Newsletter Week 10 Term 2
Sawyers Bay School 7th July 2022
Principal's Message
Kia ora Koutou,
What a term it has been. We are very appreciative of the efforts of everyone who has helped us to keep our doors open and our kids well this term. It has certainly been challenging for all involved, especially our kids.
I do have a couple of house-keeping type reminders to take you into the holidays.
PLEASE utilise our grounds over the holiday break, we love seeing families making the most of the grounds. We do remind you though that there are NO DOGS on school grounds. Not only do we find 'landmines' everywhere after the weekends and holidays, but also the grounds are for children. There are many children in our community who will not come here if there are dogs present. While I absolutely believe that having children around animals in a controlled environment is terrific, children should have the right to come to their own playground and feel safe.
We have noticed quite a number of early drop offs and late pick ups creeping in as the term goes on. Children need to be dropped off no earlier than 8.30am and picked up at 2.45pm. If there is an exceptional circumstance at any time, please get in touch with us earlier and we can work something out.
I really do hope that you all have a great holiday and a real chance to recharge ready for a full-on Term 3.
Mā te wā,
Gareth Swete
Upcoming Events
- Friday 8th July - Art Gallery Visit Tāwhirimātea and Ranginui
- Friday 8th July - last day of Term 2
- Monday 25th July - first day of Term 3
Certificates Week 9 Term 2
Papatūānuku
Kia ora whanau. It’s hard to believe we are at the end of Term 2 already!
What a fun term of learning we’ve had together in Paptūānuku.
Two things I have noticed, that I am very proud of the tamariki for:
1) their attitude to all new learning activities and challenges is so positive!
2) their kindness and thoughtfulness towards the other tamariki in the class.
Thank you for all you do at home to help nurture these wonderful personality traits in your children.
This week, we have revisited Goldilocks and The Three Bears. We changed the ending! The Bears actually invited Goldilocks to stay. So, they needed a table big enough for 4 to sit at. In pairs, we used the design process to think, plan, design, create and today we will test our tables to see if they will be a suitable piece of furniture for the four of them. This has required some creativity, a lot of testing, lots of communication and perseverance when it hasn’t worked as we predicted! Well done Paptūānuku!
Another highlight of the week was our visit from Tahu from Orokonui Ecosanctuary. We spent some time looking at the pictures of leaves and trees on the posters she brought with her. Following that, we went on a hunt around our school to find the native trees in our school grounds that matched the leaves Tahu gave us. We have a lot of natives at our school! It was fun finding, and learning about so many different trees and plants in our school environment.
I was impressed with the snippets of information that the tamariki recalled from our visit to Orokonui at the end of last term. We finished by making seed bombs out of seeds and clay, and ‘bombing’ them into the garden at school, with the anticipation they will grow more natives around our wonderful school.
I hope you all have a wonderful, fun and restful holiday break. I look forward to seeing you all back at the beginning of Term 3!
Report by Mrs Campbell
Hine-Rau-Whārangi
Mālō e lelei, kia ora, talofa, hello
What a wonderful trip we had to the Art Gallery last Thursday. Some highlights from our trip were putting on the 3D glasses and looking at the roof to see a kaleidoscope of colours, doing a short skit of the Three Little Pigs and playing twinkle twinkle little star with bells underneath a beautiful golden tree by artist Reuben Patterson and we made our glow in the dark monsters.
On Monday Tahu from the Ecosanctuary came to visit and talk about some of the beautiful Native Trees we have around our school, Liam jumped into a furry suit and became a Kiwi, we also made seed bombs (poop bombs) and threw them into the garden in the hope that some native Hebes might grow as birds eat the seeds and poop them out.
Next term, we will have a Science aspect to our Topic so over the holidays could I ask if you could keep any cardboard or newspaper for Hine-Rau-Wharangi for a couple of activities that we will be doing. Thank you in advance.
Report by Mrs Brewer
Tāwhirimātea
Tāwhirimātea have had another busy week to finish off Term Two. On Monday we had the wonderful Tahu come and visit us to follow up from our Orokonui visit. She had us outside identifying and learning about all the natives we have in our own school environment - it was exciting to know there are so many! We made more seed bombs to put around our school in the hope that even more natives will sprout up out of them.
Tuesday we had our final Kelly Sport session for the term. We were practicing our running, dodging and side stepping skills which we put together at the end in a fun game that Terryn made up. I think it's fair to say it was a hit and we will be playing it again!
