Week 2 Term 3 News

Dear Parents and Caregivers

Thank you to everyone who attended a mid year parent, teacher and child interview this week. We had an absolutely fantastic turn out with around 92% of families making a booking and around 85% actually attending the interviews. This is a long way up on previous years and shows that parents are interested and active in their child/ren education. Please take note of the messages and actions that were discussed at the interview.

On Tuesday afternoon around an hour twenty minutes after school closed there was an accident where a car hit a young boy who doesn’t attend our school on English St outside the front gate. Police and ambulance were called but luckily there were only very minor injuries due to the low speed of the car and defensive driving of the driver. It could have been a lot worse and is a reminder to us all about talking to children about crossing roads safely, watching young children when they are close to roads and driving defensively around schools. Please talk to your children about these messages.

Text message alerts from school

In emergencies we have been using text messages to update all of our families. This is a quick way to get into contact with all of our families whom we have current up to date contacts for. We are going to continue to do this but we would also like to provide more text updates and reminders for things such as special assemblies, learning celebrations, and trips. The system we use for emergencies costs for each text so is inappropriate for these messages. So we would like as many families to sign up for this free service below.

Effectively you are following our face book page via text. It costs us nothing and costs you nothing. So please follow the instructions below to sign on.

1.    Text follow riccartonp to 8987

2.    You will receive a text saying you are following @riccartonp

3.    You may receive a text asking you to join twitter. Just ignore this text, as you will still receive the texts any way.

4.    You are now set up and will receive text updates about events at school

5.    To stop texts Send OFF @riccartonp to 8987

Please note: Unfortunately if you are a 2degrees customer you may have to sign up to twitter to receive the texts via a twitter feed, if this is the case, sign up to twitter and follow riccartonp.

Congratulations to the group of around ten parents who took part in the Reading Together workshops over the last term. This was the first time we have offered this programme for parents at Riccarton and it was offered to all parents of children in rooms 4 and 5. This term we are offering it to parents of children in rooms, 6,9 and 11. It runs over 4 evenings with each session lasting an hour. It is research based and children of parents attending this programme generally go up 3 reading levels within a few months of their parents completing the programme. Details will come home to the above classes soon, so be quick and book your spot.

Have a fantastic week and please encourage your children to be Respectful, responsible Real Learners!