Term+1+2011

Our role is 56 and the minister, Hon Anne Tolley, has signed for a roll cap of 120 with funding to start in July. Why the minister can't sign off such a cap for Liberton etc, I do not know - but we are grateful. I look forward to seeing you all. || We are very excited as our student body has been asked to sing at the next combined church service in the town hall which is an awesome opportunity to let the wider Christian community see the school who may not otherwise. We are receiving professional singing lessons and I have never heard our students sing so well! Our roll is technically full so we await the decision in hopeful prayer from the Ministry regarding our maximum roll increase application. If we do not get a roll increase we will face some very difficult issues as we are operating with an extra classroom for the second year in a row and do not have the resources to continue past the end of this year. We also do not want to go back to three classes! It is in the Lord's hands! School life is very busy so I am looking forward to the 'non contact' time quickly approaching for us all. Sometimes I do wonder how long I will be able to keep this up! It's also in the Lord's hands! I look forward to seeing you all on Thursday. Blessings Fiona || We have some challenges (opportunities in disguise)- waiting on the Ministry for our MRI. We will be full come the third term. We have also in faith employed a 4th teacher and have 4 classes operating. Our biggest opportunity for a new thing is we are loosing our awesome amazing DP to the Hawkes Bay at the end of term 2. It's a bitter sweet time as it does open the door to new possibilites in God but brings to an end some wonderful relationships and a sense of shared history too with Sandra moving on. It's a time for us to pray and once again cast the nets out. God's faithful. Looking forward to Thursday. || This term we have been implementing our new National Standards and are frustrated that all schools had to develop the 'yearly' standards from literacy progressions and objectives which are set at academic levels...
 * **Aidanfield CS** ||  ||
 * **Amana CS** ||  ||
 * **Ashburton CS** || The reality of leadership has hit home with some challenging situations after 2 years of establishment.
 * **Emmanuel CS** ||  ||
 * **Hillview CS** ||  ||
 * **KingsView School** ||  ||
 * **Liberton CS** || Hi All. LCS is in good heart and we have some awesome things happening here at the moment!
 * **Middleton GS** ||  ||
 * **Nelson CA** ||  ||
 * **Rangiora NL CS** ||  ||
 * **Richmond View S** ||  ||
 * **Tasman Bay CS** || I am slowly being dragged by my staff into e-learning. It's a great thing when I am, more often than not, the recipient of their expertise. It's definately the area where the leader is a learner in this case- me. As a school we are in year 2 of a local ICT cluster intiative- my staff are buzzing. Tracy Prout was blessed to be invited to Learning at Schools ICT conference earlier this year and has brought back lots of skills but also some challenges to our way of thinking around e-learning. We are working hard at promoting our BLOGS as a means to engage our parent community and also an avenue for our children to engage with the wider world. We would love to connect with other Christian Schools at the classroom level via BLOGS so if your teachers have this happening in your neck of the woods- we would love it if they jumped on line and started a conversation with our children via the following BLOG addresses [|http://tasbay1.blogspot.com] : [|http://tasbay2.edublogs.org] Two of our teachers have also started reflective Blogs on thier practice- Tracy in particular is exploring the use of ICT with a junior class and has some great entries at [|http://tracyprout.edublogs.org]. Sandra is inspiring in her scope as a teacher and communicator- her BLOG is [|http://sarnee.edublogs.org] BLOGS are a great way to communicate in an incredibly natural way, Jesus' great good news.
 * **Timaru CS** || What a term. Currently we are enjoying a large number of enrollments and are expecting to reach our roll cap of 100 mid year. We started the year with a bit of a shake up but fortunately we did not have any damage at the school. At the end of this week we say goodbye to our last 'evacuee'.

We continue to be thankful to God for the provision of our new school site. Yesterday I hosted Teresa Thompson from KingsGate School for a time and was able to take her to our old site which is similar to her currently site and encourage her that growth can happen on a small site. And that it may take some time but the wait is worth it when we get the opportunity to move to a larger site. ||