A visual first six months of 2024.....

January is the time for Creative and Talented lessons.....

February means Knitting

....... and Horticulture

March means Technology

 ...and Woodwork

April is time for our grade 7 pupils to read to grade 1 pupils

May is a celebration of the Elmer Books by David McKee

June means one-to-one devices, Chrome Books, robotics and coding.....

We are 75 years old!

As the longest serving principal of the school, I took on the job of writing the full school history. It has taken me about ten years so far as delved into PTA records, financial statements, minutes of School Committee meetings and the like. Previous principals have been very like me as I found very good record keeping – even the Attendance records of all children since 1948! I can’t share the full history in this magazine, or even the highlights of each year but I would like to give a ‘summary’ of 75 years of excellence.
Before 1948: As the first Garden City in South Africa, the suburb of Pinelands was created in a pine forest from 1921. Pinelands Primary School was founded in 1931 as the first school in the suburb.
1948: Our school was founded as a whites only bilingual school in the northern end of Pinelands mainly for soldiers returning from the Second World War. Originally called Pinelands Primary Number 2, the first official principal was J H G Mckenzie, started with five female staff members and ninety-four pupils: sixty-three English and thirty-one Afrikaans.
Pieter-Dirk Uys was one of the first pupils and his mom and dad wrote the school song and the music!
1950: Four classrooms were added to the seven existing, ones, and a tennis court added in 1951. Four hundred and thirty pupils attended the school by then.
1956: All the Afrikaans children left the school to create Laerskool Oude Molen, on the grounds currently inhabited by Vista Nova High School.
1966: Pinehurst Primary was created, under the name of Extension 6 School!  
1968 – 1973: Henward Honiball was principal and during his time the library was built and then extended. Cape Town was experiencing a drought and the field took strain because hoses weren’t allowed! School fees were R1,50 per term!
1974 – 1976: Selwyn Hall was appointed principal and the first school magazine was written. The school pool, extensions to the playground and off-street parking were built. Selwyn was a keen sportsman and the sports at the school took off; some were netball, rugby, cricket, swimming, tennis, tennisette and athletics. He was also good at promoting the cultural aspects of school and the first play was performed and music, choir, drama and poetry teams were entered into local Eisteddfods. Several pupils from this era went on to perform at national level in cricket, gymnastics, swimming, tennis and hockey!
1977 – 1996: Bob Shepherd continued the excellent work from before. Most of the sport teams were still unbeatable, the finances of the school were healthy and the school building was revamped. Soccer was introduced as a sport in 1988. The cultural side of the school took off, with many children involved in music, speech and drama, ballet and chess. Pupil numbers were down though, with only an average of two hundred and fifty pupils per year. School fees in 1983 were R12 per family per term! Aftercare was started in 1987 because the economic downtown now required moms to work too!
PNPS joined other previously white schools to extend enrolment to all races in 1990 which added numbers to the pupil population. Three hundred and sixty-four pupils were enrolled in 1992 and school fees were R720 per pupil. isiXhosa lessons were started that year too! Water restrictions again affected the school field in 1994. In the final two years of his principalship, education was in the doldrums, with many teachers ready to leave education. This resulted in a mass exodus of teachers all around the country in 1996, and included about five staff from PNPS, including Bob, the deputy and HOD of the Foundation Phase in December 1996.
1997 – 2023: I took over in 1997 with seventeen white class teachers, three white music teachers, three white aftercare staff, one and a half white admin staff and the only staff of colour were in cleaning and maintenance! Four hundred and twenty-five pupils were enrolled, with most of them white. Teacher aides were introduced in 1998 and also that year the first teacher of colour, Rose-Anne Lawrence, was appointed! 

