Newsletter Term 2 Week 2

NEWSLETTER

TERM 2 WEEK 2 2024

Kia ora koutou

Welcome to Term 2.

We have been a bit lucky with the weather – but those winter days are ahead. 

Winter sports began over the weekend and the day was perfect for it. It was great to see local facebook pages blow up with images of our tamariki getting involved. Sports is good for our tamariki on many different levels. The one thing that can sometimes deflect from the positive aspects of sports are spectators. Please remember we want to encourage and role model the expectations of school-aged team sports. We, the school will be contacted directly if a Bulls School supporter acts inappropriately on the sideline – so please be mindful of your words and actions in the heat of the moment. Stay positive and remember – they are kids, having fun and learning new skills not professionals being paid to do a job.

This term our staff are involved in lots of different professional development opportunities. We have teachers out learning more about Structured Literacy, we have all had Te Puna Reo Teaching Support, the amazing HAL (Sport Whanganui) providers are constantly working with staff to increase our skills with the practical side of teaching physical education. We are also involved in our main focus of learning for the year ‘Mana Potential’. Our team is constantly learning and striving to meet the needs of your children.

Libby Rayner, our HAL Community Connector, and her team have recently installed a “Play Station” at the Bulls Domain. This is a big steel box full of sports gear and equipment available for use at the Domain. It’s free to use and a great opportunity for whanau to play together. Check it out if you’re down there or feel free to donate items too!

There are many great initiatives happening in our community to support our tamariki after school and during the weekend. It is really important to remember that your tamariki are not safe just because they are from Bulls. Spaces like the domain, the river, and even the school grounds often have adults around and they don’t always have the best interest of our tamariki at heart. We have been hearing incidents of physical violence and threats happening in the community that have put our young people in dangerous or compromising positions. Please ensure your children are supervised and have a plan if something goes wrong or feels unsafe. Children should be supervised when playing at school after hours at all times.  

We have LOTS of sweatshirts in our lost property which might be very handy as the weather turns. We do our best to reunite named clothing too their owners.  However, so much of the lost property is not named clearly.  At the end of next week we plan to recycle them so please check your uniforms at home and come and take a look at what we have here. We received some great feedback from our last community survey about tagging the items and after 4 weeks – recycling them, which we like the idea of but haven’t actioned yet. If you have a brilliant ‘lost property’ idea please let us know it! The less admin involved the better.

Today is a bit of a crazy (but fabulously fun) day.  We were notified last week that What Now Gunge Crew would be onsite.  There were many terms and conditions for us to agree to – which we happily did because this has been an amazing experience for our tamariki.  As soon as we know a date for the TV Show we will let you know! And when we get permission to we will share some sneak peaks to our school social media.  

Kia pai te rā, have a great day, Kim Gordon – Tumuaki o te Bulls Kura.  

Tokomanawa went to visit the Bulls Museum as part of their learning around ANZAC day. What a fantastic resource we have right on our back doorstep, we learnt so much information about our community and how things were back in the olden days. 

SUBSCRIBE TO APP GROUPS 

Di has refreshed this and named each group with 2024 so you know it’s relevant and up to date. You will all need to join the groups specific to your tamariki.

This has important notices for either the whole school or specific groups eg: Bus Students, Sports, Cultural, Hubs, etc that you can join according to what your child’s involved in.

Many notices or reminders go out via the APP so it is an important tool for parents to be aware of what is due eg: permission slips and dates for events offsite, transport required etc. This is also an efficient way to provide absence notices.

In many cases, parental permission may be given via the app as well.

UNIFORM EXPECTATIONS

Our uniform and the way we wear it is connected to our PRIDE values. Taking PRIDE in our kura and our appearance as well as acknowledging the necessity to be sunsafe sits behind our decision to introduce a Bulls School Bucket Hat as a part of our regulation uniform. This has been an expectation since the beginning of 2023. Hats are available online or in-store for $20 and they come in 2 different sizes. Once you have yours PLEASE clearly name/label it. Matching 175 potae to 175 heads is much simpler when they are clearly named.