Dear Parents, Caregivers and Friends of St Mary’s School,

Week four for the term and the site continues to develop.  The soil area has now all been worked up and grass seed sown.   The courts have been marked for basketball and netball (with four square and hop scotch to come).  The netball holes are in and the senior toilets will be ready on Wednesday, and tomorrow we will have our sliding storage cabinet put in Resource Room 1.

At home at the moment we have an exchange student from Edagowa Girls School in Japan. 

Mika is obviously a very courageous young lady to travel to another country where she only has a very basic grasp of the language with a very different culture, it would be a challenge that few would want.  Yet she has accepted the challenge and appears (after 24 hours) to be enjoying her stay in the country.

One of the focii of the New Zealand curriculum is to make our pupils global citizens and while few people get the chance to experience a different culture while at school there are few better ways of learning empathy, resilience and self reliance than really challenging your self.

A number of years ago I was travelling in Thailand when I finished up in a large market, far from the tourist trail, I looked around and I was the only non Thai there, (it was after all Thailand).  I spoke only a few words of Thai and we don’t share a common alphabet, even their numeric system is different and yet they made me feel welcome.  We communicated with drawing, hand signals and body language, from this lesson I learned that people are normally kind and welcoming and just because they look different doesn’t mean they wont accept you.

 

Have a great week.

Mike Brosnahan

Principal