Now in 2024 the school has about seventy staff with more than fifty percent staff of colour! The school has continued to flourish academically, introducing new subjects like computers, technology, woodwork, needlework, coding and robotics, horticulture and creative and talented. The learning support department grew from one teacher who came two mornings a week, to a full complement of about ten staff, providing alternate and individual learning opportunities to all pupils. The uniform was changed in 2003 to create a more South African informal, gender-neutral uniform. 
I also introduced animal ‘husbandry’, safe places around the school, started a Reggio Emilia inspired preschool, created a healthy tuckshop, the Snax Café, and changed the ‘discipline’ strategy to narrative therapy and restorative practices. Technology was introduced and welcomed everywhere - from a computer room with stand-alone PCs to one-to-one devices, tablets, laptops and banks of Chrome books.
One of the biggest achievements during this time was leading the school during Covid! Although it was like steering a ship without a compass or rudder, the result for our school has been positive! The school management had to look at everything we did, and the way we did it, and this resulted in a far superior offering in curriculum, timetable, sports offerings, use of space, use of staff and traffic flow.
The school has also achieved many awards between 1997 and 2024; these are a few……
• a Proudly South African Award in 2003, 
• Overcoming Adversity in 2022, 
• academic awards in Language and Mathematics over the years, 
• five pupils in the top ten in the country’s Horizon Maths competition in 2013, 
• the National Science Olympiad for primary pupils in 2012, 
• five pupils in the top fifty of the ABSA art competition, 
• Astronomical National Award, for primary schools, 
• in 2013, the Western Cape Inclusive Education recognition award, 
• a second in the Metro Central Maths Competition in 2013 and several firsts in 2015, 
• joint second in the Living Maths Olympiad, 
• ASHOKA Changemaker School accreditation in 2015, 
• a silver medal at the Cape Town Eskom Science Expo, 
• won the Wonder League Robotics international competition in 2017, 
• several medals at the Royal Philatelic Society’s annual competitions, 
• several provincial, national and international chess players, athletes, judokas, gymnasts, cricket 

        and hockey players 
• seven of our children spoke in the Parliamentary Chambers in 2012! 
As I will retire at the end of this year, I have written the history of the school to ensure that all this is not lost. My thanks to all those, who, over the years have contributed their thoughts, experiences and factual information to this ‘epistle’, and I encourage those who still wish to do so, to email thaakirahfritz@pnps.co.za.

One year to go!

This year has been quite a personal journey for me. Although I have known for years that public servants have to retire when sixty-five, I have only realised how close this is this year. To help me process this ‘divorce’ from my ‘baby’ I have started to redecorate the ‘principal’s office’ and start moving my personal items back home. Luckily Shereen and I have Elmer’s Space to operate from this has made the move slightly easier. A new carpet, new furniture and a warmer colour has now made this space a lovely meeting room for all to share until the new principal takes over in January 2025.

The other part of the personal journey is finding the right person to continue our journey. PNPS is a very special place; the primary school I wished that I attended in my youth so choosing a successor is difficult. The post was advertised early in September and is currently being processed by the education department and the Governing Body. The plan is to have someone appointed in January 2024 for January 2025 so the current Governing Body and Management Team can work closely with the appointee to ensure a smooth takeover.

After twenty-eight years of my life focusing on one school community, and building the school of your dreams, how do you release this mission and pass it on to someone? That I haven’t dealt with yet, and luckily I still have a year to come to terms with that. In the meantime, I urge you to support all the processes happening currently and the new person who is appointed as the right people will be choosing the right person on your behalf: the worst possible thing for me would be to hear the school community withdrawing their support. The school is only as strong as you, your children and the faith you have in the school. After twenty-eight years of building that, my wish is that the school would continue to flourish, grow, innovate and diversify even more, and continue to be a WCED flagship school on which ‘other school’s model themselves’ as we say in our Vision statement.

Safe places at Pinelands North

Over the years the school has adapted itself from a school we as adults attended, to one that cares about individuals within the whole. Not all children are happy to play outside at breaktime or learn in a room with another thirty children. Realising this has made us create spaces for children to ‘be’ when the world is too overwhelming.

