Kia ora e ta whānau,

We hope you are all keeping well, keeping safe, keeping sane and getting vaccinated.

As you will be aware, the Government has made the decision to keep schools closed for the start of Term 4. Like many of you, the staff are hopeful we can return to school very soon and very disappointed that we are not back in Level 2 school for the term.

At Alert Level 3 the school will open on Monday 18 October for only the small number of children who need to attend because they have no appropriate carer available at home. If you have to go to work and have no appropriate carer available at home for your child, please complete this form so we organise the school for Alert Level 3 Bubble School.

All our usual safety precautions for Alert Level 3 will be in place which include following all the recommendations from the public health experts. This means we will regularly clean and disinfect high-touch surfaces, encourage everyone to frequently wash their hands and cover their coughs and sneezes, and keep everyone physically distanced from others as much as possible (one metre inside and two metres outside). We will also keep school bubbles to no more than 10 students. These bubbles will not mix with other bubbles.

Our contact tracing systems will be in place, which includes our attendance register and visitor register, and we will be limiting staff onsite with the majority of our team working from home.

Our staff on-site will have been tested for COVID-19 before they get back to work and we are moving toward having 100% of our staff vaccinated – so we are all playing our part in keeping our community safe. It is also now legally required that we hold a COVID-19 vaccination register for all eligible students over 12 years old and staff.

If we were to have a case of COVID-19 in our school, public health authorities will want to know if we are a school with a high vaccination rate. This information will then be used as part of the local health authority’s risk assessment. The more highly vaccinated we are (staff and eligible students over 12 years old), the less likely it will be that we will have to close down for a long period of time, or we might not need to close at all. We will therefore need to know if your child has had their first or second vaccine dose or is exempted from being vaccinated. This information will be held by us in accordance with the Privacy Act and will only be shared with public health authorities.

We are therefore getting our data collection system in place and will get in touch with you again very soon.

We will continue to support all children who remain learning from home, through our distance learning programme. At the end of last term we noticed a drop-off in the engagement of our online learning. Therefore, this week the teachers have been reviewing their online learning and planning a more engaging programme. More information about our online programme will be available on Friday. Should your child not be able to connect with the online programme, please complete this Hard Pack of Learning Materials Request Form.

While we know how difficult it is trying to work from home as well as support your child’s learning, please keep your child at home if there is an appropriate carer available. For those of you with no other option, we look forward to seeing your child at school next week.

We are proud of how our community has responded to this outbreak, but the mahi isn’t yet done. Please continue to follow all the alert level requirements including staying at home, getting tested for COVID-19 if you are feeling unwell, and for your own sake and for the health of your whānau, please get vaccinated. I’ve included some information about vaccinations and this is on the Covid-19 page of our website to support decision making.

These are the very best things we can do to keep our community as safe as possible and get everyone back to school.

Camp

I know many parents in Years 5-8 will be wondering if camp is going ahead. In these uncertain times it is sadly, very unlikely camp will be going ahead. A final decision will be made on Monday after the post cabinet media briefing at 4:00 p.m. However, in order for us to be comfortable for camp to go ahead, Auckland will need to be in Alert Level 2 with school starting no later than 1 November to allow teachers to prepare students for camp in the week before camp.

As a staff, we feel that this is highly unlikely and have made the decision to let parents know of our thinking in case those parents who kindly volunteered to assist on camp can cancel any annual leave that they have booked.

For clarity, it is very unlikely camp will go ahead with a final decision being made after the post cabinet media briefing at 4:00 p.m. on Monday.

Term 4 Events

As we know what is happening with school for the term, we will advise what this means for events through the term.

Pātaka / Community Pantry

A reminder that there are a few groceries in the pātaka at the school entrance. It is located by the doors to the front office to keep it out of the weather. Please help yourself if you require any of the items. Naturally, we are grateful to any parents who would like to donate some pantry items - please place these directly in the pātaka. Please also view the Agencies you can contact for assistance article below.

