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Western Heights School  
Week 3 T4
 
 
 
 
Western Heights School
Our Vision
We are … Caring, Creative, Confident, Cognisant, Connecting, Contributing, Collaborative.
Our Mission
Our children love to learn to lead as they dream, grow, shine and reflect. 
Love                - ourselves - others - our world 
Learn about     - ourselves - others - our world 
Lead                - ourselves - others - in our world
Our Charter
 
 
 
Calendar of Events
Whanau Time is every second Friday in our hall, starting at 9:45 am sharp. Everyone is warmly welcomed to join us for these special WHS family occasions. Next Whanau Time - Friday 4 November. Rooms 9 and 15 hosting.
WHS Calendar
 
 
 
Saturday 29/10
Marimba Band Festival performance
 
Tuesday 1/11
Diwali Festival Celebrations at WHS
 
Friday 4/11
Whanau Time in our hall starting at 9:45am Rooms 9 and 15 hosting. All welcome.
 
Saturday 5/11
Western Heights competing at Jump Jam Nationals in Tauranga. Go girls!
 
 
Whanau Time Message
 

Last Friday rooms 6 and 14 hosted Whanau Time. As usual, it was a very special event. Our children are so talented and full of energy, enthusiasm and spontaneity - as the  Nae Nae dance at the end so clearly demonstrated.
I have to give my sincere apologies for my being on the phone and unavailable for much of Whanau Time on Friday - I was informed my dad in Christchurch had entered end-stage heart failure, so frantic efforts to arrange flights etc were my main focus, and I did my best to fit everything else around that.
My presentation focused on Girl Power - so I had half the audience won over at least. 
I have spoken a few times about amazing girls - the message has been that girls can do anything, be anything, achieve anything if they believe and if they have GRIT.
Our girls touch team trained long and hard and they believed they could win - even when it looked like it might just be too hard.
They showed GRIT - and they were Champions. (So were our boys but our focus Friday was on Girl Power).
One of my favourite ever Girl Power stories is about a lady named Wilma Rudolph.
Wilma Rudolph was born in 1940 - she was the 20th of 22 children. She weighed only as much as 4 blocks of butter - 2kg. Her family had so little and Wilma faced some massive challenges.
Not only was she born tiny, she was born very sick.
As a child Wilma had - Measles - Mumps - Scarlet Fever - Chicken Pox - Double Pneumonia and Polio but could not go to the local hospital because it was for  Whites people only.
Wilma was told she would never walk and would have to wear steel braces all her life.
A lot like the ones Forrest Gump wore.
Mum drove Wilma 80 km to a Black People hospital several times every week for two years to get Wilma the help she needed.nEveryone in her family helped and encouraged her to persevere.
After 12 years of illness and steel braces, Wilma gave up the braces and for the first time ever finally felt free. Most people would just be happy to be able to walk for the first time but not Wilma. She decided to do much more than just walk - she wanted to become an athlete.
Wilma followed her sister into basketball and for three years sat on the bench as a ‘reserve’ - not playing a single game. She never gave up hope though.
Wilma had GRIT in the substitute pit - she practised every day and trained harder than ever.
In her second year at College she became the starting guard for her team and led them to the State Championship.
At age 16, just four years after taking off her steel leg braces, Wilma competed for the USA at the 1956 Olympic games in Melbourne. She won a bronze medal in the 4 x 100 metres relay.
At the 1960 Olympics in Rome, she became the first American woman ever to win three gold medals in a single Olympics.
     100 metres 
     200 metres
     4 x 100 metres relay
The girl who began life with the ‘broken legs’ and weighing only one third as much as a healthy baby usually would - was now a world record holder.
Wilma’s GRIT paid off - she won many wonderful awards…
1960 - Associated Press International Female Athlete of the Year
1994 - Inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame
2003 - United States Postal Service issue a stamp in her honour.
Nothing could ever stop Wilma from achieving her dreams.
“My mother taught me very early to believe I could achieve any accomplishment I wanted to. 
My first goal was to walk without braces.”
Wilma’s message to you is, hopefully you will believe in yourselves. Hopefully if you don’t make the A Team - or even the team - straight away, you won’t give up. Hopefully you will have GRIT like Wilma and be your own champion.
I left everyone (well mainly the girls) with a final suggestion for a message they could perhaps pin to their mirror to reflect on each morning…
 

