We are a rural school and even though our roll has grown in the past few years we still retain that small school feel.
We are very proud of our Kaurihohore Kids.
We aim to develop our school values of empathy, respect, kindness and citizenship. We see citizenship as the three other values in action. Relationships are at the core of everything we do. We want to understand and truly see children in order to teach them.
We want our children to be creative and innovative, to think outside of the box. We want children to stand up for each other, to recognise bullying and to work with us to eliminate it. We want children to grow into independent, self-driven learners, who recognise the importance of mistakes and embrace challenge.
We want responsible risk takers, who are resilient and bounce back from difficult situations quickly. We want every one of our children to believe in themselves and their potential to be successful. Most of all, we want our children to be happy and have the opportunity to develop dispositions that will assist them to lead a happy life.
Our space makes the most of the outdoors and children spend a lot of time learning in the outdoors.
We value play and believe that it is the most effective way for children to be learning.
Our roll fluctuates between 185-220 each year.
We have a committed and dynamic staff, who strive to do their best for each child in their class.
We believe that quality teachers can achieve great results in small classes and are committed to ensuring our classes stay as small as possible.
Our committed BOT partially funds a teacher to ensure this is possible.
We try to keep our senior classes below 26 if possible and our junior classes below 24. Our new entrant room runs with two teachers throughout term 1 and 2 and increases to 3 if our numbers grow. We aim to create nurturing classroom environments and have a nurture space at school for children who are struggling to regulate their emotions or just feeling in need of a little time out.
We teach inquiry using dramatic inquiry with a focus on our local curriculum and ensuring children develop knowledge of our place and local stories over time.
Alongside this we run quality programmes in literacy and numeracy as we believe it is vital that children develop these basics early on when and as they are ready. We follow a structured literacy approach as this benefits all children. Juniors also follow a structured approach to the teaching of mathematics, ensuring children have strong foundations.
In our junior rooms we take developmental stages into account when engaging in learning. Children are immersed in an environment based on play that assists them to grow as individuals as and when they are ready, rather than pushing them into learning they are not ready for. Play also has an important place for children's learning as they progress through our classes.
We do a lot of teaching around citizenship and want to ensure that children leave our school with skills that will benefit them in the future. We believe teaching respect, empathy and kindness is a crucial part of what we do. We believe emotional learning is important for children, they need to be able to name the emotion to tame it. We use Pause Breathe Smile, the little spot of feelings and the Zones of regulation along with other ways to ensure children are ultimately able to self-manage and regulate.
Environmental learning is very important at Kaurihohore, we are a zero waste school and hope that we are able to give children skills that will empower them to look after and preserve our environment.
We have an approach to wellbeing that ensures children learn key ideas that will allow them to grow and develop healthy skills for life. We take an active approach to bullying prevention.
We value Physical Education and believe in giving children as many opportunities through sport as we can. We have a bike track, built a new swimming pool and have a small turf for children to use. We run a sports academy for children from year 5-6. This group meet every Friday and get to experience a range of different sports delivered by outside coaches. We have school netball teams, hockey teams and basketball teams. Our kids generally play soccer for Kamo club.
We do not have playground rules, juniors and seniors play together and have lovely relationships. Instead we strive to see children using the values to assist them with problems in the playground.
We are a restorative practice school and believe that children need to be given the opportunity to own, fix and learn from their mistakes. We believe that in teaching children about the zones of regulation and the little spot of feelings, we can help them with their ability to self-manage.
We believe student voice is crucial and our classrooms ensure student voice is widely used.
We believe whānau play an incredibly important role in their child's journey through school and aim to engage them, involve them and communicate with them in as many ways we can.
All learning at Kaurihohore is centred around the pillars of learning. Learning to do, Learning to learn, Learning to live together and Learning to be.
Our motto is "Enthusiasm and Values for Life Through Learning. Manaakitanga, Whanaungatana and Mana Tangata.
Our goal is "Mā te huruhuru ka rere te manu" "Adorn this bird with feathers that enable it to fly"
We want children to be adorned with wonderful values and dispositions that enable to them to truly be successful.
We believe all schools need to be trauma informed and developmentally responsive. That children do well if they can and that consquences and rewards do not help to build the skills need for children to be happy, well rounded individulas.
We don't believe in a one size fits all approach, instead we believe one size fits one.
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