Principal's Page

Kia Ora Friends 

As teachers, parents and principals we are often caught in a paradox. We dearly want to keep our children safe and ensure their success. However we are also often worried that they will get hurt and that they will fail - so we do everything we can to prevent that from happening. 

The paradox is those very efforts to manage our fears for our children have reduced our children’s safety and lowered their odds of success.

Thanks to the exceptional work and research of our own Annette Pram, so ably supported by Dana Taylor and all our junior school teachers, we know the importance of structured play and a structured approach to play-based learning. Later in this newsletter, an article explains why children need risk, fear, and excitement in play. I think it is worth a read.

Community Survey:

As you can easily tell, I am immensely proud of our school. We have worked hard to continuously improve our school - and we have come a long way in the last ten years. There is always room for improvement, and we want your help identifying what will improve our school for our children and you.

Our community survey has been running for a couple of weeks now, and we offer our sincere thanks to everyone who has responded.

We have noticed some patterns in the responses. Quite a number are from families new to our school. There are some common themes too.  Some of the ideas shared are ones we have looked at in the past. Some can seem to be good ideas but from experience, we know they are not the best solutions for our school and our approach to educating and caring for our children. We will share those reasons so you understand why we can't follow through on all the suggestions.

Homework:

This is a topic that regularly comes up. Many parents will well remember having homework. Many parents will also remember how frustrating that homework could be. I well remember having copious amounts of maths problems to solve. I remember not being able to remember how to solve the problems and my parents not being able to help me. I remember how frustrating that was and I remember how I went from loving maths - times tables and basic facts and doing stuff in my head - to not liking maths at all.

The homework I loved was learning my times tables and basic facts. I loved challenging myself to get faster and faster and go past my 12 times tables, learning squares to 20 squared. I loved reading and did not see that as homework at all.

Many parents with older children will remember homework battles—battles to get them to sit down, to focus, and to complete homework that they don't want to do or don't want to do, and knowing that we can't be of much help.

As a result, some of us start to ask ourselves if this enforced homework is doing any good or serving any purpose. Thankfully there is research out there to answer those questions and help us find a better way forward.

In this newsletter, I'll share some of the research and thinking around homework, home learning, and learning through practical family activities.

As always - if you have questions or concerns about anything school-related - email me at macash@mac.com, and I will get back to you asap.

My very best regards to you all,

Ash Maindonald

Principal.