Monday 20th October, 2025
Kia ora koutou
Our major fundraiser for the year is coming up on Sunday 9 November. We’d love to see you there.
We are excited about our Agri Sports and Pet Day tomorrow. We realise there are some strong winds forecast this week, and we have been discussing the potential of changing the pet day, but we’ve decided to go ahead after looking at the latest update, and we know how much organising goes into getting the pets here. We will have some of the Agri sports inside during the morning, so the children aren’t out in the wind all day. If your child doesn’t have a pet to bring, they will be buddied up with someone that has one, so they won’t be missing out.
Please bring pets along from 12pm, with anything they need - water bowl etc, and take them straight to the area where they need to be tied up. We will show our students today. A big thanks to our judges - Mandy Burrows, Slack and Ju Lucas, and Tilly Ensor, and to George Lucas for organising Agri Sports.
The children have all been working really hard on their pet projects, so these will be on display outside Kahiwi on pet day.
Thanks to all of the parents who have offered to help with transport on our upcoming trips. We will send you the confirmed transport info the week before each event. Next week we have athletics, so I’ll email this to you on Friday. We have always said that preschoolers are not able to come to any events, but this is only when you are needed as parent help - such as Beach Ed and the Antarctic Centre. If you are taking transport to any of our other trips, you are welcome to have preschoolers with you.
Ngā mihi
Maree Lucas
Tumuaki/Principal
principal@omihi.school.nz
School Notices
School closed on Thursday 23rd October
As we had sent out in our email, NZEI teachers, support staff and principals will be striking this Thursday, so our school will be closed. We will be attending the march at Pak’n’save in Rangiora at 8am on Thursday. There is also one at Hagley Park from 11.30am if anybody would like to attend either of these.
Omihi School raffle
Thank you for all of the donations for our raffle. We will be sending home tickets this week, and we ask that each child please sell 20 tickets. If possible, can you please transfer the payment to the school account rather than send cash along.
Literacy update from Penny
The introduction of a new curriculum has been significant in education. We are in a privileged position in that we had already been implementing a number of the newer requirements. We continue to strengthen and develop our structured literacy approach and look at ways we can interweave this into what we know of our kids, the new curriculum and our experience and knowledge. We are seeing marked progress with handwriting for our children and will continue to work towards improving surface level writing features such as structure, punctuation and spelling.
Parent AI session
We are running an AI session on Wednesday 22nd October from 3.15pm - 4pm in Kahiwi. Maree will talk briefly about our draft AI policy and how we are using AI across the school for the admin side, and then each teacher will talk about how they are using AI in their classrooms, and there will be a chance for questions.
Your children are welcome to play outside while you are there, but please note we haven't got any supervision for them outside. Please email Maree to register.
School Docs review
We work on a 3 year cycle, and each term we review a number of our policies. These are open for review from our community as well. Please review the following by going to http://omihi.schooldocs.co.nz. Username: omihi Password: glenmark
Bullying and Harassment
Behaviour Management
Searches, Surrender, and Retention of Property
Minimising Physical Restraint
Stand-down, Suspension, and Exclusion
Staff Wellbeing and Safety
Trailride help
Our biggest fundraiser for the year is coming up on Sunday 9 November. Thank you to those who have volunteered to help. We are looking for someone who is going to be in Christchurch around this time to collect and return the radios for the marshals from TL Parker in Burnside. They can be collected either 6 or 7 November, and will need to be returned on 10 November. Please let Maree know if you are able to do this for us.
Pool key
If you would like to purchase a pool key for the summer, please email Bryleigh on office@omihi.school.nz. It is $50 for school families, and $70 for our wider community. There is a $20 refund when you return the key.
School photos
PhotoLife has emailed parents directly with access details to place your school photo orders. Please make sure you check your junk folder for these and email enquiries@photolife.co.nz with any questions.
Free delivery is available for all orders placed before midnight on Sunday 26 October, so we recommend getting any orders in before this time.