 
 
Family Update to Above
 

Sincere thanks to everyone who texted, emailed and/or spoke to me about my dad - it’s truly appreciated.
My dad was in end-stage heart failure when I arrived. 
He was supposed to be on the road to recovery but instead took a bad turn Friday morning. I was there by 3pm and he was pleased to see Jax and I, and held our hands tightly and said some things - hard to understand  - but we could make some of it out. I am so pleased we did come down early though as after that Friday afternoon he was mostly out to it.
My dad passed on Monday morning. I am so grateful to you all for your support at this time, and so grateful I had time with him while he was still able to talk to us and hear my appreciation, love and respect.
I will see you all next Monday morning - take care.

 
 
Important Follow Up to Parent Survey
 

 I was reflecting last week on the number of parents who feel happy and comfortable just to call in to my office and have a chat and a catch-up. I really love that.
I must also reflect that a number of you noted in your survey responses that I am a busy person and some of you feel hesitant to bother me.
Please can I tell you all - it is not a bother. I love hearing from you, connecting with you, or having the opportunity to help in some way if I can.
Please forgive me if I have made you feel I am too busy to be interrupted - I really want to be here for you all.

 
 
Western Heights Community Garden “Common Ground”
 







Working Bee
Saturday 29 October 9am - 1pm.
We will be putting down a stone path around our existing garden boxes, as well as weeding the gardens, cleaning the ground and installing an automatic watering system. 
Come for 4 hours or whatever time you have.
Bring a spade, rake or just your helping hands
Morning tea provided 
Children welcome under parental supervision. 
Also bring a water bottle, hat, gloves, and wear shoes appropriate for gardening.
All Parents/Caregivers, Staff and Students are welcome
To register email
nicholah@westernheights.school.nz                 
or see Nichola in Room 3. Thanks.

In preparation for our Working Bee, Abi and Gabe  donated some tools and supplies. We are most grateful.

 
 
Kiwis Also Need Some Help… Now Friday 28 November
 

Help Save Our Kiwi
by supporting our Whole School Morning Tea on the courts at 10:30am
on Friday 28 October. If you are happy to support this worthy cause, please bring a Gold Coin Donation.

 
 
Stepping Back  
  In Time




 
 
  Tree-mendous Gift to WHS from Arataki Centre

 
 
 
C of the Week - Collaboration:
 