One of the first spaces created was a quiet games space outside my office. We had noticed that some children couldn’t understand the team games at break and would often get into skirmishes with their peers. We regularly place logic games, puzzles, colouring equipment and gender-neutral toys like dolls’ houses and car garages on these tables and we find that pairs of children, even between grades, end up playing quietly in the passage during break and before school. Also, before school the library is open from 7:00. Children arrive at school and race to the library to play board games, complete puzzles or find a little hidden comfortable spot to read on their own. The library is also open until 16:00 in the afternoon and families use this space to read or work together too.

When we first introduced animals as ‘therapy animals’, we used Beck se Plek, named after Buzzy Beck, a former deputy of the school until 1996. In this enclosed outside quad, bunnies, guinea pigs, chickens and ducks live happily together and provide a welcome respite to children during breaktimes. Every single break, children from mainly grade 1 to 3, find an animal to cuddle and feed until the bell rings for class time again. Grade 3 pupils who have consistently assisted with the animals are appointed ‘bunny monitors’, and they wear this name with great pride! 

In 2017 the theme of our year was “Pushing Boulders”, named after the book by the same name by Athol Williams. Athol was, at that stage, an uncle of children at the school and is still a famous poet and author. During that year we focused on grit and determination with the children and gave them some strategies to use when confronted with difficult parts of their lives. This space is still used as a quiet space: there is a large chess set to play with and children sit around in quiet groups during breaks, away from the hustle and bustle of the other playgrounds. 

Another quiet ‘playground’ is the Mandela Peace Garden. This little quiet garden connected to aftercare, was created by Aunty Suzi, the previous head of aftercare, and a few aftercarians who wanted a calm space to be in the afternoons. They planted indigenous cuttings and collected artifacts such as bird cages, tea pots and fairies to decorate the space.

Learning support has always been a safe place to be: inside the room there are always adults to help children debrief and in the passage there are more games to keep unhappy children busy. A place which was never a safe place for us adults when we were at school, was the staffroom – I remember we weren’t even allowed to walk past that section of the passage! At PNPS children are welcomed into the space: as individuals, as groups to teach and as places to meet. The veranda alongside the staff room is often used as an extra classroom for small groups of children. 

This year the staff created Elmer’s Space. Situated in one of the classrooms with two doors permanently open, this space has been decorated with a huge wooden Elmer, created for one of our previous school plays, and two smaller patchwork Elmers, created by the Wyatt family. Shereen Stadler, the deputy, Thaakirah Fritz, our media intern, and I are now based in this space, waiting for staff and children to join us. Sometimes we are joined by children and staff needing support and sometimes children are sent to us for a debrief if their day is not going well. Sometimes this is just a good quiet place to sit when your classroom is too rowdy or a place to quietly recover from a bout of crying. Baloo, my Indian Ringneck parrot, is also based there and he entertains all who go by. Accessibility is the key to this space: the furniture is arranged to make it look inviting and the staff are based on the outside of a horseshoe, which makes the visitors feel included.

For many children at school in South Africa, school is not a safe place to be, but here in the little suburb of Pinelands, all children have many to choose from – a school I wished to attend when I was small!

Can school be fun?

 The role of fun at school is crucial for creating a positive and engaging learning environment. When pupils enjoy coming to school, they are more likely to be motivated to learn, participate in class activities and develop positive relationships with teachers and peers.

Here are some ways that fun can be incorporated into the school day:

1. Laughter: 

Laughter is a great way to relieve stress and promote a positive atmosphere in the classroom. Teachers can incorporate humour into their lessons or use funny videos or jokes to break up the monotony of the day.

2. Links between teachers and pupils: 

Creating a personal connection between teachers and pupils can help to build trust and respect. Teachers can share personal stories or interests with their pupils to help them see them as real people, not just authority figures.

3. Seeing staff as human: 

Teachers can also show their human side by sharing their own struggles or challenges. This can help pupils to see that everyone has difficulties and that it's okay to ask for help when needed.

4. Lightening the day: 

Taking a break from academic work can help to refresh pupils and give them a mental break. Teachers can incorporate fun activities or games into the day to help pupils relax and recharge. Walking around the field quickly or doing cartwheels on the playground between lessons creates a little excitement to assist those who find it hard to sit still in the classroom as well as creating a lighter moment in the day for all.

