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We had a wonderful day celebrating our students today! We were absolutely delighted to welcome several new tamariki and their families into our school community. We also took the time to celebrate our latest learning milestone. Over the past two weeks, our students have been focusing heavily on Communication. It has been fantastic to see them working hard on their listening and speaking skills, and we are incredibly proud of everyone recognized today. A very warm welcome to our new students, and well done to all our certificate winners!  Last night, we held our Home & School AGM, marking a special time of transition for our committee. We want to say a massive thank you to Kelly and Gina, who are stepping down from their leadership roles after a few years of hard work and incredible dedication. We also want to wish Kelly and her family all the very best with the upcoming new addition to their family—we absolutely cannot wait to meet your new little girl! We then officially welcomed Ruth Chalmers as our new President, Emma Adamson as Vice President, and Kerry-Ellen McKay as Secretary. Thank you to Danielle Duncan, who is staying on as Treasurer. The Home & School is lucky to have you on board again. We are so incredibly grateful for everyone who has stepped up and your dedication and commitment toward West Gore School and its students. We have also restructured the Home & School Committee this year to better respect everyone's busy schedules. As you may have seen, we have set up sub-committees that will run independently, with team leaders reporting back just once a term. We hope this fresh approach means fewer meetings and less time away from your families! You can expect another round of forms to go home or a phone call to those who haven’t signed up yet. As promised, A massive congratulations to our prize winners:
The Home & Garden Tour Committee is already hard at work planning our upcoming West Gore School Home & Garden Tour 2026. 🏡 SAVE THE DATE!
We look forward to a great year ahead.   A huge thank you to Craig and Jamie from the MLT Rugby Ambassador Programme for delivering an engaging and energetic session with our students. Opportunities like these help our tamariki build skills, confidence, teamwork, and a love of sport. We are incredibly grateful to MLT for sponsoring this programme and making experiences like this possible for our students!   Dear Parents / Whanau, We are enjoying the connection with you, our community. Community partnership is at the heart of great education. When you, our parents actively support your children’s learning journey, our children develop confidence, resilience and the skills needed to thrive. We have had several opportunities to connect with you recently which we have loved. Eastern Cross Country was held yesterday where our team performed so well with two children now representing us at Southland next week. Congratulations to Lachie & Ollie. Our Busking was such a fun event with our children believing they were super stars on the street singing their hearts out to a large crowd. Thank you for making our children feel special and donating us $269.00 which we will spend on some musical instruments for next year. Thank you to all who sent back the Home and School sign up sheet. We are hoping this new system will allow more people to be involved in the way that suits your work and family needs. We will make contact later next week with families that are still to respond. Please send back early next week to still be in the Hot Chip and Grocery Voucher draw. We are planning our Cultural Festival for the end of this term. Information will be sent home today. This was an amazing event last year where we all learnt so much about each other. We are excited to share in further activities, kai and culture together. And … I hope you have all seen the brilliant advert for our School App that was posted on Facebook and our app last evening. It was enacted by our clever and creative Miss Prattley, Laya, Issy and Izette. No excuses now to not have this App. Thank you for your support of our Teacher Only day on Tuesday. Teachers had a full day learning the new Maths curriculum while our Support Staff participated in professional development relevant to the work they do. Enjoy your weekend Nga mihi Linda Fraser Principal   Hello Everyone, Over the last weeks there have been so many activities West Gore students have been involved with. We have had the Cross Country, well done to those who placed in their Girls and Boys age groups. Special congratulations to Ollie, Lachie, Harry, Lachlan and Malachai who did a stellar job of representing West Gore School! At the Southland Festival of Dance our fabulous dancers took out First Place in the School’s section! Our dancers achieved recognition in several categories, well done everyone for that hard work and your fantastic efforts on the day. Keep dancing Katelynne, May, Issy, Izette, Willow, Isabella and Aaliyah. Pink shirt day was a valuable and engaging way for our tamariki to learn about and consider the effects and feelings associated with bullying. An ongoing awareness, especially at such a young age can change the lives of so many young people, now and into the future. Our students who participated in the busking last Thursday gave such a joyful performance that was so well received. Many parents came out and the positive vibe on the street that was full of parents watching their particular school groups was so good. To all of the students who took part in all of these activities, you did your school proud. The focus on learning at West Gore goes hand in hand with the collaboration, fellowship and team spirit that these fun activities promote. All of these really cool achievements are reported on our school app, check us out on Facebook too. Of course the success of all these endeavours rests in large part on the staff , community and parent helpers who offered