Learning Conversations

Booking forms for these went home on Wednesday...and they will be held on the Monday 11th to Wednesday 13th April. Remember, these will be different this term, with teachers giving each whānau a call to discuss their child/ren’s learning. There are a range of times available, including some later times into the evening (as we normally would).

In that last week we will print off your child's HERO graph and progress dials so that you have access to those while on the phone to us.

HERO - Learning Post Commenting

We’ve opened up another feature in HERO, allowing you to comment on posts about your child. In a normal term you would get a couple of posts written up about the learning your child is engaged in. These could cover a wide range of topics, but all relate to something recent your child has done. They may contain some photos to show the learning in action, but they will all describe for you the learning happening.

With commenting now turned on for these posts, you can respond for your child. You might sit down with them and discuss what they have learned, and write a comment sharing back what they liked best…or what you are proud of…or a next step you could see…or just a comment to say how awesome they are. You might ask them to write a comment back to the teacher…your child might ask how they could improve…or they might ask a question about what they learned…or they might say what they were most proud of when doing the learning.

This feature allows the learning posts to become a ‘2-way’ conversation, and we look forward to seeing your comments come in.

COVID Stuff

A big thank you once again for your support during this phase of the pandemic, and a further thank you for all the kind words you’ve given us. This week is very different from last…attendance is up, cases are down and we have pretty much a full complement of staff. I said this last week…but worth saying again…I’m proud that we managed to keep learning happening at school across last week, even with some staff away. All kids were taught, got to engage in powerful play/maker learning and got to hang out with their friends.

I don’t want to jinx things…but perhaps we are now seeing our peak, and plateau. A couple of graphs below…the flash one (thanks to John Hart) shows the daily case count for the Wairarapa…with peak cases being last week and a slow drop off happening. Under that is a graph I’ve been using at school to track our situation…and it mirrors this very closely. The key lines are probably the ‘active cases’ and the ‘numbers isolating’. Both of these peaked last week and have been trending down since.

Teacher Only Day - Thursday 14th April

Reminder…we are having a Teacher Only Day on Thursday 14th April. This was to be a townwide teacher only day, but due to COVID we aren’t coming together across all the schools. DPS is still going to have the day to do some powerful learning together. Many thanks for your support.

This makes the last day of term Wednesday 13th April (as Friday is Good Friday).