5. Stress relievers: 

Schools can also provide stress relievers such as mindfulness exercises or relaxation techniques to help pupils manage stress and anxiety. At Pinelands North there are several spaces for children to relieve stress: the Mandela Peace Garden, Elmer’s Space, Quiet Quad, Beck se Plek, learning support and outside the principal’s office.

6. Conversation starters: 

Fun activities can also be used as conversation starters, encouraging pupils to share their thoughts and ideas with each other. This can help to build relationships and create a sense of community in the classroom.

7. Making school memorable: 

Fun activities can help to create positive memories of school, which can have a lasting impact on pupils' attitudes towards learning and education. Children won’t remember the tests they do but they will remember School in Action days, Readers are Leaders, Hooked on Books and Derby Days.

To incorporate fun into the school day, teachers and staff can brainstorm ideas for activities or games that align with their curriculum and pupil interests. They can also survey pupils to find out what activities they enjoy and what they would like to see more of in the classroom. Finally, it's important for teachers and staff to model a positive attitude and a willingness to have fun themselves, as this can create a culture of fun and learning throughout the school. Staff at our school have monthly Fun Days where different grades will decide what the staff will wear on a particular day. Fun days we have had recently are: wear a strange hat, crazy hair day, different shoe or sock day and a touch of bling. This dressing up by adults makes children laugh at the beginning of their day and so their load is lightened for the day. The important thing to remember in creating fun is that it doesn’t have to cost anything to implement – all it requires a little imagination and some good ‘gees’!

Building Community at Pinelands North

One negative about Covid was that it kept people away from each other. Pinelands North has always encouraged families to be part of the education solution and so Covid broke down the community vibe because we couldn’t interact as partners face to face. This year we have to focus on rebuilding our community and her a few ideas we have used to do this: 

• Welcome family members back into the passages and classrooms

While children are being dropped off or collected, staff are available to chat casually to families. Besides our usual parent meetings each grade will have their own ‘school in action’ day this year so that all family members can actually follow their children through a normal day and experience schooling today for themselves. Trust is built when parents understand exactly what goes on in every classroom.

• Focus on gratitude

We thank our parents, the staff and children for playing their part in our big picture, even if not everybody is playing a big part. Showing gratitude for small things makes others want to please the organization more and then more people will want to play a positive role to the benefit of everybody.

• Invest in the people of the community

We look out for opportunities to coach, share or workshop with parents, grandparents, pupils and their caregivers, interns, volunteers and staff. Every learning opportunity gives someone else a skill that they can use in furthering their learning in their own lives. This year we have employed thirteen Presidential Interns too: these are young unemployed youth are now assisting with art, sport and music classes, facilitating children with special needs and providing another set of eyes in classrooms.

• Encourage pupil voices

The best way to ‘know’ what is really going on behind the scenes is to ask children informally. Good adult and child relationships in a school allow children to voice opinions about staff, about safe and unsafe places at school and about their own home realities. We have staff specially trained and available to ‘listen actively’ and to act upon the advice or information given.

• Have fun, play and laugh at school

Laughter changes vibes. School should be to create opportunities to laugh, play and make schooling fun. Our staff regularly hold fun days when they might wear two different shoes to school, encourage children and staff to wear pyjamas or wear their clothes backwards. Just tiny things like this lighten the load of life and create smiles in classrooms as school starts.

• Daily shout outs

Why not catch people in the act of doing the right thing instead of the wrong? Our staff and children to look at the world through new lenses and encourage kindness, generosity and good habits by announcing what they witness over the intercom during the day.

• Shared conflict resolution language

Our school uses several ways of dealing with conflict, with families as well as the children. By sharing the language used at school to resolve conflict with our families, we encourage them to also resolve conflict at home in a similar way. If parents need to be informed of some school conflict, they will  then understand the process used too. One great way of resolving conflict is to use narrative therapy; our school tries to change people’s stories, about themselves and about others, through this process.