their time, knowledge, experience and encouragement, our grateful thanks to you all. Also last Thursday our school acknowledged and offered thanks to our incredible Support Staff who are a constant and ever present strength not only in our school function but in the day to day experience of your children’s day at school. I was very happy to be there on behalf of the Board and to express our gratitude. At our Board meeting last week Principal Linda Fraser and Deputy Principal Rebekah Prattley updated the Board on the new curriculum reporting that will be coming into effect over the next months. The repeated adjustments to the curriculum over the last two and a half years have brought with them intense ongoing change. The staff have been spending valuable time with curriculum advisors from the Ministry of Education trialing new assessment procedures, identifying issues and preparing early to best serve the needs and requirements for our students. We are fortunate indeed to have such experience in our leadership team to guide staff through a large amount of change and the intense work required. We are in good hands and the Board appreciates this very much indeed. Susan Hasselman Presiding Member   This amazing group of children did West Gore School proud at the Eastern Cross Country yesterday. They all ran hard and gave it their best! Congratulations to Ollie and Lachie who will be going on to represent us at Southland Cross Country on 12th June 2026.  AGM - Thursday 11th June at 7pm in the staffroom Volunteer sign-up sheets went home yesterday. A massive thank you to everyone who has already stepped up to join a sub-committee or offered to be a general helper on event days. We truly appreciate your support! We Need You! If you haven’t sent your form back yet, our friendly office team will give you a quick call soon to check in. Joining a sub-committee is a fantastic way to help because these smaller groups work independently. This means fewer long meetings and more quality time back with your family! Committees to sign up for are: Heat Ups, Breakfast Club, Home and Garden Tour, Pizza Days, Disco, Sport Uniforms and Community Support.  Road Patrol – Supporting Student Safety Did you know that Road Patrol plays an important role in helping keep our students safe when travelling to and from school? We encourage all parents and caregivers to take a few minutes to review our Road Patrol Policy on SchoolDocs to learn more about how crossings are managed, the responsibilities of students and supervisors, and the safety procedures in place. The policy also highlights the important role that parent volunteers play in supporting the operation of Road Patrol. At present, we do not have enough volunteers to safely run the programme, meaning that Road Patrol has had to be scaled back, and not all crossings are always managed. If you are able to assist, even occasionally, we would love to hear from you. Together, we can help create a safer environment for all students travelling to and from school. If you can help with Road Patrol in the mornings at either Robertson or Kitchener Streets, please contact Anneke in the office.  Our talented students have you covered! They created this tutorial for you in just 30 minutes! Watch their hilarious guide and remember, our school app is the main way we share important news, notices, and updates with whanau. See Anneke in the office if you need help downloading and working on it. "How The Birds Got Their Colours" is a traditional, First Nations Dreamtime story from Western Australia that explains how native birds got their vibrant colours and why the crow stayed black. After listening to this story. Room 3 students made colourful birds from a variety of resources and personalised them with their own designs. Ask your Room 3 tamariki to tell you, how the birds got their colours.  On Saturday we had 22 dancers compete at the Southland Festival of Dance. They were lucky to take up the opportunity to learn dances from Rachel Wilson and Jysse Prattley from Rachel’s Studio of Dance. We are proud of all the girls who worked hard during their lessons, looked amazing on the day and danced with joy and flair. The following girls received placings in their finals:
Katelynne & Mya - 3rd in the Foxtrot Katelynne - 2nd in her solo Samba Issy & Izette - 1st in the Foxtrot Willow - 1st in her solo Samba Isabella & Aliyah - 1st in the Samba A special mention to Isabella who won a term’s scholarship at Rachel’s Studio of Dance. We look forward to seeing where this takes you! We are also proud of the whole team, they scored the most points as a school and therefore took out the Schools Section in FIRST PLACE! An amazing achievement that they should be very proud of. Thank you to all the parents and whanau who supported their children. A massive thank you to Rachel and Jysse who voluntarily give up their time each week to share their knowledge and talents with our students. We are so grateful for their time and energy. A big congratulations to our friends over the bridge - East Gore School. Their dancers were amazing and they got lots of placings and scholarships too. A great event to be a part of, well done to all involved!  Kia ora Parents / Whānau, There was lots of excitement and many duck shooting stories on Monday morning… we must have the best shooters, so many ducks shot! Sounds like a fun weekend for many families. Southland Festival of Dance We are excited that twenty four students will compete in the schools section of the dance competition in Gore on Saturday. We are very grateful for Rachel Wilson and Jysse Prattley who have donated their time to teach our children their dances. We had our own show yesterday and we loved seeing the flair and skill of our dances after just 7 weeks. The festival is on at the Gore T&C on Saturday, starting 9.30 am. The dance crew would love you support. Thank you to Rachel and Jysse for offering this wonderful opportunity to our students.
