Building relationships with Whanau

One of my focuses this year has been around helping other staff members build strong relationships with the families & whanau of their students. We have had an increase of new staff this year and we have identified that creating home-school partnerships are one of the most important relationships within a school setting. Last term we hosted a 'Matariki Evening' which was a huge success and saw a lot of our families coming to see their children perform and check out their learning.

This week I worked with the Junior teachers to create a 'Meet the teacher' afternoon. We worked together to create a plan on how they would host a meet a greet. We organized cards to be made by the kids and be sent home, as well as baking scones and providing tea. - After the meet and greet 8 parents overall turned up to all three classes. This made me think about if we had enough 'buy in' from the kids and perhaps the time of the meet and greet wasn't the best ( 3-4pm) I wonder if 2-3pm, when students are still in class would be better. That would mean there would be more of a focus on the students. So what? Our next step will be to try and re-organise whanau to come in, in a different way and consider the hunches of why it didn't work this time around.