Newsletter Week 3 Term 4
Sawyers Bay School 3rd November 2022
Principal's Message
Kia ora koutou,
It was so nice to see adults back at Assembly last week. The kids love having you there to see their sharing and awards, thanks for joining us.
Thank you to all of our families for keeping our kids so organised for swimming. And to the children, a big well done on your energy and efforts that you have been putting into swimming already.
On Tuesday we had a group of children represent the school at the North Zone Athletics Meet. As always the kids were fantastic, competed with positivity and determination, and made us proud. Well done North Zone Team.
The West Harbour Schools have been working together on a shared teacher and parent session with clinical pyschologist, Mike Parkes. Mike will be sharing with us practical strategies to help our children navigate anxiety. We have been working hard within the school to help our learners with anxiety and a session with an expert is a terrific opportunity for us to learn, and we hope you can join us. Mike is very knowledgeable, practical and easy to listen to. Anxiety is a very normal reaction to different situations. How we learn to recognise the anxiety, and react to it will determine how much we let the anxiety take control. If you have a spare hour between 5.30pm and 6.30pm on Tuesday 29th of November, I would strongly encourage you to come along to this session.
Mā te wā,
Gareth Swete
Upcoming Events
- School Swimming Monday 31st Oct - Friday 11th November
- Final Assembly - Friday 9th December
- Final Day of Term 4 - 1pm Thursday 15th December
Assembly Certificates
Te Ākonga o te Wiki
Book Fair
The books will be available for viewing from 8am-8.30am and 2.45pm-3.15pm daily.
Cash and EFT-POS payments can be made.
Papatūānuku
Kia ora everyone!
This week we welcome Hadassah Christopher to Papatūānku!
We are really enjoying our swimming lessons over the last few days. Already, we have seen considerable progress. These daily sessions may be tiring for little people, but the progress they make by going every day is worthwhile. The tamariki continue to amaze and impress us with their ‘give-it-all’ attitude and their excitement and enthusiasm each day. We are all impressed with how well they can dry and dress themselves in the changing room! Thanks for the hard work you’ve put in at home, helping the kids to become this independent.
There is a high level of excitement about the classroom jobs that have been created, to help us with real-life learning as part of our Inquiry unit on Jobs and Careers. Each child has a job to do, that they get paid for on Friday. They can also earn bonuses, for effort, for having all of their ‘tools’ ready, and for helping out other children with their jobs. Twice a week, we count our cash, exchange for a larger note, and have the opportunity to spend their hard earned cash on classroom rewards. To spend or save, that is the question! It is wonderful to hear the chitter chatter with peers about how many $1 notes needed to exchange for a $5, and likewise with exchanging $5 notes for a $10.
We were excited to venture into our school’s relocated library on Wednesday afternoon. Two library books may be borrowed each week, and they can stay at home to be re-read as often as you like until next Wednesday. We enjoyed the new space, and learning more about where fiction and non-fiction books are located and how they are classified. Thank you also to the Port Chalmers Library staff who also supplement our learning each term by choosing books to support our Inquiry and Maths units.
Report by Mrs Campbell
Hine-Rau-Whārangi
Talofa, Mālō e lelei, Kia ora, Hello
What an amazing week of learning it has been in Hine-Rau-Wharangi. We have been particularly excited about our swimming lessons and being able to go to the pool on these super hot sunny days it has been really refreshing. I have seen great progress with the Hine-Rau students at swimming with them all achieving great success they do work super hard at these lessons. In writing this week we have been busy editing our draft writing and producing some beautiful published work to share in assembly next week. We wrote a recount of our West Harbor Sports day and packed all of our information into our Rucksacks. In Math we are working on telling the time and have been looking into analog and digital equipment to tell time and why it is important to know how to tell the time on all of the different technologies.
Report by Mrs Brewer
Tāwhirimātea
This week has been a busy one. We are really enjoying our swimming sessions each day and it is so exciting to watch how quickly the children are progressing. Some of the children are feeling really proud of themselves for jumping into the deep end. Others are showing real leaps and bounds in their confidence when swimming with their faces in the water and everyone is doing such a fantastic job of challenging themselves and extending their capabilities.
It’s a bird….it’s a plane….it’s a DINOSAUR! Excitement ran high on Wednesday afternoon during our dino-rific afternoon. We begun with a picture book about dinosaurs in the supermarket and then continued to work on our business plans for our dinosaur parks. After spending our $1000 budget on dinosaurs, we then set off on a dinosaur hunt around the classroom. We needed to use rulers to correctly measure each and every dinosaur. This information is going to be very useful when designing the correct sized enclosures to fit our dinosaurs. While we were checking through our answers, something large caught our attention behind the brick wall. It was large and brown and we quickly realised that there was a dinosaur on the loose in our school! No fear was shown as the Tāwhirimātea children bolted off in search of our large friend who appeared to be very shy and quickly scampered away. We then decided to dress Emily up in a dinosaur costume that the children had noticed hiding in the back of the classroom. We put our measurement skills to the test and found out that it was 2 metres tall….this seemed HUGE but we knew the t-rex was in fact much larger than that….our research skills found out that a fossil found was 12.3 meters! Off outside we went with the long measuring tape to see how big it really was (see picture below of us all standing along the tape!). Everyone is really excited to move onto the next part of our business plan - designing the layout of the park and using our knowledge of arrays and area to create appropriate sized enclosures.