Attendance We are delighted to see a significant shift in our attendance in term 1. 82% of our students attended regularly compared with 67% in term 1 last year. We had 95% of our students arriving on time regularly. We appreciate your attention to ensuring your child is at school unless sick or other emergency /unavoidable situations. Lets keep a strong focus on this as there is room for improvement, especially unjustified absences at 26%. Ministry of Education statistics have recorded our absences for the following reasons: 56% Illness / Medical 5% To be followed up 26% Unjustified 2% Stood Down 10% Explained and Approved  Learning Through Play We are constantly reviewing and being upskilled by Longworth Education’s director Sarah Aiono, as to how to improve our learning experience for our students. Our senior school has introduced a stronger thematic approach under the umbrella, ‘Under One Sky’ which symbolises our cultural connection focus for this term. The modified approach provides more structure for those learners that need it while leaving options open for those that have ideas and creative thoughts they want to explore further. This will be showcased as part of our Cultural Festival at the end of the term. We wish all our mothers a wonderful day on Sunday. On this Mother’s Day, we honour the quiet strength, endless sacrifice, and unconditional love of mothers and mother figures. Their guidance shapes hearts, builds communities, and inspires the next generation every single day. Nga mihi Linda Fraser  Cross Country is happening on Friday the 22nd of May at Dolamore Park  We are excited to share that the Home and School committee is moving toward a more efficient way of working! To value everyone's time and reduce the number of formal meetings, we are restructuring into smaller, focused sub-committees for projects like the Home & Garden Tour, Uniforms, Pizza Days, Breakfast Club, Disco, Community Support, and Heat-ups. Each group will operate independently under a team leader who reports directly to the Presiding Member, allowing us to spend less time "around the table" and more time making things happen. We are also introducing online meetings as a flexible option for our busy volunteers. Our AGM will be held on 10 June, and we are currently seeking enthusiastic individuals to step into the vital roles of Presiding Member and Secretary. If you have the skills to help lead our school community in this new format, please get in touch with Anneke in the office. Keep an eye out for a notice coming home soon, which will provide a detailed description of each sub-committee and what each role entails. Families can expect a detailed information sheet coming home soon, which will include an opportunity to sign up for your preferred sub-committee. 
In Room One we have been learning about ANZAC Day. We imagined ourselves as soldiers on the battlefield and wrote postcards home to our loved ones. We used our creativity and empathy to think about what life may have been like for the soldiers during the war. Kia Ora Everyone, It was my happy duty to welcome new students to our Kura at the start of Term 2. I have been fortunate to attend three Mihi Whakatau gatherings at school since I became a Board member and it is a pleasure every time. The participation of our entire student body, our Kapa Haka group, our teaching staff and our Principal make every occasion such as this something our entire school community can be very proud of.  I am very pleased to inform you that Board Parent Representative Sonya Stewart has been appointed Deputy Presiding Member of our Board of Trustees. This an important role in actioning Board business as well as working alongside our Principal. The Board is grateful for the engagement of our parent community with the new Attendance Management Plan set out by the Ministry Of Education. There is ongoing and consistent Ministry oversight and follow up of our actions around our management of student attendance. We appreciate your ongoing support and attention to this very much. With the start of a new Term the School Policies and Procedures team reviews current school policies on a number of topics. We really want as much participation in this as we can get from our School Community. To review a policy just go to the school app, select ‘Links’- School Docs. Depending on your device you can type in our school name or select from the drop box. User name- westgore Password- wiggie Policies for review will be highlighted. You can select which one you wish to review. Once you have read the topic you
can select the blue button ‘Start Your Review”. We appreciate your input very much so over the term if you have a spare five minutes do have a look. All of the school policies are in place for the well-being and safety of everyone at West Gore School. Nga Mihi Susan Hasselman Board Of Trustees |
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