At Western Heights we currently focus on the Seven Cs - see poster picture at right.
One of those Cs is Collaborative.
We know this is an important skill and disposition to have, partly because the New Zealand Business Roundtable in a report to government expressed their concern that a lot of University graduates and job applicants had ‘discreet’ knowledge, that is specific knowledge they have gained in achieving their degree qualification. However, many of those graduates were not good at problem solving, asking questions or working collaboratively in a team to solve problems.
Here then, are some thoughts on Collaboration.
Excerpted from “The ABCs of How We Learn: 26 Scientifically Proven Approaches, How They Work, and When to Use Them,” (c) 2016 by Daniel L. Schwartz, Jessica M. Tsang and Kristen P. Blair.  
The following is from the chapter “L is for Listening and Sharing.”
Learning more together than alone:
With listening and sharing, learners try to construct joint understandings. Listening and sharing are the cornerstones of collaborative learning. We can learn more working together than working alone.
A little history lesson: The study of cooperation arose after World War II as part of a research program on conflict resolution (Deutsch, 1977). Negotiation depends on cooperation, and negotiation is a preferable resolution to conflict than war. From this starting point, one reason to use cooperative learning is to help students develop better skills at cooperating (e.g., Johnson & Johnson, 1987). 
Subsequent research discovered a second reason to use cooperative learning: when students collaborate on class assignments, they learn the material better. Small group work can yield both better abilities to cooperate and better learning of the content.
Simply putting students into small groups, however, does not guarantee desirable outcomes. Success depends on listening and sharing. Listening and sharing as cooperative techniques can alleviate frustration and, more importantly, allow group learning to surpass what would be possible by a single student (Slavin, 1995). 
Effective collaborative learning yields gains in motivation and conceptual understanding. Ideally, it also helps students learn how to cooperate in the future.
How Listening and Sharing Works:
Everything is more fun with someone else!! Well, at least it should be. Many college students dislike group projects. Some of this is because they think they can do this better alone than together. But more often than not, it is because one or more of five ingredients is missing: 
joint attention, listening, sharing, coordinating, and perspective taking.
Joint Attention
To collaborate, people need to pay attention to the same thing. If two children are building separate sand castles, they are not collaborating. They are engaged in parallel play. The abilities to maintain joint attention are foundational and emerge around the first year of life. Infants and parents can share attention to the same toy. Next, infants learn to follow the parents gaze to maintain joint visual attention. Finally, the infants learn to direct their parents’ attention (Carpenter, Nagell, Tomasello, Butterworth, & Moore, 1998). Visual attention provides an index of what people are thinking about.
Using a common visual anchor (e.g., a common diagram) can help people maintain joint visual attention. In one study, Schneider and Pea (2013) had partners complete a circuit task, where participants had to figure out which circuit controlled which outcome in a simulation. They collaborated remotely over headsets. They saw the same image on their respective computers, so it was possible to maintain joint visual attention. In one condition, the authors used eye tracking: a moving dot showed each participant where the other was looking, so it was easier for them to maintain joint visual attention. These partners exhibited better collaboration, and they learned more from the task than did partners who did not have the eye-tracking dot to support joint attention.
Listening
Thoughts can be much more complex than an eye gaze. It also helps to hear what people are thinking. A common situation is that people fail to listen to one another because they are too busy talking or they just discount other people’s ideas. 
Sharing
Sharing operates on two levels - sharing common goals and sharing ideas. First, if people do not share some level of common goal, they will collaborate at cross-purposes. Second, if nobody shares ideas, collaboration will not go very far. In school, getting people to share can be difficult. Learners may be shy, or they may not have good strategies for sharing. Children often do not know how to offer constructive criticism or build on an idea. It can be helpful to give templates for sharing, such as two likes and a wish, where the “wish” is a constructive criticism or a building idea.
Coordinating
Have you ever had the experience of a group discussion, in which you just cannot seem to get your timing right? Either you always interrupt before the speaker is done, or someone else grabs the floor exactly when the other person finishes and before you can jump in. Collaboration requires a great deal of turn-taking coordination. When the number of collaborators increases, it is also important to partition roles and opportunities to interact. You may hope coordination evolves organically, which it might. But it might turn into a Lord of the Flies scenario instead. It can be useful to establish collaborative structures and rules.
Perspective Taking
A primary reason for collaborating is that people bring different ideas to the table. The first four ingredients - joint attention, listening, sharing, and coordinating - support the exchange of information. The fifth ingredient is understanding why people are offering the information they do. (This often goes beyond what speakers can possibly show and say). People need to understand the point of view behind what others are saying, so they can interpret it more fully. This requires perspective taking. This is where important learning takes place, because learners can gain a new way to think about matters. It can also help differentiate and clarify one’s own ideas. A conflict of opinions can enhance learning (Johnson & Johnson, 2009).
An interesting study on perspective taking (Kulkarni, Cambre, Kotturi, Bernstein, & Klemmer, 2015) occurred in a massive open online course (MOOC) with global participation. In their online discussions, learners were encouraged to review lecture content by relating it to their local context. The researchers placed people into low or high diversity groups based on the spread of geographic regions among participants. Students in the most geographically diverse discussion groups saw the highest learning gains, presumably because they had the opportunity to consider more different perspectives than geographically uniform groups did.
If you call in and visit our MLE area in our senior school you will often see wonderful examples of collaborative learning taking place.
One of our goals is to grow self-managing, self-motivating, self-moderating, independent leaders of our own learning. Such children understand they come to school to learn. They are engaged and enthused, and they are open to collaboration. They engage in rich discussion, display respect for the ideas of others, and are open to changing their thinking.
It makes Western Heights such an awesome place for children to Love to Learn to Lead.

