Introducing our new communities:
On Friday we introduced our students to their new communities. They're designed to introduce more leadership opportunities, mentoring and role modelling for younger students and will also add to the culture of our school. Similar to houses that some schools operate, our communities will in time become a strong feature of HPPS. Our communities include students from all levels as well as staff members and have been named after the beaches at Bethells, Waiake, Piha, Muriwai and Karekare.
Our students have already begun to work on logos, chants and investigating what these beaches might mean or represent. We have also asked the students to tell us what they want the communities to be used for.
PINs
I'm constantly amazed at how well are young learners do when they have the opportunity to lead their workshops! As we observed them at the end of week 7 we saw the amount of thought, reflection and effort going into each of their workshops.PINs workshops require a lot of planning by the students, staff and families to make these happen each week. Thus far we've been lucky to have hosted several parents who have given their time to run workshops about Sign Language, First Aid, Baking, Budgeting and Mexican Cooking.
To support our students so they continue to develop their workshops and their dispositional growth we've put together two small tools to add value to our PINs systems. The first is a small observation template that identifies their next steps for any future workshops (as shown). As part of their PINs plans, we do ask them to reflect and think about what they can do better next time. This tool can assist them with this reflection. Leaders reflected on Friday that they'd "run out of things to do and needed more ideas for their workshop", others noticed that "their students wouldn't follow the rules and they had to keep making more rules". Many of them are very proud of their workshops and also want to celebrate the work others are doing in their workshops.
The second tool is an evaluation form, this allows the participants to comment on the workshops that they attend and will assist us to provide constructive feedback to our workshop leaders. This is something that you can support your children with by helping them to fill out the form if they want to
comment on a PINs workshop they have attended.