By Nick Leith | Posted: Wednesday March 22, 2023
Resilience week at Casebrook and some 'thank yous'...
Kia ora koutou
We’ve been talking with our students and community about resilience this week. One of our key values is Perseverance - Hiringa and at times this can be the most important value we need to demonstrate during the school year.
We had Jake Bailey in on Monday to talk with the staff, students and parents/caregivers about his experiences with a highly aggressive form of cancer aged 18 and what he learned about resilience.
Jake uses the 4S framework:
Slow down - give yourself time
Salvaging - seek out things that make you happy when it gets hard
Streamlining - spend time on things that train your brain to feel good - you can't dwell on only the negative stuff
Stand alongside - we do better with other people to help us through tough times.
As parents it's about enabling our kids to see the positives and learning from moments when they're confronted with challenges or adversity - we have to enable our young people to learn their way through these challenges, with positive support where needed.
School life is full of daily challenges, most often good ones, some not so good! A reminder to our community that we have many systems here for support, and often it is about knowing who best to talk to to access that support. Our class teachers are a good first place to start and then there is Mark Russell, our Learning Support Coordinator. He is the best in the business and is the perfect starting point for any child with learning or social needs.
In other news, we are nearing the celebration end of our term. After a very successful CAIMS Summer Tournament (big thanks to Tom Straker for his organisation) we will be celebrating Casebrook challenge achievements in a couple of weeks. There is nothing like receiving your first Casebrook gold badge in assembly so we look forward to those achievements, still plenty of time for students to show some perseverance to get that done.
A big thanks to our Year 8 students who have done a marvellous job of helping our Year 7 students learn the ways of Casebrook life. A perfect example of this is the sheer volume of students attending Pasifika on Tuesday (over 170!) and enjoying being part of a wider group, as well as our Casebrook singers and other extension activities. Plenty more of these opportunities to come with sporting teams as trials begin ready for the winter terms.
Lastly, we see our final Year 8 camp and Year 7 EOTC activities complete (almost) over the next week. This has been a term impacted by weather like no other for our EOTC coordinator, Char Rennie. A huge thanks to her for the amount of time she has spent re-organising things and to the parents/caregivers for their support of this; we hate cancelling stuff here! We look forward to seeing our parent helpers at our EOTC drinks on Wednesday 5th April - please come, we’re actually pretty cool people to spend time with in the evening (for teachers anyway). So let us thank you!
Ngā mihi nui
Nick Leith