On Thursday 14th April, Bairds Kindergarten held its termly Awards named ‘The Matariki Awards’,

These termly Celebrations has been a great way to celebrate all we have been working on.

This year we started Whānau Groups of 10 children and families for each staff member. Each group decided on their logo and slogan. The groups were also given a colour which was selected from the AKA main colours used in their logo.

The teams are Taniwhas (Yellow), Phoenix (Red), and Sharks (Blue).

The staff wanted to encourage particpation but mainly attendance. We set up systems to encourage our children to actively attend kindergarten. When a child attends kindergarten, they would get one point (child would place their team colour token in their funnel see picture bottom right) and no attendance but contact made gets half a point. Parents wanted to get into the action too so we made a question of a week feedback system. The parents would answer the question using a sticky note of their team’s colour, each contribtion gets one point (see picture second from bottom right). We have asked questions like, ” What does Waitangi Day mean to you” and “What was your favourite childs book? Have you read it to your own child?” Attendance at the Whānau meetings (committee meetings) teams would also get points for each parent that attends, we have had sports days, fundraising which also teams got points for. Parents also have suggested some creative ways to gain extra points which we will start next term.

Each week points for attendance and extra points were posted for the parents to see. Competition has been heated and we found attendance and parent participation increase even more.

We presented all our children with strenghts they had displayed this term as well as graduating children to primary school. We also presented “Best Attender” from each of our groups and the overall winner for the term.

Final Points were:

Taniwhas 586

Phoenix 585

Sharks 583.

It was an amazing night enjoyed by over the 130 in attendance. Well Done to everyone.