Oromahoe School
The Oromahoe School Community prides itself on its friendly, caring, family atmosphere where all children are treated with respect and honoured for their individual strengths and contribution to school life. A spacious, rural setting, large playing field, shade trees, children’s sculpture and mosaic work enhance the natural environment. Oromahoe School was established more than 100 years ago to serve the local community and staffed by teachers from the Mission, later becoming a Native School. It is now a three teacher school attended by sixty six children, who come from a very wide catchment area (both urban and rural), 40% of whom identify as Maori. Their families make the choice to attend a small rural primary school, fifteen minutes South of Kerikeri on SH 10, catering for years one to eight. Less than 20% of the children live within the school bus run, the rest being brought to school by private car from as far away as Moerewa, Kerikeri and Waimate North.
Oromahoe school is an Enviroschool and in 2008 we were awarded an Enviroschool Silver Award for our work in the area of Education for Sustainability. Each class has a designated vegetable garden and the senior students care for and continue to plant a food forest with a variety of fruit trees. We follow the permaculture philosophy in the development of the grounds. The students are involved in the design and implemenattion of fun, interesting learning and play spaces, planting more trees to provide shade, bird habitats and food, developing a sustainable butterfly garden and many other Environmental Education projects.
In line with our continued focus on high standards of literacy achievement for all, the school is constantly upgrading the library to provide an enticing variety of reading materials, with all students encouraged to borrow up to five books at a time. Senior student librarians take responsibility for issuing books and creating interesting and topical displays. The use of digital Information and communication technology is also fostered with a pod of laptops being available for use across the school.
We value learning through the Arts, producing acclaimed whole school theatrical shows, participating in combined schools’ singing festivals, art exhibitions,and encouraging performers to visit our school. In the last two years we have held very successful whole school Arts Intensive weeks, encompassing all of the domains; dance , drama, music and visual arts.
The children participate enthusiastically in many aspects of physical education, and excel in interschool sports events especially athletics and cross country events. This winter we fielded a very successful 7th grade soccer team and a combined netball team.
The school recognizes the value of teacher professional development in addressing the diverse needs of its students and continues to designate a generous budget to support this. We believe it is essential to support a learning environment in which the teachers establish meaningful, healthy and happy relationships with individual children, especially for Maori and for boys, which foster improved achievement in all areas of the curriculum. The BOT also employs student support workers (teacher aides) across the school to help lower the student-adult ratio.
Teachers use formative assessment to inform the feedback they give to students about their learning success and to feed forward towards the next learning steps. This learning talk significantly improves the engagement with learning for all students but especially for those who are at risk of not achieving. This, coupled with teachers’ understanding of what constitutes good teaching, results in excellent student achievement. across the curriculum. Over all year levels we have 80% of our children reading at or above their chronological age. Seventy five percent of our Maori girls and fifty eight percent of our Maori boys are reading at or above their chronological age.
In 2009 the science curriculum was the focus of teachers professional learning, another example of our commitment to continue to deliver quality education to our students and their families. The School is currently participating in an ICT Professional Development Cluster with 12 other local schools.
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