Opening Links via Hero App

Finally, if you are using the app to read this update and are unable to open any of the links, please check your email inbox to see if you have received this update via email. The links may work better for you if you open them in your email. Alternatively, this update is posted to our website on the Covid-19 Tab.

Ngā mihi,

Kevin and the team at Te Hihi

Kia ora e te whānau,

I hope the students are enjoying a break from online learning. I am sending out a brief update to say that we are yet to hear what the roadmap out of Covid Alert Level 3 means for school. The Ministry of Education has advised schools that this information will come out next week. As soon as we receive it, I will post another update.

The key to having school and life back is for everyone who is eligible for a vaccine to get vaccinated.

Ag Day Videos

It has been awesome to see so many videos posted in the dropbox - well done. We have heard a few people are having problems uploading them. As an alternative, either email them to kevinb@tehihi.school.nz or put them on a USB memory stick and drop them to Te Hihi Autocourt.

Ngā mihi,

Kevin

Kia ora koutou,

Hopefully you have enjoyed a little more freedom in Alert Level 3 and have been able to enjoy that barista brewed coffee or some takeaways. Hopefully, you've also all made the most of the first day of Daylight Savings.

Last week of Term

This week is our last week of the term and on Friday we farewell Xanthe Viljoen and Jessica Allen. We wish them all the best for the next chapter in their careers and thank them for their amazing service to Te Hihi. This Friday all classes will be having a Google Meet to wrap up the term.

Once again, we want to thank all of you for doing the best you can to support your child with their learning. We know that many of them have had enough and this next week is possibly going to be the hardest. All around Auckland student engagemnent in online learning has been dropping. When the students are at school they interact with their peers while they are working, they move around to refocus themselves (sometimes a bit too often), and there is ample time for them to complete the tasks. Interacting with their peers sparks their thinking which helps motivate and focus them. They also chat about non-task related happenings just as we do in our work places. This is all normal learning behaviour that they are missing when learning from home so it is understandable their engagement is waning. If you are noticing this with your own children, allow them a break. The biggest impact on learning is when curiosity is sparked and that is often through conversations and questions. Go for a walk, throw or kick a ball and draw their attention to what is happening around them at the same time. You'll be surprised in what they pick up.

It is our wish as staff that Auckland drops down in levels in the holidays and we can return to school for Term 4. Like the students, we are really keen to get back into school, to welcome the students back into school and spend our days with them again.

Ag Day Reminder

Those students who have an animal and want to enter the Ag Day video competition, videos for leading, calling, and trick need to be shot over next weekend and uploaded into the dropbox folder by Monday 4 October. The creatve videos also need to be uploaded by Monday.

Camp

A reminder to parents of students in Te Kanawa and Rutherford, we are continuing to plan for camp to go ahead at Camp Bentzon, Kawau Island. Please continue to fill out the forms, especially the parent volunteer expression of interest if you are wishing to attend.

Staff Video

Finally, the staff have made a video for the students and this will be uploaded onto the school website tomorrow. A notification will come out with the link.

Enjoy your week and stay safe,

Kevin

Kia ora,

The quick move to Alert Level 4, high volumes of testing for COVID in the community, extensive wastewater testing, huge numbers of New Zealanders being vaccinated (more than three million people have now received their first dose) and an amazing response by Aucklanders to follow the rules at Alert Level 4 has given Government confidence that Auckland will move to Alert Level 3 at 11:59pm on Tuesday 21 September. Until then, we remain at Alert Level 4.

When we do move to Alert Level 3, you legally must stay within your household bubble unless for essential personal movement, including going to work and going to school.

All going well, we will be open on Wednesday for only the small number of children who need to attend. As you imagine, it will not be school as we know it under Alert Level 2 or 1. All our usual safety precautions for Alert Level 3 will be in place which include following all the recommendations from the public health experts.

This means we will regularly clean and disinfect high-touch surfaces, encourage everyone to frequently wash their hands and cover their coughs and sneezes, and keep everyone physically distanced from others as much as possible (one metre inside and two metres outside). We will also keep school bubbles to no more than 10 students. These bubbles will not mix with other bubbles.

