Below are some great excerpts from a writeup that Hororata Primary School created about their day of service.

“We decided to place a real focus on giving something back to our community. This sat firmly under our school’s Six Kinds of Best (6KOB) values programme i.e., Being Kind to Yourself; Being Kind to Others; Being Kind to the Environment; Being the Learning Kind; Being the Achieving Kinds and Being the Community Kind, and was designed to teach our kids the importance of community.”

…”In recent years our school council has set itself a goal each year to give something back to the community. Be it baking a cake for the local volunteer fire brigade; giving to local families who need a hand up or donating money to worthy causes such as Westpac Air Rescue, Kids Can and Radio Lollipop. This has seen us re-think the things we do in our community; the motivation of giving verses taking and changing that perception that ‘if there is nothing in it for us, then why are we doing?’

The truth of the matter is that 2017 has been a year out of the box. Sure sickness, Mother Nature and staff leave were all good reasons for us not to achieve our SVA goal, but in the eleventh hour, we volunteered our services to help out a local family who were trying to pull together their gardens for a local garden tour. Unfortunately, the family like most in the Hororata community, had been struck down with the horrible 100 day cough. Annabel (Mum) had injured her leg and was awaiting an important operation and the weather (Mother Nature) had made it almost impossible to get on to the gardens… that was until the Hororata Volunteer Army arrived, with an army of 42 enthusiastic, energetic and motivated students, who in an afternoon were able to help Phil and Annabel transform their beautiful garden into what was identified as one of the stand-out gardens in the Hororata Garden Tour.

The opportunity to help a local family, a family who give a lot to school and our community, was very rewarding. There was real sense of satisfaction in the children, with one summing it by saying ‘can we do more of this kind of stuff, Mr G?’ ”

…”The truth of the matter is that the learning was huge. It ticked many boxes in our 6KOB tool kit and taught our children a valuable lessons about life. Our next steps are to integrate the SVA philosophy into our Discovery Learning Model; provide children with more opportunities to give something back to our community – big or small and work closely with community organisations to better identify where we can best help out.”