The children are really getting passionate about their math at the moment. We have created number squares with die, having to add up all our rows and columns, and then we had to add up all of our repeated numbers. There were many children trying their best to beat my score - and many did!
One reading group has been working on reading chapter books over the past couple of weeks. They were then challenged with the task of creating a new book cover and blurb for their books to encourage others to read it. This has caught on with others in the class who are now challenging themselves to pick up a chapter book and read it during our silent reading times and even during choosing times!
We will be finishing up the week with our trip to the Art Gallery to tie in with this term's topic. We can’t wait to find out what fabulous art works we will be creating with Libby.
I wish everyone a restful and well deserved holiday and look forward to seeing everyone back next term and ready to jump into our new topic - “What’s going on here?”
Report by Mrs Swete
Ranginui
Kia Ora from Ranginui
A big thank you to you all for a wonderful term 2. I know it has been another stop/start term for many of the Ranginui children and this week has seen many absences as well. Keep being kind and let us hope that next term we keep moving forward to a better school life together. The children of Ranginui have worked extremely well all term and I hope they all get the needed ‘reset’ they deserve. In class we have created stop motion movies. Our first one was to show movement of an object or person. This week's photos are of us sharing our first movie making. We talked about what we liked, what we would do next time and skills we would like to learn. Next we will add sound recordings and focus on a moment in a fairytale. (My learning is to be able to share these with you) I'll try my best.
We are looking forward to our art gallery trip on Friday afternoon.
Ka Kite until next term. Take care everybody.
Report by Miss Ruzsa
Hinemoana
We have created our Matariki kites and given them a test run. From our test runs we have all noticed that our kites do need some improvements. Some of us realised our kites were too heavy, others that the material of our sail was too fragile. We have also reflected on our work using The Thinking Hats, discussing what went well, what was challenging and what we would do differently next time. It has been a lot of fun making our kites!
In Maths, we have learnt how to add and subtract decimal numbers. We have also been reviewing our knowledge about finding fractions of sets / groups. From there we had a challenge to answer the question -
I picked up a handful of M&M’s. One third of my M&M’s were red.
What might a drawing of my M&M’s look like?
The children did some amazing thinking and problem solving on this challenge and they have decided you should give it a go too! (If you get stuck I’m sure the Hinemoana children would be happy to help you out.)
We have finished our own fairy tales and have published these on the computer. There are some very cool ideas happening with our fairy tales. You can check out some snippets below:
Once upon a time there lived a princess called Lily. She lived in the beautiful Amazon rainforest. One day while Lily and her animals were playing, a blue light covered the forest. Bamn! A witch appeared and suddenly Lily was a mouse! Squeak, squeak!
By Kenzie
Once upon a time there lived a young, beautiful princess called Mint. She lived in Candyland Palace where everything was made of candy, with her Mum, Queen Caramel. Princess Mint loved to grow sweet, delicious candy canes in the Royal Candyland Palace Garden with Lollipop, her dog, who adored playing fetch with the cupcake frisbee.
By Isabella G
Lastly, enjoy your holidays! And we will see you all back for Term 3.
Report by Miss Laing
Tāne Mahuta
This week we had a lot of fun at Kelly Sport. The term focus at Kelly Sport has been ‘agility’, in order to get better at using ‘agility’ we have been working on getting quicker with our reactions, using more coordination with movements and trying to increase our ability to change direction. We worked on these skills by playing a fun alternative to tag which focused specifically on lateral movements. Taggers were only allowed to move side to side on two lines of the court and runners had to do their best to ‘fake’ directions and get past the taggers. When they passed the taggers they had to collect cones from the opposite end of the court and bring them safely back to their team. Children were thinking hard about different paths and directions to try out to attempt and trick the taggers. It has been awesome watching the students’ reaction times improve this term and watching them focus on their agility skills. Ka pai kids!
Report by Miss Tenci
Under the Wharf Project
Community Notices
Sawyers Bay School Board Elections
Nominations are open for the election of 5 parent representatives to the school board.
All eligible voters will receive a nomination form. Use this form to nominate yourself or someone in your community. You will also receive a nomination cover letter calling for nominations. Information on who is not eligible to be a board member is provided with the nomination form.
If you need more nomination forms, please contact the school office.
Nominations close at noon on 3 August. You may provide a signed candidate statement and photograph with your nomination.
The electoral roll is held at the school and can be viewed during normal school hours.
As nominations are received, there will be a list of candidates’ names kept at the school up until election day, which you can view.
Voting closes at 4pm on 7 September.
Kyla Martyn
Returning Officer
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