Our contact tracing systems will be in place, which includes our attendance register and visitor register, and we will be limiting staff onsite with the majority of our team working from home.

You can also assist everyone’s safety by keeping your child at home if they are feeling unwell and please do contact your GP or Healthline, to seek advice about getting tested.

We will continue to support all children who remain learning from home, through our distance learning programme.

While we know how difficult it is trying to work from home as well as support your child’s learning, please keep your child at home if there is an appropriate carer available. For those of you with no other option, please complete this form and we will be in touch tomorrow.

Earlier today we reviewed our calendar for Term 4 in lighht of the lockdown we have navigated so well. Next week we will be sending you a list of event dates for Term 4 with the options for each event under Alert Levels 2 and 3. Should Auckland be placed back into Alert Level 4 at any stage during Term 4 the events during that time will be cancelled.

We should be proud of how we have responded to this outbreak, but the mahi isn’t yet done. As you have been doing, please continue to follow all the alert level requirements at Alert Level 4 and stay at home. It is the best tool we have to keep our whānau and community safe.

Ngā mihi,

Kevin

Kia ora e te whānau,

I hope you're all doing well and enjoying this lovely Saturday weather. It is definitely easier to cope with lockdown when the weather is fine. It will be nice coming out of lockdown knowing we've got on top of all those tidying up jobs around our properties.

Supporting local

As Ag day has changed to a virtual Ag Day, the canned goods received for the Ag Day raffle have been donated to Ngāti Tamaoho food bank. If you are in need of a food parcel, Ngāti Tamaoho are there to help, their number is 0800 120 908.

As a school we have set up a Pātaka/Community Pantry by the front doors of the school. If you have items you can donate, we invite you to place them in the pātaka or if you need any items, please do not hestitate to take some. There are already some cans of food and packets of weet-bix in there.

Attached to this notice is a list of places you can access if you are in need of support or you can access it and other support links through this link to our website

Within my own whānau we have been supporting each other as the lockdown takes its toll on morale. If you need any support, please reach out. The Ministry of Education is in continual contact with schools and are there to support schools supporting their community.

Level 3 at School

Should there be a change down the levels to Alert Level 3 next week, school will be available for those who need it. More information about this is on our school's website and you will need to complete this form before your child can start school in Level 3.

Online learning will come out as usual on Sunday afternoon.

Kia pai tō rā whakatā, have a great weekend!

Kia ora e te whānau,

Nau mai, haere mai ki te wiki o te reo Māori

Welcome to Maori language week. Last week I was introduced to a new app called Drops available from both Google Play and the App Store. This is a great app for learning some te reo Māori. It has both a free (which I use) and paid version and I highly recommend it. You will be surprised how using it for just a few minutes each day will dramatically increase your reo. On Whaea Deb's Learning From Home site she has also included lots of ways you can use te reo Māori at home.

Alert Level 3

We're not there yet but like many of you, I am hopeful Auckland will shift down to Alert Level 3 on Monday. When Auckland does move to Alert Level 3, you legally must stay within your household bubble unless for essential personal movement. As the Prime Minister noted, the Delta strain is different and under the revised Ministry of Health guidelines, schools are essentially closed at Alert Level 3 with the exception of those few children whose parents and carers must leave their home to work, and there is no appropriate alternative caregiver arrangements. Teachers will continue to deliver online learning and this will be the learning that the students who attend school will be completing.

If you need your child to attend school in Alert Level 3, please complete this form. If you have an appropriate caregiver available within your home, or are not required to leave your home to work, the school has the right to deny your request to send your child(ren) to school during Level 3.

We have posted on our website our Alert Level 3 plan here under the Covid-19 tab.

Information coming out this week

Year 5-8 Camp

This week we will be sending out information about our Year 5-8 camp on Kawau Island from November 8-12. We are very hopeful that this will go ahead and have been informed that even if we are at Alert Level 2 the camp can still go ahead. The all camp information will be posted on our website under the News & Events tab.

Ag Day

On Tuesday night a final decision will be made about Ag Day and a communication about this will come out on Wednesday.

