Kia ora koutou,

I cannot thank all of our SBS Community enough for the awesome effort at the West Harbour Sports Day. The children were amazing. They competed well, participated with enthusiasm, made us proud with their behaviour and above all else, had a great time. Our parent team was equally as amazing. Thank you to all of our parents who were able to help out on the day and keep our kids going. We were all so thankful to our families for their efforts. Thank you to our kaiako for their positivity, organisation and encouragement, you really made the difference on the day. A big thank you to our neighbour schools for joining us and making it great. I love seeing all of our West Harbour children working together and enjoying each others company. And lastly, a big thanks to Port Otago for their support of the day. We couldn't have done it without you.

Tomorrow we will be hosting Rob Proffit-White, leading mathematics education guru as well as 20 other teachers and leaders from 6 other schools. The day will be a great chance to see new mathematical pedagogy in practice with our children.

We do look forward to seeing parents back at assembly tomorrow too after a very long absence. Please remember that we start at 2.15pm. There will be plenty of seating and space either at the back row, or on the deck as we will open Room 7 right up so you dont miss the action.

Mā te wā,

Gareth Swete

We found, as expected, that even a small change in temperature has a dramatic effect on the eco-systems in the harbour.

This project came to a conclusion with the children using the laboratories and equipment at the Marine Science Centre in Portobello, as well as a few detours around the centre to see a huge number of scientific experiments in action.

A big thank you to Jess from the university for leading us through the project, Mrs Swete for running the project on her 'day off' a week and Rachel from Port to Port for a pretty spectacular trip to the Marine Science Centre and back.

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.

What a fantastic day we had at the West Harbour Sports Day!

The children were all amazing. They gave every activity an incredible effort and the smiles on their faces were delightful.

A huge thank you to the parents who were able to assist us during the day.

Next week we start our Swimming lessons at the Port Chalmers pool. We had a chat in class, about the fact that it would be great if the kids could be practicing at home, to dry themselves, and get dressed themselves, as it definitely makes our changing room time go more smoothly when the kids have developed some independence in this area!

The kids are very excited about our two weeks of swimming, and we are always so impressed with their progress after ten lessons.

Our class is sharing in assembly this week, so we are looking forward to sharing some of our work with you, if you're able to attend.

Report by Mrs Campbell

Talofa, Mālō e lelei, Kia ora Hello

Welcome to Week Two from Hine-Rau-Wharangi. We have had a great start to the week with a lovely long weekend and then West Harbour Sports Day yesterday. The children were very excited yesterday when we arrived at school for Sports day. Once the role was taken and we were given our group numbers, we were off on the bus with our buddy class Hine Moana. It was all very exciting as this was our first big sports day for a long while and a huge variety of activities to participate in. I am always impressed with our kids. They show enormous Sportsmanship constantly cheering their peers on, helping each other out and giving everything a go. Below are a few highlights of our day.

I enjoyed the high jump (Olivia)

I enjoyed the tug o war (Emerson)

I enjoyed the high jump (Elma)

Thank you to all the parents who came and helped us out, we were very lucky.

Report by Mrs Brewer

What a week! Sports day was a HUGE hit. We were so lucky with the weather and everyone had such a great day. I was so impressed with how well all our children did - all those practices last week definitely paid off! On Wednesday we shared our highlights and wrote a recount of our day, working hard to start our stories with an opening sentence that caught the readers attention and made them want to read more. We are continuing to play the marimba this week. We are learning about different notes and beats, and some of our songs even require us to practice our spelling. We are hoping to polish our skills enough to play a song for assembly next week. We are loving our Banqer programme. On Friday we had a banking session where the children were able to deposit extra cash earnt over the week into their accounts. We have also assigned wages to our classroom jobs so will be able to add these earnings to our bank accounts this coming Friday. We have also set up automatic payments for power and equipment usage as well as an automatic transfer to our savings accounts. Some have decided to save more than others. It will be interesting to see what our bank accounts look like at the end of the term.

Report by Mrs Swete

Kia Ora

Thank you to everyone who participated in the West Harbour Sports day. The children were amazing athletes and such good sportsmanship was shown to their team members. They all tried their very best and we all had such fun. The events were brilliant and well organised. I loved the atmosphere and when the relays were on the children really showed their pride in Sawyers Bay School!

A reminder to return all sports tops that were given out and not needed for other school sports groups.

Ranginui have begun learning about finances through an online programme called Banqer. Each classroom child has their own account and any earnings over the week are deposited into it. As we are just setting up the programme and learning about the platform I will in the near future be sending home a link for you to learn more and hopefully help start some great conversations about finances/banking.

We are setting up our classroom popcorn business, and the children have written about their skills and what they would like to do within the business. More about this as the term progresses.

We are sharing our learning at this week's assembly and hope you can make it along to see us.

As swimming begins next week I know the children get a bit hungry after it. If possible you might like to add a couple of extra food items.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions. joslynr@sawyersbay.school.nz

Ka Kite

Report by Miss Ruzsa

On Tuesday this week SBS went to Sports Day along with all the other schools from the West Harbour. We had a great day in the sunshine and all of the children did so well competing in a range of athletics and activities. The children showed off their wonderful SBS Values and it was an added bonus to take home the win this year!

We are all things Halloween this week incorporating some Halloween activities into our reading rotations and completing some spooky Halloween stories. Each of us received a Halloween picture as our story starter and had to complete a six sentence story, sharing who, where (the setting), problem and solution. From there we added in some more sentences to provide the reader with extra detail. Our stories are shaping up to be pretty interesting and scary!

On Wednesday afternoon Hinemoana got the parachute out and participated in some fun parachute games. One fun game we played was, ‘popcorn’. First we had to keep a ball bouncing on the parachute by working altogether. Then we made it trickier by working in teams - one team had to keep the ball on the parachute while the other team had to bounce it off! Another game was the categories game, where you had to run under the parachute if you fitted into the category someone called. One category was a bit controversial, ‘if you think pineapple belongs on pizza!’

After our parachute fun we got together with the other senior classes for Syndicate Singing. It was so lovely having our senior school back together to enjoy some songs.

And, apparently it’s a short week?

Report by Miss Laing

It’s been a fab, sporty week this week for the Tane Mahuta kids! We were lucky to have a beautiful, sunny day for the West Harbour Sports Day on Tuesday where a whole lot of Sawyers Bay students shone with their sporting efforts! It was awesome to watch our kids' great enthusiasm and behaviour over the day, they really made us proud. The Tug of War and Egg and Spoon Obstacle Course were particularly fun highlights! Take a look at some of the Tane Mahuta children engaging in these activities in our photos for this week.

We have also restarted our Senior Syndicate Sport Rotations this week, which we snuck in before the rain started on Wednesday. For this week, Tane Mahuta focused particularly on small ball skills and hand eye coordination. We completed a variety of drills and played a few games to build up these skills. Again - this was a lot of fun! Though some of us have tired muscles now all of the awesome, sporty activities have definitely been worth it!

Report by Miss Tenci