Welcome back

Happy New Year and welcome back to another year at Fendalton Open-air School!

We have undergone a bit of a transformation over the summer with a fresh new paint job. The staff and I spent a lot of time looking at colours and choosing nice, bright, child friendly colours for our school and we are very pleased with the result.

Last week all the staff went away for a couple of days at Pudding Hill for a retreat. This was a very successful experience. We had lots of fun and welcomed our new staff in style. The strong relationships between all staff, parents and children are one of the key factors in the success of our school and long may that continue. This year we will be exploring more ways to strengthen those relationships even more and further improve the communication from the school to the community.

I would like to formally welcome our new teachers, Paul Page (New Entrants), Carolyn Silby (Junior Team leader and year 2), Hazel Holland (year 3), Jo Murphy (year 4), Marama Buck (year 5)and Paulette Newton who has returned from maternity leave. We know that they will be fabulous teachers and make a real difference to the children.

My own summer holiday was a great success with lots of sunshine and relaxing as well as a visit from my parents all the way from Yorkshire back home. It is great to be back at school though and wonderful to see all the children smiling and happy, ready to learn.

How to subscribe to a blog - like this one.

Why we should teach philosophy to kids

Via the BPS Research Digest: A recent study on the long-term benefits of the Socratic method. In a study of 105 children, all around 10 years old, teachers spent an hour a week for 16 months teaching lessons based on philosophical inquiry.

The philosophy-based lessons encouraged a community approach to "inquiry" in the classroom, with children sharing their views on Socratic questions posed by the teacher.

The result? At the end of 16 months,

Compared with 72 control children, the philosophy children showed significant improvements on tests of their verbal, numerical and spatial abilities

And two years later, when the philosophy children were tested again, their higher scores persisted -- while the lower-scoring control group were, in some cases, declining further. Researchers Keith Topping and Steve Trickey point out that these gains persisted even though the kids had switched schools as well, from primary to secondary, showing that the influence of philosophical inquiry works across contexts and over time.

Or in the words of Socrates, "If this is the doctrine which corrupts the youth, my influence is ruinous indeed."

Socrates image from Wikimedia

Read, Speed, Feed

Today I experienced my first Read, Speed, Feed!
What a fabulous event for our children. The opportunity for dads and other significant men to come into school for a couple of hours to read, eat and play with their children makes such a difference and is a wonderful innovation. The event has been running for 6 years now and is a credit to the school and the staff who organise it. Paul Norton takes a lead role in the organisation and all the staff take part, helping the smooth running of the day.
It was a great opportunity for me to meet some of the dads and join them and their kids in a game of football on the field. Thanks to all the men who came along and to the PTA for providing the sausages (even though I was too late and missed out on my feed!).

Read the article Paul Norton wrote for The Boys in Schools Bulletin about Read, Feed, Speed.

Kids teaching kids (and adults)

Our children are amazing! This week a group of our year six Tech Wizard's took part in a children's conference in Australia but they did it all from the comfort of the Village. 

The conference was being held in Victoria and our children were beamed in via Skype to teach some of the participants how to make their own blogs. They spent several hours working on laptops, video conferencing and emailing the Australian children. It was incredible to watch and hugely successful.

Earlier in the week we entertained a group of 35 teachers from around the South Island; Tech Wizards came to the fore again, this time teaching the adults. There is nothing so amazing as watching 11 year old children confidently talking to a large group of adults and teaching the teachers how to use new technologies.

2008 School Survey

Download the Survey (if you are using a PC please right click on the link and choose "save as" from the menu. Mac users please control click and select "Save Link As" from the menu)

Your feedback on how we are doing as a school is really important to us. It helps us to plan for the future and ensure that we are offering the best possible education to our students. This form can be completed on your computer and emailed directly to me where all the forms will be collated. The survey is anonymous and ends on December 14th. At the bottom of the form there is a submit form button which you need to click and follow the instructions.

Next week I will have a table set up in the playground with a few laptops so that you can complete the survey with technical help from one of our student council members. Paper copies of the survey are also available in the office.

West Zone Athletics

Last Thursday I was able to make a quick visit to see some of our children compete in the West Zone Athletics championships. It was an amazing event with schools from all over Christchurch competing in all the major disciplines. I only managed to catch our relay teams in action and was delighted to see us come away victorious in all 5 of the races I saw. What impressed me most though was the support provided for the athletes by their peers and parents. It was great to see such impressive school spirit but also fair play towards the opposition. Congratulations to all our athletes but also all our supporters.

