Live Laugh Love

Words by Sophie Pye and Senior Student Leadership Team RANGI RURU GIRLS’ SCHOOL

The word live is all about taking opportunities, embracing school spirit and enjoying co-curriculars. Laugh is about looking after yourself, having fun and making memories with your friends. Love is aroha - spreading kindness, giving through service to your community and generosity of spirit. By embracing a little bit of the live, the laugh and the love, you have it all! Covid-19 was certainly unexpected and unfortunately resulted in a lot of disappointment. However, our theme shone throughout the seven weeks of lockdown. From day one we kept up our Rangi spirit by staying connected through a brand new @rrgsstudents Instagram account. On this account, we kept everyone up to date with the happenings of girls at our school as well as running a bunch of fun competitions and activities. Some of these were:

• The famous ‘Great Bake Off’ competition, in which Holly

Lill took out the 1st prize with her creative cake. • A Les Mills instructor did a live workout tutorial on the

Instagram just for Rangi girls • A newly formatted ‘Rangi’s

Got Talent’ took place on the

Instagram story, which

allowed us to watch the talent of our school perform from their homes • Our Kapa Haka group ran a

Te Reo quiz every Thursday featuring a Māori word of the week • Our Wellbeing Council shared their Wellbeing Wednesday tips to help us keep on top of our self-awareness • Teachers also popped in to say hi through some lovely videos, along side other recognisable faces including

Brodie Kane, Art Green,

Suzie Cato and Rachel

McCann. • Student involvement and connection on this platform was a highlight throughout the lockdown.

We certainly kept up our ‘living’ through the Rangi Roadie Clan Competition and ‘laughing’ through daily morning tutor check-ins or virtual pet days. However, it was the spreading of aroha from the Rangi community that really stood out during lock down. A group of Year 11s spent their lockdown knitting peggy squares to make a blanket for the Salvation Army. The wonderful Kate Brown volunteered hours of her time at the Evergreen Club for elderly where she put together handmade booklets and care packages to entertain them. Agave Yu was also working hard, putting together online chapels and assemblies for us all to enjoy, which created some normality in our online school day. Coming back to school was the most exciting thing in the world! Because of the difficulties we all experienced through the pandemic, it felt like we had become a whole lot closer when we finally could come back together. There’s a Te Reo saying: He aha te mea nui o te ao? He Tāngata, he Tāngata, he Tāngata. What is the most important thing in the world? It is people, it is people, it is people. We became a whole lot more grateful for simple things – especially people. We were more grateful for our families of whom we spent more time with than we had in years, for our friends who we now didn’t get to see every day and for our teachers who worked twice as hard to deliver classes from their homes to ours while being understanding each and every day. Now that we have returned to our beautiful campus, it has been great to see our community back together, safe, well and in good spirits. In order to celebrate our reuniting we held Let’s Laugh Week, where we danced to Jump Jam in the sun, wrote thank you cards to our staff, came to school in our PJ’s for mufti day, and grabbed a free hot chocolate and joke on the way to the first class of the day. After so long apart, the laughter around the grounds was a welcome sound. There is still a lot to look forward to for the remainder of 2020 and we are confident that there will be plenty more laughs, a lot more love and some good old living to be done!