Your AJHS eNewsletter has arrived – Week 6

Newsletter

School of Opportunity

Kia ora koutou parents and caregivers,

Our thoughts are with those families who have had to contend with flooding or weather damage from earlier this week. Please let us know if we can support you with food or any other essential items. Human resilience is remarkable. Again and again, humans demonstrate their fortitude to adapt, adjust and change through diversity and collective action. This time we are living in could very well be described as a story of redefinition, underpinned by hope and optimism for our future.

This week we made the very difficult decision to cancel the Year 9 camp scheduled during week 10 of this term. We all feel a deep level of disappointment about missing the opportunity to experience learning with our students at Camp Bentzon, Kawau Island.

This lockdown as a whole, along with your experiences, present an opportunity. To ensure we capture the questions and feedback this experience is raising, we will be conducting a survey with students and parents. This will give us insight into your range of opinions and suggestions to move forward in a way that strengthens our partnership and quality of learning living with COVID-19. Please look out for this survey in our communications.

If you have the opportunity, please send an email of encouragement or affirmation to your child’s teacher. Our support staff, teachers and leaders are working diligently every day. I am in awe of them.

Noho ora mai ra, please stay safe.

Cushla Shepherd, Acting Principal

Gingerbread Goodness

Well done to our Year 10 students who made gingerbread cookies for their online food technology lesson. It was great to see so many of them giving it a go and being so proud of their baking skills. Great work! We bet your families appreciated them.

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AJHS animals take a holiday!

A big thanks to Poppy Kirkflexton, one of our fabulous teachers, who has very kindly provided accommodation for our school animals.

On top of her own pets, she is looking after Squirtle the turtle, 9 birds, 3 guinea pigs and 1 rabbit.

Go Poppy!

Science experiments at home

Well done Year 8 student Mia Woods for making and testing for carbon dioxide at home. Even your cat looks interested!

Mia’s metal straws didn’t quite work the way it did in the video with the plastic ones, so she solved the problem and changed the method. A true scientist.

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Free ‘Homeschooling During Lockdown’ webinar series for students and parents

Feeling the strain of home-schooling? Join NZ’s leading cyber safety experts, Linewize by Family Zone, for a webinar series to help families with the pressures of learning from home in lockdown. The webinars are only 30 minutes long, and share helpful tips on how to stay focused and manage your wellbeing. https://www.linewize.io/homelearningnz

Bring out the Engineer in you!

EPro8 has announced a free lockdown challenge, so get your family together, come up with a creative team name, and get ready to engineer! There is no restriction on who can be part of your team – they just all need to be part of your bubble, so parents, siblings and even your cat can help!

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Meet the people behind the teaching role

Since lockdown we’ve been busy on Facebook posting profiles of our wonderful teachers and support staff. It’s a good opportunity to learn more about the people who educate your children, and for the students to discover their teachers are more than just teachers!

Visit our page to take a look… https://www.facebook.com/ajhsnz

Food Bank Challenge

Throughout Term 2 and 3 our Y7 students have been learning about health and wellbeing, with a lens on nutrition in line with growth and development. As part of this exciting unit, we celebrated with a healthy breakfast in each whanau. We also asked students to consider other families who might benefit from donations of nutritious and varied items in the form of a Food Bank Challenge!

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