Online Learning

Following this notification we will be posting out this week's learning. The online learning is also posted on the school's website under each learning space.

Colour Fun Run

Thank you to everyone who has supported this fundraising event. As soon as we can we will be holding this event but we will likely hold off until we are below Alert Level 2.

Wellbeing tips

Your children will continue to look to you for guidance and support. The Ministry of Education have developed three age-appropriate tip sheets to help you talk with your children and work through common challenges and behaviours that might have changed because of COVID-19.

Tips for parents – toddlers(external link)

Tips for parents – children(external link)

Tips for parents – young people(external link)

Manaaki Ora app

This free app provides tips on how to self-help, or support others who might be going through hard times or stress. It has simple and creative activities to build wellbeing and resilience. This includes helping whānau identify their feelings and when they feel overwhelmed, where to get support and tips on how to support others.

Download Manaaki Ora - App store(external link)

Download Manaaki Ora - Google Play store(external link)

Other wellbeing support

It's okay to seek help or talk to someone if you feel you're not coping.

There are helplines available that offer support, information and help:

Where to go for help - Unite against COVID-19(external link)

There are also free apps, toolkits and other digital resources to help you look after your mental wellbeing:

Free tools, resources and apps - Unite against COVID-19

Kia ora koutou,

Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there. We hope you have a great day.

It is very reassuring to see the number of new cases in the community dropping; it shows that the lockdown is working and won't it be a wonderful accomplishment for the country to once again eliminate it. The other pleasing statistic, of course, is the increasing number of vaccinated New Zealanders.

Thank you

As a staff we really appreciate the support you are giving your children as they learn from home. We understand the difficulties some of you face juggling your own work with your children's learning, trying to motivate them out of boredom and keeping your own spirits up.

The staff have really appreciated all of the emails of support and thanking them for the work they are doing. As we go through lockdown it is the small things that count and the notes of thanks mean an immense amount.

Following this notification is the coming weeks learning from Hillary, Taylor, Te Kanawa and Rutherford. Blake teachers will be sent separately.

Kia haumaru te noho / Stay safe.

Kevin

Tēnā koutou,

I think we had all anticipated a further extension of Alert Level 4, and the Prime Minister confirmed this yesterday. The Alert Level will be reviewed on Friday afternoon, but for now Alert Level 4 will remain in place until 12:59pm Tuesday 31 August.

And so our distance learning programme will continue! Please see previous posts about the Learning at Home. A reminder that should your child have a problem logging in please get in touch with either myself at kevinb@tehihi.school.nz or David Curtin, davidc@tehihi.school.nz and we can arrange a password reset. Please encourage your child to stick with the password we send out. Often the password resets come because they change their password and then forget what they have changed it to. We are currently in the process of updating the Logins page on Hero with your child's login details for all of the platforms we use.

At this time with students on devices we need to keep our tamariki safe from inappropriate material on the internet. This morning I received an email from The Light Project which I share with you as it has excellent resources to support parents in the role you play in keeping your children safe in your home. It is quite likely that many of you won't need it at this time but at some point in the future you may.

As it was last year, our school calendar has been affected by the lockdown. Once we have certainty around when we will be back in school at Alert Level 2 or less we will be able to inform you about changes to events. Whaea Deb has sent out a notification about the Colour Run (great work with the fundraising!) and FOTHS have a virtual meeting tonight to discuss Ag Day. Fortunately we were able to look at various Ag Day scenarios when we were in the Level 3 lockdown last August and these have come back into consideration for this year. Our Rehu Tai Oral Language Festival and Poetry Recital will go ahead as soon as we are back in school so children need to continue to work on these.

