Newsletter Friday 8 May 2020

He mihi mahana ki a koutou katoa - warm greetings to all.

Hopefully by now you have watched both the invitation video and the video showing the ways the Ridgway staff showed the 4 Rs during the lockdown. We would love all our families to participate in sharing how they showed the 4 Rs, or how they saw others showing the 4 Rs both locally and internationally. If you can keep it short (unlike Harriette and I) then that would be great. We will pull all the clips together and share them at a 'premier event' once we are back at school. The purpose of this is to bring everyone back together and reflect and celebrate as a school community. As the invitation said, there are many ways you can do this. It could be a skit, a painting, a cartoon or animation, a story...the possibilities are endless! Older children may want to work on this themselves or online with friends, siblings can work together, whole families can participate. You can email your clips and any questions to me at sarah@ridgway.school.nz. We can't wait to see what our community will come up with!

Returning to school under Level 2

At this stage it looks likely that we will be returning to school on Monday May 18th. We will be keeping up the hygiene practices that we started before we went into lockdown. This means frequent handwashing, cleaning of surfaces and practising coughing and sneezing etiquette. It also means that children must be kept home when they aren't 100%. We will be able to confirm the return date for school once the government makes their announcement this coming Monday.

We will have 7 weeks of school until the end of Term 2. Our focus for the rest of the term is the well-being of our children. We are going to have a strong PE and Arts programme and through these we will acknowledge their experiences, create fun experiences and transition them back to school. As we are prioritising wellbeing, we are going to minimise assessment and therefore there won't be any formal reporting during Term 2. You can read more here to find out about the sort of activities we will be doing.

Ngā mihi

Sarah Taylor

Deputy Principal

Ridgway School