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

Welcome back to everybody for Term Three.

After looking at my diary I can say that this promises to be a very busy term.

Please remember to always read the diary of upcoming events in each newsletter and also

remember that all up coming events will be listed on the school website and facebook page.

One of my earliest memories of school was being in Miss Horgan’s junior room at Patearoa School and listening to the commentary on the radio of the moon landing. I can still well recall, "That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind".

Every boy had a set of plastic astronauts to play with along side his soldiers and cowboys and

Indians.

Man travelling to, and then landing on the moon, was astounding. It meant that people looked to the night sky to study the stars wondering, "where to next?"

Apollo 11 was surely only a gentle beginning. Next stop mars then the stars. After all we had Star Trek, Lost in Space, and U.F.O.

But then Nasa stopped it’s space programme, well certainly the manned flight aspect.

In recent times a large number of people have become sceptical about whether man has really landed on the moon. These sceptics point to a range of reasons why, they say this could not have happened: Van

Allan's belt, solar flares, the relatively primitive state of computers at the time. They look at the films and photos and say; the flag is waving, the shadows are wrong!

They suggest that the moon landings only happened on a film sound stage and they were done to "put one over the Soviet Union" at the height of the cold war.

I have read a lot about both sides of this debate. Neither side is conclusive. Neither side has definitive proof. But really for me and for a huge number of other people this matter has achieved a lot. It has got us to really think about a topic.

That is a very important part of education. No matter what, you encourage your children to think and question. That is how you learn, that is education.

Have a great term. Mike Brosnahan