and Nigel Latta were keynote speakers for the day. We discussed the increasing prevalence of social and mental challenges, the impact of these and strategies we can use to influence positive change.

Key takeaways for us would be teaching our children the importance of hope and looking for beauty in small moments. We learnt about simple things we can do to manage stress and develop resilience. We also listened to Tina Lomax speak about trauma informed teaching, which was a very impactful experience.

Ngā mihi
Penny Vincent
Acting Principal/Tumuaki

School Notices

Production
Tickets are still available to purchase. Please email Bryleigh at office@omihi.school.nz or come into the office to purchase. Tickets are $12.50. For children under 12 they are $5 and under 5’s are free. (The ticket price is just to cover the cost of hiring lighting and sound).

On the day of the production, we have two performances. One matinee at 11am and one afternoon show at 5pm. You can purchase tickets to either show, or both if you wish. For the evening performance, children need to be at the hall between 4:15-4:30pm. If you would like to take your child home between the matinee and evening show, you are welcome to. Between 3:00-4:15pm after school on Wednesday teachers will not be available to supervise children. 

Playhouse Theatre
We are looking forward to welcoming the Playhouse Theatre back to Omihi on Thursday this week to perform ‘Treasure Island’ for our students.

Cross Country
Congratulations to Hugo, Michael, Taylor, Kaisa and Jack who qualified for Canterbury Cross Country.

Lunchonline
This week it is Sushi. Head to this link if you would like to place an order.

Wellbeing Week/Pyjama Day

In the last week of term we are having a wellbeing week at school. This is a week designed to emphasize the importance of looking after ourselves and fostering meaningful connections with one another within school. We encourage the children to experience the joy that comes from making a positive impact on other peoples lives, and how important it is to be grateful for what we have. We are so lucky to have such an amazing environment that we can foster this in. Some of the activities we will be doing are looking at how we can build resilience, random acts of kindness and so on. We are ending the week with a pyjama themed mufti day. We are raising money through a gold coin donation to go towards “The Kindness Collective”, an organisation on a mission to provide warm winter pyjamas to kids all over Aotearoa!  

Community Notices

Yoga at the Omihi Community Hall

Please note yoga with Tristin is now held on Tuesdays, 8.00-9.00am at the Omihi Community Hall (previously Fridays).

Jessica and Kaisa

Kia ora koutou

We welcome Jessica into Tūpari, and her family into our Omihi whānau.

It was lovely to have Greta Valley School join us last week to have a game of touch. We enjoy a bit of steady competition, and also the opportunity to collaborate with our neighbours. We are looking forward to going to Greta to try out their new soccer nets!

We hope to see you at our cross country this week (now on Thursday). We are so proud of how our tamariki have been training and persevering with their running.

Ngā mihi
Penny Vincent
Acting Principal/Tumuaki

School Notices

Year 1-8 Cross Country - Postponed until Thursday 8th June
Our whole school participates in the Small School Cross Country with Broomfield and Waipara School. Broomfield School organise this and this year there is a new location - where Onepunga meets Holleth Hills Road (about 2.5 km from Broomfield School). There will be lots of signage. No Dogs are permitted to be on this property. Year 4-8 children that qualify will then go onto the Kowai Cross Country on the 13th June at the same place. All info, including maps is here.

We ask that you pick your child up from school by 11.30am on the 8th to go to the cross country. Further times are below. We also need one parent to be a marshal. Please let Penny know if you can help. You could share it with another parent to ensure you see your child race.

12.15 pm - Marshal Briefing 
12.20 pm - Students & Parent Briefing
12.30 pm - Races start (Year 1 is the first race, through to the Year 8’s)

Senior Assembly
We welcome our community to our senior assembly on Friday 9th June at 2pm.

Reports
You will be receiving a reading and writing comment this week via Hero. Please check in with your class teacher if you aren’t able to access Hero.

Kia ora koutou

The last few weeks have seen such a great vibe at school. It is hard to believe that this week marks the half-way mark through the term! We are really starting to get our teeth stuck into our production practices now. We will be spending a lot of our afternoons over at the hall beginning to block out scenes.

Tickets will be on sale soon, so please keep an eye out for this. There will be limited numbers. It has been really special to watch each and every child shine in some aspect of the production. We cannot wait to share it with you!

Ngā mihi
Penny Vincent
Acting Principal/Tumuaki

School Notices

Update on our Strategic Initiative from Georgie: (Implement a Culturally Responsive Programme)
Culturally responsive teachers are people who are potential-focused and view diversity as an advantage. Here at Omihi we love having our whānau come in and share their knowledge with our students and community. A resource that we have started to implement to further develop our cultural responsiveness is Niho Taniwha. This is a document written by Melanie Riwai-Couch, who has worked for over two decades in the education sector as a teacher and tumuaki. We are using this resource, alongside The Hikairo Schema, to provide us with an in-depth understanding of effective partnerships under Te Tiriti o Waitangi, issues of sovereignty for iwi, and how to help whānau find and use their voices in education. We look forward to sharing more with you as we go on this journey together.

Omihi School Raffle
Congratulations to our prize winners of our Omihi School raffle! You helped us raise nearly $3000 for our kura.

Please pick up your prize from our office, or email Bryleigh to get it posted to you where possible - office@omihi.school.nz.

Year 0-4 Assembly
We welcome all of our families to our junior assembly on Friday 26th May at 2pm.

Touch Game
We have a touch game against Greta Valley school on Wednesday 31st May at Omihi. It runs from 11am-12pm, and we invite parents to come along and watch. There will be a Year 4-8 game and a Year 1-3 game. We are still looking for refs for each game. Please let Penny know if you can help.

Year 1-8 Cross Country - Tuesday 6th June, Postponement: Thursday 8th June
Our whole school participates in the Small School Cross Country with Broomfield and Waipara School. Broomfield School organise this and this year there is a new location - where Onepunga meets Holleth Hills Road (about 2.5 km from Broomfield School). There will be lots of signage. No Dogs are permitted to be on this property. Year 4-8 children that qualify will then go onto the Kowai Cross Country on the 13th June at the same place. All info, including maps is here. Broomfield will be having a walk through of the location on Friday 2nd June if anybody would like to take their child for that. Please meet at the location at 10.30am.

We ask that you pick your child up from school by 11.30am on the 6th to go to the cross country. Further times are below. We also need one parent to be a marshal. Please let Penny know if you can help. You could share it with another parent to ensure you see your child race.

12.15 pm - Marshal Briefing 
12.20 pm - Students & Parent Briefing
12.30 pm - Races start (Year 1 is the first race, through to the Year 8’s)

King’s birthday weekend
A reminder it is a public holiday on Monday 5th June, so school will be closed.

Community Notices

We’ve got a couple of new additions to our library, Big Wooly Mammoth and Old T-Rex, written and self-published by retired teacher Geoff Gudsell from Nelson. These are great books with beautiful illustrations, and are particularly loved by children aged 3-10.

If you are interested in buying a copy of each of these books for the little ones in your life, please email geoff@arapiki.nz. He has a special offer of $52.00 for both books delivered ($54.00 to rural addresses).

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.