• Acts of kindness

Encourage acts of kindness; between people at school and those at home. Remembering a birthday, calling when you hear a family pet has died or just checking in because you thought of someone are all kind acts which show you care about the people in your community. We try to follow up regularly with our families – short emails or Whatsapp or voice notes let our families know we are thinking of them in difficult times.

• Pay it forward

A great project for the whole family is to work out who is in need around them and ask them then to ‘pay it forward’. Simple ideas like buying a pair of shoes for someone in need, offering to babysit a colicky baby or the neighbours’ dog are some ideas families have used to bring happiness to others and therefore also to themselves. We have used this idea as a holiday project for our families and it worked so well – each child was given a tin to fill with coins and then the money inside was used to ‘pay it forward’.

None of the above ideas cost money: they just take time and a little extra effort on behalf of all members of the school community. When a school community is happy, feels welcomed and safe, then the children in the school benefit hugely!

Our Inclusive Journey is Acknowledged Worldwide!

 What an exciting but exhausting year 2022 has been so far! Early in March we were invited to enter a competition: Do you think your school is world class? Five categories were offered, and we decided to enter them all as we truly believe we are world class! That decision resulted in five people spending five full days writing why PNPS is world class in Overcoming Adversity, Innovation, Sustaining Healthy Lives, Environmental Action and in Community Collaboration. 

We received great news in May but were sworn to confidentiality until 9 June when the whole world would receive a press release, announcing that Pinelands North was one of ten finalists in Overcoming Adversity! Every finalist was asked to arrange an event in their country on 9 June so that the announcement could be made public knowledge.

Do you know how difficult it is to get well-known personalities, the entire school community, the press, social media and education department officials to an event without being able to tell them why they should attend?  Luckily, we had already invited our school community to some ‘gees’ creating events earlier in the term and so we tagged the idea to that and Youth Day, which in South Africa falls on 16 June, the following week. Overcoming Adversity fits in perfectly with Youth Day! Guests were told that they needed to be on the field between 10:00 and 12:00, wearing colours of the rainbow and to believe that the visit would be worth their while! Our families were asked to bring their children to school for only those two hours that day – and nobody complained!

Tents were erected around the field for each grade to offer the school community an activity - like face painting, flag making, games, doughnut decorating and an opportunity to create mindful bookmarks. Red carpets were laid out, food trucks offered refreshments, a shuttle service offered families to chance to ‘park and ride’ and the marimba team entertained us with foot stomping music! Photographers were quick to capture every beautiful moment! 

When guests arrived, they were ushered to the astro on the field where a social café atmosphere allowed them to meet and greet, enjoy coffee in their own ‘take home’ souvenir mug or go and enjoy the festivities in the tents.

Premier Alan Winde arrived just before 11:00 when the more formal ceremony was to commence. The choir entertained the school and then Joanne Peers, the Community Support Co-ordinator and parent, set the scene by linking the history of the struggle on Youth Day, with how our school has worked on helping the community overcome adversity over the past while.

One thousand people on the field still didn’t really know why they were there until Premier Alan Winde announced that the school was one of ten finalists in the world, and one of only two in South Africa! The crowd went wild: with South African flags waving, the entire community stood up and sang the National Anthem. What a moving moment for all present!

After the announcement, the school and the education department were allowed to share the information far and wide. Public relations experts, photographers, radio station hosts and the press, and social media influencers were all rallied to tell the story of the school as widely as possible.

The top three schools in each category were announced in June and Pinelands North made the cut! This resulted in T4 Education creating a video of our school journey and us receiving loads of media attention from the world.

The next big event was World Education Week, held online in October. This event showcased the 50 top schools around the world in a one-week extravaganza! Pinelands North was given a one-hour slot on 18 October to tell the world about what we were doing, to enable other schools around the world to follow our lead. 

The following day the winners in each category were announced: Project Shelter Wakadogo in Uganda won our category as their teachers spent 36 000 hours teaching their students in their own homes during Covid!

We are thrilled we entered the competition as it gave us an opportunity to re-evaluate what we do daily within our school community, and to appreciate the journey we have been on through the recent past.