Friday 16 February

He mihi mahana ki a koutou katoa
Bonjour à toutes nos familles

Restorative Practice at school

We are in our second year of Restorative Practice at school, where we work with the Ministry of Education to learn all about Restorative Practice and how to use it. Restorative Practice focuses on building and maintaining positive and respectful relationships across the school, giving us best practice tools and techniques to maintain and restore relationships if things go wrong.  Instead of leaping to blame and then punishment, we:

• Tell the story (what has happened)

• Explore the harm (who has been affected and what was it like for them?)

• Repair the harm (what needs to happen to put it right?)

• Reach an agreement (what do you need to start doing, stop doing? If this happens again what could you do differently?)

One of the benefits of this is that children learn how to resolve conflict themselves and with each other, rather than just getting the hump. Our Peer Mediators follow a restorative practice model during mediation in the playground. 

If you’re interested to know more, you can watch this  video that gives you some of the background.  

Multicultural Day

Here are a few photos from today’s multicultural day, where we celebrated our cultures and family traditions! 

Bringing back the bants - coffee mornings at VBC

If you’re wanting an informal chat, have some questions (or just don’t have anything better to do) you are welcome to come to VBC on Friday mornings to have a coffee and a chat with Sarah and/or Julie. We will head down after road patrol so will be there around 9ish. 

Upcoming Events

• All of March is Movin’ March

• 21 March School Athletics Day

• 28 March Teacher Only Day

• 29 March - 2 April - Easter Break (note that Tuesday 2nd April is part of the Easter holiday)

• 3 - 5 April Year 5 & 6 Camp, Forest Lakes

• 12 April last day of Term 1

• 29 April first day of Term 2

• 8 - 9 May Noho Marae (Year 4 - 6, optional for Year 7 & 8)