 
 
Growth Mindset - the Habits of Highly Successful People
 







1.  They say what they mean and mean what they say. They are careful with their own words. Successful people don’t make you guess what they mean. They tell the truth and make it very simple for others to understand their objectives and intentions in order to work well together.
2.   They are self-aware. They know who they are, they have a defined vision, and they know their strengths and weaknesses. Successful people understand their responsibilities, roles, and identity.
3.  They manage their time by managing their emotions. Everyone can plan for the next day by allocating tasks into their schedule, but successful people go beyond that. They do what they need to do even it makes them uncomfortable. They manage their emotions better than everyone else.
4.  They start before feeling ready. Successful people never wait for the perfect timing to take action because they understand that there is no such thing as the perfect timing. They make decisions and take actions.
They eliminate choices and options. Successful people are focused - they reduce their options. 
5.  They show up. They show up even when nobody else does - not just for the wins and celebrations, they show up during the grind, and in the face of fear and adversity.
6.  They contribute before they ask. This is what made them successful. They find ways to provide value to others (their partners, team, customers) before they even ask for anything in return.
7.  They time-travel by learning from others. They read to learn ideas that took the author 20 years to figure out, in 20 minutes. They value mentorship to avoid mistakes and get through challenges. They hire smart people  to compensate their own short-comings.
8.  They are consistent. Successful people put in the work day in and day out. They understand that results never appear from nowhere on the first day. They have faith in the power of tiny actions (Kaizen - small steps), and always aim for the long-term results. They win because they’re playing a long game while everyone else goes short.
9.  They value true relationships. Successful people know their success is due to their mentor, friends, partners and team members.
10.  They see themselves as lucky. We experience hundreds of incidents and events in a day, and a slight change of any outcome could turn our life to a very different path. Successful people believe they are lucky to be successful and feel grateful for that.

 
 
  A Weekly Series on Ways to Boost Brain Power

 
 
 
Tutoring Available 
 



‘Reach for the moon, then if you miss you will fall amongst the stars’

Tutoring available in
     Mathematics
      Spelling
      Reading
      Writing
      Art / Craft
      Study Skills

Tutors are qualified and experienced teachers based in Te Atatu South. Phone 0211342517.

 
 
Spring Festival Chinese Culture Lessons: 
 

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If your child is interested in Chinese culture, food or language, come along to try some Chinese Culture lessons during the Spring Festival season at the Te Atatu Peninsula Community Centre. 
Visit the Te Atatu Spring Festival facebook page or     www.mandarinheroes.com    to check out the lesson schedule. 
e-mail Ray on mandarinheroes@gmail.com to enrol. 

 
 
  Food for Thought from a Great Thinker  
 
 
  A Halloween Alternative For All
 
 
 
  Halloween Walks and Rides
It’s time to dust off the cobwebs from your dress-up box and join one of our annual Halloween rides. Witches, warlocks, ghosts, ghouls, princesses, and superheroes will all be taking centre stage as they pedal along Twin Streams, Henderson.
This is a  wonderful opportunity to get out and about on some of our wonderful paths and discover great places to ride (scooters and walkers welcome). There will be spot prizes and trick-or-treating to make for a thrilling family event. 

For more information simon.vincent@at.govt.nz  or ph 094474467


 
 
 
 


 
 
 
  Dog Poetry  
 
 
Welcome to our Newest Western Heights Whanau
 


The warmest of warm Western Heights welcomes to
sorry I am away this week, so this week’s welcomes will feature next week.
We are delighted to have you join our Western Heights whanau and hope and trust you all feel right at home here, are happy, and Loving, Learning and Leading.

 
 
 
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Western Heights School
126 Sturges Road
Henderson
Auckland 0612
P -  09 8361213
M - 021 779 009
 
 
 
 
 
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