Ranzau School turns red

Ranzau School turned red last month to support children with heart conditions.

The school’s community council, comprised of nine pupils from Year 5 and 6, held a successful ‘Red Wednesday’ fundraiser to raise funds for Heart Kids New Zealand.

“We have kids at our school with heart conditions, so we wanted to support it,” says Jacob Flowerday, a member of the council.

“Each year we do something different and this year it was good to pick something that can help local kids,” adds council member Naomi Fryer.

Red Wednesday involved all 102 Ranzau school pupils dressing in red, donating a gold coin to the Heart Kids cause, and trying fun activities such as jump jam – an aerobic-styled dance, and jump rope – different styles of skipping, to get their hearts working in the spirit of the heart-themed day.

“Jump jam and jump rope all are active and get you moving,” says Year 6 council member Vaiola Tapueluelu.

The student council is in charge of organising fundraising events such as this one, so they took the lead on Red Wednesday, making posters, advertising the event in the newsletter, and getting up in front of the whole school, dressed in bright red during assembly to inspire kids to take part.

Council member Grace Kernot says the highlight of the day for her was doing jump jam to ‘Afro Circus,’ a popular song from the movie Madagascar.

Dakota Yeoman says that for her the best part of the day was taking part in the jump rope skipping contests which were run by the Student Sports Committee members, another active and vibrant group at the school.

The Daubney family donated cherry-flavoured Juicies which were sold on the day with all the proceeds going to Heart Kids New Zealand.

“We had three buckets of money that we split into piles of $10,” Leo Bennett explains.

“Then we added all the groups together to get that bucket’s total. We did that for all the buckets then added the total together to get our final amount.”

A representative from Heart Kids New Zealand will visit Ranzau School over the next few weeks to let them know exactly what the funds they have raised will be used for.

“The day went really well, and it was really fun,” concludes council member Lily Quinney.