Report by Mrs Swete
Ranginui
Kia Ora Whanau
It has been a wonderful week and a lot has happened in Ranginui! Last Friday the students participated in an awesome math lesson taken by Mr Rob Profitt White. (Joined by 20 other principals/teachers attending a PD workshop hosted by Sawyers Bay School.) Ranginui showed how great they are at solving open-ended math problems. Rob led the lesson and his praise and feedback to the students and myself was very positive. The students were able to explain their reasoning using mathematical language and were so engaged in their learning. Ka Pai Ranginui!!
We have continued to develop financial literacy/language skills through the online program - Banqer. You should have received a notice with a login code this week. From there you can see an outline of the program and what your child is learning in class.
Our first week of swimming lessons is running really well. Huge improvements have been made every session.
Our Popcorn business is taking off. The students have named the company - I Don’t Know? Popcorn!
And have identified areas within the company they would like to work in. All students have realised that they need to work collaboratively to be able to complete their job. Great life skills developing!
I was able to take four students to an enviro-school hui on Monday. Liam H, Olly, Aquilla and Quinn. We began the day attending a powhiri at Arai Te Uru Marae. We then participated in activities taken by the enviro-school staff. We learnt a lot about medicinal native plants and their uses, soil testing and created our own animal shelters. It was wonderful to interact with other schools and our students represented Sawyers Bay School with pride.
Ka Kite
Report by Miss Ruzsa
Hinemoana
This week we have begun our swimming lessons for Term 4. As always the children have been doing a great job in the pool. It has been a pretty good way to cool off as well with this beautiful (but muggy) weather we have been having.
Our topic for this term is exploring jobs and careers. In Hinemoana, we chatted about all the things we already know about jobs and asked some questions. From there we have explored some different occupations and what knowledge and skills we think each of those jobs would require. We have written our very first Curriculum Vitaes that include our personal information, education, experiences and skills. We are learning to format these correctly on Google Docs using titles, subheadings and bulleted lists. Learning to write a CV is a very important skill to have!
In Maths, we are diving further into our topic about Money and are now exploring Financial Literacy. We have discovered lots of new words like income, wants, needs and trade-offs and had to match these up with the correct definitions. We play lots of games to practise our number knowledge and strategies and a new one we have learnt is called ‘Multiply Max’. In this game not only do we need to use our multiplication but also adding! This is a quick game to set up and give a go at home - paper, pencil and a dice (you could even use an interactive one online.)
Report by Miss Laing
Tāne Mahuta
Kia ora everyone, it has been another fun, sporty week in Tane Mahuta. We had a number of children involved in the North Zone Athletics Day on Tuesday who represented Sawyers Bay well and made us proud. These children put a lot of effort into their events and did their best! It was great to see. We have also started up our second round of school swimming where the kids have been pushing themselves to extend their swimming skills and trying hard at the pool. We are looking forward to the rest of our swimming sessions!
In class time we have been focusing a lot on Money for maths. We are building up not only our skills around using different maths operations to work out different money problems, but also to extend our money vocabulary. This week we have made Money Maths Dictionaries and defined key terms about money. We are collaborating as a class and in small groups about the terms we don’t know to extend our knowledge. We know as we get older we are going to have to be using money management skills so we thought we’d better start understanding some of these terms now! We have been thinking about the difference between wants and needs in relation to money and how the careers we may end up choosing one day will impact our money choices. We have really been enjoying tying our Money and Inquiry learning together this term.
Report by Miss Tenci
Sports News
This Week's results:
Touch Rugby
SBS Force game cancelled due to weather
Futsal
SBS Stars 5-1 W POD Riley
SBS Spurs won by default
SBS Sparks 6-4 W POD Harrison
SBS Steamers 4-0 W POD Harri
SBS Sweepers 0-5 L POD Jack
Community Notices
Port Chalmers Library Book Club - Monday 7 November
Join us at the usual time of 3.15 for snacks-
Followed by a creative activity and games from 3.30pm-4.30pm.
(Please let staff know if you are being picked up before 4.30pm).
We look forward to seeing you and hearing about the books you’ve been reading.
Contact Us
Email: office@sawyersbay.school.nz
Website: https://sawyersbay.school.nz/
Location: Sawyers Bay School 99 Stevenson Ave, Sawyers Bay, Dunedin 9023, New Zealand
Phone: 03 472 8981