Issue 8: Week 9, Term 1 2025

Principal's Message - Karere a te Tumuaki

Kia ora e te whānau,

I hope this pānui finds you all well and enjoying the sunshine when it pops through despite the chilly mornings at the Flagpole!

I really enjoyed watching the All Whites qualifying game for the World Cup on Monday night — such an exciting match (although a little bit nail biting until those first couple of goals were scored!). It was a little bit extra special for me personally, as I actually taught Sarpreet Singh when he was at Everglade School back in 2009. It’s always such a proud moment seeing our tamariki go on to do incredible things.

Back at school at the moment, we’re buzzing with excitement as the Peter Pan production draws near. We’ve recently done a full check of the hall’s capacity and had a trial with seating. We are thrilled to let you know that we’ll be able to sell 300 tickets per show — so there will be plenty of room for whānau to come along and support. Mr. Dyer, the cast, the teachers and everyone involved are working incredibly hard. The children are putting in great effort with their dances (as you can see in this week's picture), and we know lots of people are currently busy sorting out costumes. A special thanks to Mrs Noakes and Stewart Dance Studios for lending us the amazing costumes for our cast of main characters — ngā mihi nui to you all! We’re also super excited to have an ex-parent lending a hand with projecting backgrounds using a short-range projector. Even better — the images for all the backgrounds were created by us using AI (meaning no copyright issues), so we’re feeling quite proud of our creativity and teamwork.

At lunchtime today, Mrs Christensen and I are looking forward to taking our Year 5–6 Flipperball team to Te Hihi School for a match at 1pm. For those who aren’t familiar, Flipperball is a fun version of water polo played above the water. It should be a great game and an awesome opportunity for our ākonga to shine. We also look forward to Te Hihi bringing some children up to ours for a football match next term - nothing like a little local inter-school rivalry!

Lastly, we’re all looking ahead to Friday’s dress-up pizza fundraiser day for the Year 5–6 camp — always a highlight and a wonderful way to bring our school whānau together.

Hope you all have a fantastic rest of the week!

Ngā manaakitanga,

Anna Powrie

Celebrating Learning and Achievement

Assembly Certificate Winners 13th March 

Notes from the Office

Sports Camp 2025

Would your business like to be one of this years sponsors for our Intermediate 2025 sports camp team?

Every year in Term 2, Karaka School take a large number of Intermediate students to sports camp to compete in up to 40 different sports, against other schools for cups.

Your name would appear on the back of their sports camp hoodie, which then becomes part of the Karaka School uniform for the rest of the year.

Please email Kim Sutton if you are interested for your business to be a sponsor in 2025 - kims@karaka.school.nz

PTA News

Uniform Shop

We’d like to add trackpants (with school logo) to the school uniform, available to all ages/sizes. They will be the same ones as the intermediates wear to sports camp. The aim is to reduce the wide mix of trackpants/leggings/tights worn in winter.

They will be $40 each. Sizes 6/8/10/12/14/S/M/L.

Pre-orders (and pre-payment) can be made through Kindo to gauge interest.

Sample sizes have arrived and will be available to try on at the uniform shop on Monday.

Updates from the Wider Community