The government has asked schools to remind parents that there is a lot we can all do to protect our whānau and community from COVID-19 including:

• Everyone must continue to stay home in their bubble

• Do not mix with other household bubbles – if they have COVID-19, it can easily spread to your household, and every other household they and you are connecting with

• As new cases are identified, new locations of interest are added to the Ministry of Health website – please keep checking this. You can search by your location and they are sorted by date, so you only need to check the locations which have been added when you last checked

• Wash your hands regularly, especially when you have been out in public

• Stay home if you are feeling unwell and seek advice about whether you need to get a test

• Wear a face covering when out and about, and you MUST wear a face covering in any businesses or services which are open at Alert Level 4 (unless you have specifically been exempted from doing so, which includes anyone aged under 12)

• Keep a two-metre distance from people outside your household bubble

• Check in using the NZ COVID Tracer App wherever you go or keep a manual record (a reminder the App only stores information on your own phone – no one else will know who it is that checked in, or when)

You can go to the COVID19.govt.nz website if you would like more information on Alert Level 4 requirements.

There is a very helpful article by Dr Siouxsie Wiles and Toby Morris in The Spinoff regarding misinformation and disinformation.

Their red flags for how to spot bad information are particularly well-summarised. Bad information will:

• downplay COVID-19 and the pandemic

• focus on survival rates

• ignore long COVID

• emphasise individual freedom

• try to sell you something

• push simple cures/treatments

• make you feel fearful or angry.

“Good information put out to help you make an informed choice won’t make you feel scared or angry. It’ll make you feel empowered.”

Finally, we know some families in our community may be finding it difficult to access food and essential items such as medicine. This information about how to access to food or essential items summarises the supports that are available, including financial help to buy food.

Please do take care and let us know how we can best support you and your whānau. You can get in touch with the teachers through their learning space email account. We recommend that you use this rather than their personal account so that all teachers are included in the communication. Birdie Dell and Janet Daubermann are monitoring emails to the school office and Delene Jamieson and I can be reached through our personal email addresses. All comments posted on these Hero notifications are also read which provides you with another way to contact the school.

Noho ora mai,

Kevin

Kia ora parents,

As we have access to school to get devices delivered, we can now move to our online Learning@Home programme. This will start on Monday and we will be sending out more information and details for this on Sunday. Whilst we hope all students join the online programme, we understand that every family has complexities that may not make this possible.

For those families who are not able to access online Learning@Home, tomorrow morning we will be sending out a document with learning activities that do not require a device. During the rest of the lockdown the teachers will be adapting the online learning activities and these will be posted via Hero.

Ngā mihi,

Kevin

17 August 2021

Kia ora koutou

We are now all in Alert Level 4 which means that our school will not be open onsite from tomorrow, Wednesday 18 August, for any students. This follows someone being identified with COVID-19 and who has been in the Auckland and Coromandel communities while believed to be infectious.

It is really important we do everything we can to keep our community safe. Alert Level 4 means we need to stay home in our bubbles and avoid any travelling as much as possible. Supermarkets, pharmacies, foodbanks and other essential services will be open – but remember to wear a face covering if you are out and about (even a scarf wrapped around your mouth and nose will help). Check in using the NZ COVID Tracer App wherever you go and please also keep a distance from people you don’t know and wash your hands well and often, especially before and after using any public facilities.

With such short notice we weren’t able to hand out devices to students who needed them in order to support distance learning. Once we are able to get into school to distribute devices we will let you know. At the earliest this will be Thursday. In the meantime, staff will be getting everything prepared with their online learning programme should the lockdown go longer. To support your child at home over the next three days, play board games or cards, do jigsaw puzzles or read with them. All of these activities are educationally sound to build their problem solving, computation, reading and social skills. If you're courageous enough, let them bake in the kitchen as following a recipe is great for maths and reading.

Please go to the Ministry of Health website if you live in Auckland or the Coromandel region, or have recently visited there. There is a list of locations the confirmed case has visited while they were considered to be infectious. If you were at one of those locations and at the same time as specified on the website, then please follow the relevant instructions to isolate and potentially to get tested. Please keep checking that webpage as new locations may be identified over time.

Our focus as always will be to support the learning, safety and wellbeing of our tauira/students and we continue to be here to support you as well.

Please don’t hesitate to contact your child’s kaiako/teacher or me, if there is something you need assistance with.

Ngā mihi,

Kevin