Umawera school has had a focus on growing leaders to implement a range of play, fitness and lunchtime activities.  The focus came about from receiving some support from Sport Northland’s Energizer, Joel Quitta-Moses who has been supporting the school in various ways.

During the initial stages, the focus was to create a range of activities that were easy to run at break times as students had become bored with the games they knew and in some cases, undesirable behaviour started to creep in.  After much discussion students voiced their thoughts on the activities that they enjoyed and the equipment that was most popular plus some new ideas on what they thought could happen during break times.

Out of these discussions a range of new activities were introduced to seniors to learn, play and have fun with and once they felt confident, they spent time strategising ways in which the games could be modified to suit time allocated, rules so that everyone has  fun time and small competitions within their own class. Games were also modified to suit the hot weather and play in the swimming pool.  Soon leaders were creating modified games.

Principal Christine Gilmour says “the idea was just to have the kids learn some new games.  Once the new games became common and students learnt how to modify the new games it became clear that they could modify the old ones. Leaders created fitness sessions out of them, ran lunchtime activities.  They became leaders for the class which initially was not the idea but glad it happened. The class respected the ones running activities because there was a general belief that if they all worked together and played well together, it would be more fun for each other”.

The plan for 2020 is to continue the leadership development for Umawera senior students with Ki-o-Rahi planned for term one - this gives the leaders another chance to work together on an activity that they are slowly becoming more confident in and shows that working together this term should be able to happen more easily in 2020. Students have also voiced their idea to host a sports day between themselves and any other local schools that are interested.