Johanna and Erica from Mindful Mover did another great parent & child mindfulness session, this time with older kids. Check out the photos below to see how much fun and enjoyment these guys had and if you want more information on doing mindfulness at home with your kids, visit our Mindfulness Page. 

Rawhiti School has been lucky enough to have won a beautiful new garden, which is now in place outside the school library on the north side of the school building.
POD OASIS is an award-winning garden created lovingly by the team at Greening the Rubble and for a number of years it was located in at Re:Start Mall in the centre of Christchurch. However with the future of that mall uncertain Greening the Rubble decided to give away the garden to a community group that could make use and love this garden for many years to come. 
It is our honour that Rawhiti School was chosen as the recipient for this amazing garden and after many hours of work and labour from the Greening the Rubble team, the teachers, the students, the PTA and families from the school the garden is in place.
Now we have a garden to treasure, a space for the children at the school to have a haven, a quiet place within the chaos and clutter of the playground to just sit and contemplate. Somewhere to chill out and read a book or somewhere to sit with friends and have a quiet chat.
We believe our children deserve inspiring and beautiful spaces too. 

The Court Jesters from the Court Theatre put on a great, laughter-filled show for us to enjoy last night to liven up a wet and cold evening. With hot food (our famous nachos and sausage sizzle) from 5pm, a photo booth to remember the night and lots of fun and games to try it was a successful and fun way to end the term. 

There were quite a few boxes of PTA stuff dutifully packaged up from the old schools prior to the merger.
A week ago we thought it was about time we sorted through these boxes and had a good ol' clean out. At the bottom of a box we found three rolls of stickers (1000 per roll) all with the message 'Reminder: PTA Meeting' in vivid green.
Not seeing much of a use for these in this digital era we were about to throw them out when someone suggested that the little kids down in Rongo ma Tane are always looking for 'junk' to turn into 'treasure'.
So we dropped them off down there and thought little more about them until coming into class today I came across a whole group of kids getting super creative with our old PTA stickers.

Oh man, what fun they were having with these old stickers!

The PTA recently learnt there were only a handful of sandpit toys left at school to share between the junior and senior sandpit areas and lots & lots of children who wished to play in the sandpits. This was a dilemma we could solve! Here's how we did it...

Research
Trish and Steph hung out and chatted to the children in the large sandpit to see how they played and what toys they might like. Shovels to dig with and some buckets with sandcastle shapes were the most common requests. One thing we did notice was how nicely everyone was playing together in the sandpit, how much collaboration & sharing was going on and how much imagination they had to use due to the lack of equipment. We thought this was actually a good thing!

Quality & Choice
We checked the quality of the tools they already had and found they were good quality, heavy duty plastic. After looking in the school supplies catalogue and visiting the Playcentre Shop in Sydenham we found that the Playcentre Shop stocked the exact same good quality items as in the schools catalogue, except they were half the price. They also had a really good range of sandcastle making moulds which we thought were even better than buckets, and would encourage a lot more creativity & options. We thought a good selection of basic items plus some more interesting items would be useful to continue to inspire the children to use their wonderful imaginations.

Numbers
We thought it would be a good idea to limit the number of new items purchased, so the children could continue working collaboratively. We also felt less items might encourage children to show a greater appreciation, and be more inclined to look after them.

Storage
We needed to consider where the new items would be stored. Rongomatane have a large wheelie bin. The children are in charge of packing it up at the end of the day, and the teachers store the bin in the classroom foyer at night and at the weekends. Trish investigated wheelie bin options and actually discovered an abandoned wheelie bin at the old Freeville site. It was in excellent condition apart from missing a lid, so she located a replacement lid from a local supplier in Chch, and planned to “pimp” the bin with orange paint to make it look cool.

Looking After the Toys
The children from Tane Mahuta and Tawhirimatea use the senior sandpit the most, so we have asked the teachers from those classrooms to see if they can arrange for monitors to pack away the new toys at the end of each day and store them in their foyer in the new bin.

Dilemma Solved!
So now the Rawhiti School children have a great range of sandpit toys to keep them busy at breaktimes. And that means happy kids. Like we said, it's the little things that matter!

The PTA has got together with the Senior students to bag up a truck-load of kindling (literally). Between us all we got stuck in and bagged more than 300 bags of kindling to sell at $6.50 for a fundraiser. The profits of this will be split 50/50 between the PTA and the Senior Students.