Movember - the serious bit.

As you may have spotted in the playground I am sporting a new facial growth! However I do have a good excuse for my razorly challenged appearance.

Every year in New Zealand 2,656 men are diagnosed with prostate cancer and about 600 die of the disease, making prostate cancer the second largest cause of male deaths, after lung cancer.

The average life expectancy of a man in New Zealand is 4 years less than a woman.

To sponsor my Mo please go to http://www.movember.com/nz/donate, enter my registration number which is 64713 and your credit card details. Or you can sponsor me by cheque made payable to the "Prostate Cancer Foundation of New Zealand" clearly marking the donation as being for my Registration Number: 64713. Please mail cheques to: Movember, PO Box 87 150, Meadowbank 1742, Auckland. All donations over $5 are tax deductible.

All donations are made directly to the Prostate Cancer Foundation of New Zealand who will use the funds to create awareness, increase support networks for those men who suffer from prostate cancer, fund research and scholarship programs.

New staff for 2008

The Board and I have been working through the process of appointing new staff for 2008. We have now made several appointments for the new year and we are extremely pleased with the high calibre of the teachers that we have awarded positions to. We are still working on the exact positioning of teachers for next year and I will add more details soon. The new appointments are as follows:

Carolyn Silby will be joining us as Junior Team Leader. She is coming to us from Southbridge School and is an outstanding teacher and leader.
Paulette Newton is returning from her maternity leave to become our new Transition to School leader.
Karen Brown and Louise Dennis have both won permanent positions at FOS.
Deborah Kennedy and Letesha Campbell will also be with us in 2008.
Joanne Murphy is re joining the school after a year in the UK. She taught a year 4 class at FOS in 2006.
Hazel Holland is joining us from Nottingham, UK. She is another outstanding teacher who comes to us with a glowing reference.
Marama Buck worked with us during her Graduate School training earlier this year, and we are delighted that she will be starting her teaching career with us.

I am very excited about all the new appointments and I look forward to working with them all next year.

Library upgrade

The Board have been looking at the library blog and discussing the findings. They have agreed that we need to look into building a new library more closely. A sub-committee has been formed for this. The Library sub-committee met for the first time on Monday 29th September to look at ways to take the concept forward. They looked at funding options and possible locations for a new library.

The impact of the new government 1/18 ratio change for New Entrants and Year 1 children means that we will need more teaching spaces during 2008. It is our hope that we can free up the existing library for teaching spaces by building the new library and ESOL space together. However the reality is that this will take longer than a year, so we need to look at how we can find spaces for the new children at the end of 2008, when we will need to open more classes than we have in the past.

The current Library can house much of the computer and shelving needs of the completed library, and it seems sensible to buy those things now and then move them into the library when it is completed in a year or so. Therefore I would like to request that some of the money raised by the Spring Ball be spent on this. There are two main reasons for this:

1. The money raised by the Ball should be spent on today’s children.
2. The library needs to be improved for 2008 not just 2009 and beyond.

My report to the PTA

I would like to thank the PTA for providing tea, coffee and phenomenal Afghans after my talks at the start of term. Those nights were a really important opportunity for me to connect with lots of people and talk through ideas about education and the development of the school over the next few years and the refreshments helped greatly.

I would like the PTA to help promote my blog (fendalton-principal.blogspot.com) as a good source of information about what is happening in school and another way of keeping in contact with the school community and me. Rob has been working with some of the PTA on setting up their own blog.

Blogging is a very powerful tool which allows us to very quickly make web announcements and keep websites active and live. We need to look closely at how we are going to organise it in terms of moderation of comments and postings but at the moment it is a good start for the PTA to learn some of the possibilities.

The real power of blogging is in subscriptions as this allows the school community to be automatically notified of updates without having to go to the web to check. I will be putting some guides to making effective use of blogs onto my blog in the coming weeks.

Movember

This month Mr Norton, Mr Clarke and I will all be growing moustaches for Movember!

The obvious question is why?

The answer is because men lack awareness about the very real health issue they face, have an attitude of "she'll be right" and are reluctant to see a doctor about an illness or to go for regular medical checks.

The aim of Movember is to change these attitudes, make male health fun by putting the Mo back on the face of New Zealand men and in the process raise some serious funds for the number one male health issue, prostate cancer.

We will be asking for sponsorship in honour of our sacrifice and at the end of the month we will be having a special "Mo day" where the children can get involved by wearing a moustache to school for the day!

So try not to laugh at our efforts when you see us around school, it is for a good cause!