Clemency Wright and the wonderful Room 9 WON the Interface magazine best class bog award!!

This is a HUGE achievement as the competition for this award is tremendous.  There are many, many entriesandd to even make the finals is HUGE.  Winning is a real coup.  Well done to both Room 9 and the wonderful Mrs Wright.  Two years ago R9 had not even begun blogging and now they are the best in the country. How cool is that!!

You can see in the photo the Netbook Mrs Wright won as the prize.  They are talking to Greg Adams the Editor of the magazine on skype and have just found out about the win.

You can follow the links to their blog and all the other web presences classes have from the sidebar of this blog.  Do have a look at the wonderful things that are happening in these spaces.  They are a wonderful way for families to see what is happening at school and in the classrooms.  No longer can the children go home and answer “nothing” to the “what did you do at school today?” question.  There are small maps on many of the sites that show where the visitors to the pages come from.  You can see from the dots in so many places that peopl from around the world are coming to our websites to find out about the things we are doing at Outram School.

Tania Bellamy and the Robots group presented four workshops at the Kidz@Conference ICT conference today.  Mark Beaton also helped out with the sessions and the feedback the group had was very good.  Well done to all 6 children involved.

We also had 4 Y5/6 children who were delegates at the conference and went to a number of different workshops and found out about using all sorts of different software and technology.  Janferie Tansley and Kerry MacKenzie also attended a day of the conference each to learn about the kinds of things that the children were learning about as well.  They will then be able to share the ideas with other teachers back at school.

Channel 9 news also had an item that included interviews and shots of our children.

A big thanks to the team that put the conference together and well done to all the people from Outram School who attended over the two days.

We had our biannual pet day today.  What a day it was!

Heaps of parents and children everywhere.  Most of the school bought along some kind of pet to share and the photograph above shows Tayne with his trophy for the Best in Show with his pet calf.  There were a huge number of categories that you could enter into.

A massive thankyou to Lynda Bayne and all her team of helpers who bought all the day together and made it the wonderful success it was for us all.  The rain stayed away until we were all ready to head home.

Pet Days are a special part of Outram School.  They are a big part of what it means to be in a rural community.  So very different from schools in town.  The children from Pine Hill School who shared the day with us had a wonderful time as well.

Once again a BIG thankyou to all involved!

we have two positions available for wonderful teachers who want to join our team from next year.

Senior School.

1. Classroom Teacher (Senior). We are looking for a skilled classroom teacher.  The successful applicant will have strengths in literacy, numeracy and PE/PA as well as the ability to motivate, engage with, and enthuse children. Applications close 16 November. Information pack is available from Outram School, our website or by emailing gregc@outram.school.nz.

1. Classroom Teacher (Senior) / Sports Coordinator (1mu). First and foremost you have to be a skilled and successful classroom teacher.  The successful applicant will have strengths in literacy, numeracy and PE/PA as well as the ability to motivate, engage with, and enthuse children.  You will be leading our very successful co-curricular and sports programme and the position comes with some release and 1 management unit in recognition of this.  Applications close 16 November. Information pack is available from Outram School, our website or by emailing gregc@outram.school.nz.

These are the ads that have appeared in the Education Gazette.

You can download the position information and application form HERE

This week the Y7/8 children are at Oreti beach near Invercargill on their camp.  All the messages we have had back from them are that things are going well and the children and teachers are having a BALL.

We work hard to have a varied programme at Outram School and give the children a wide range of experiences during their time with us.  If you keep an eye on the R3 and R5 web pages/wikis you will no doubt see more about their time ‘down south’.

Room 9’s Blog has made the finals of the Interface Magazine Best Class Blog awards!! Clemency Wright is a stunning teacher and has a wonderful classroom. Her blog began as a tentative toe dipped in the water and has grown over the past couple of years into a central part of her classroom and classroom programme. In the usual way with people who do fabulous things she simply sees it as normal, nothing special, and rather mundane. It is none of these things! It is a wonderful example of the way Web2.0 technologies can break down the barriers between home and school, make the classroom programme ‘transparent’ and bring families into the school in so many different ways. Please take a look at the website and vote for her class blog. (you do have to be a NZ teacher, or employed in a school to vote though) She thoroughly deserves the accolades!

Room 9 really SHINES!!!!!

An interesting note too – 3 of the 10 finalists in the Awards are classrooms and teachers from Dunedin. Two are from our ICT PD Cluster. How good are we!

On Friday 11th September 11 Outram School students competed in the Otago Cross Country. To qualify for this you needed to get top 6 in the Outram School Cross Country and top 3 in the South Taieri Schools Cross Country. All the students ran very well on the day, below are the placings.
Yr 5- 1st Malachi Bushchl
3rd Jacob Beal-Harris

Yr 6- 2nd Georgia Bushchl
6th Zara Styles
15th Brooke Miller

Yr 7- 30th Nicola Lord

Yr 8- 18th Daniel Gruppelar

13th Christie Wood
12th Belinda Skudder

So as you can the Outram Students achieved fantastic results overall considering there were around 100 people in each race. Be very proud of them and if you see them around don’t forget to say congratulations!
By Nicola.L

The latest West of the Taieri Newsletter can be downloaded from HERE. It gives a lot of news and information about events and people in this part of the Taieri Planes.

If you are interested in advertising in this publication – it is delivered to houses all over the Taieri – then please contact the editor (or even us at school and we will pass on)

I am including the front bit I write in each weeks newsletter in a post on this blog:

A BIG thankyou to all the families who kept children at home on Tuesday afternoon while many of the staff were at a funeral. It is one of the real strengths of a community like Outram that people gather around each other at times like this. Our whole staff, and particularly Lyn and her family, felt very supported by this, particularly given the short notice. So thanks again!

We have a Working Bee on the 20th September. This is a Sunday and we will begin at 10am. The main thing we are aiming to do is pour concrete to extend path areas behind R3/4 to keep mud out of the classrooms. We will also be making new garden beds and doing a small amount of paving around the Garden Club gardens by the Hall. While we have the digger the long jump pit will be moved from the edge of the soccer field. So bring along shovels, wheel barrows etc and any concreting equipment you may have. Any specific offers or questions to Garth Mitchel, or Greg at school please. It would also be good if you are intending to come if you can let us know so we can pass numbers on to the caterers. There is a return slip later in this newsletter.

A reminder and plea to PLEASE let us know if your children are not going to be on the school bus on any particular day. If you pick them up and don’t let us know it can mean a big hold up for the rest of the children while we confirm what has happened. Equally if your child is on the bus when this is not part of their usual routine we need to know so we can add their name to the bus lists.
Each day we gather names of children not going on the bus and mark them absent on the appropriate bus list. We update the lists based on any calls that come in to the Office before the end of the school day. Children then line up at the end of the day in their designated places for each bus and the bus lists are checked against the children in the line. We then also do a head count on each bus and ensure that the number of children on the bus matches with what we were expecting.
As you can see a lot of work goes into ensuring we have the right children on the buses each day and buses have to wait for the last child to be checked off and accounted for. This is why not knowing where a child is can be a real problem. PLEASE let us know as soon as you can of any changes to who we can expect on the buses.
Thanks

Remember you can download newsletters from here

We all have to think about the model we are for children. Parents, teachers, families ….. All of us, all the time.