Kia ora koutou,

A big thank you to all of our families who have come out this week and participated in the Parent/Child/Teacher interviews. We know that families are busy in the afternoons and evenings, but really do love having the opportunity to sit down with you and have a focused discussion about your children. We also appreciate that often the allocated time only allows us to scratch the surface of what we could discuss. This is simply to be able to get through up to 26 interviews over two nights for our teaching staff. If you feel that you need more time, our teachers are always available and would be happy to meet with you.

It has been great to see our summer term sports teams starting up for the year too. We have a small handful of futsal teams and a touch rugby team busy representing the school. Our sports registrations continue to get smaller and smaller. Again, we know that families are already very committed to many after school activities, but if there are barriers to having your children participate in extra-curricular sports, we would love to know. Kids learn a great deal participating in sports, especially team sports, and we want to find ways to help our kids get involved.

If you have a look at the community notices section of our newsletter, you will find some information about the Ministry of Educations 'Incredible Years Training'. IYT is a course for parents with children from 3-8 and helps to share skills and strategies to maximise children's development and behaviour in a positive way. the This is an opportunity for us parents to learn new skills, consolidate what we already know and have a chance to hear from experts in a group situation. The upcoming sessions for Dunedin are:

• Dunedin delivered by Ministry of Education, contact Pamela Seccombe pamela.seccombe@education.govt.nz

Wednesday at Catholic Social Services rooms in Macandrew Road, South Dunedin starting 3rd May

• Dunedin delivered by Family Works Otago, contact Nicola Roberts Nicola.roberts@psotago.org.nz

Thursday evenings at Presbyterian Support rooms, Moray Place starting 23 February

Please feel welcome to come in for a chat if you would like to know more about this course.

Mā te wā,

Gareth Swete

Greetings to our SBS whanau and community.

This week, we had lots of discussions and learning activities about frogs, to help us with our phonics learning about the sound ‘f’. Hopefully you saw our wonderful drawings that went home during the weekend in our Poetry books. Remember we have ‘Fun Fact Friday’ coming up again, so if your tamariki have a particular interest in anything that they want to share a fact with us about, then we look forward to hearing those on Friday morning.

We’ve continued our measurement learning about weight, using balance scales to find items that are heavier, lighter, or the same as other items. This has required us to do lots of exploring, inquiring and investigating as we use classroom materials, estimation skills and learning to write up our results. We’re learning to write numbers and have learned a new game which starts with a blank number line, a pen and two dice. Maybe you wish to recreate this game at home? Your child will gladly ‘teach’ you, I am sure!

We’ve continued our learning about how to create a self portrait, this time exploring our school grounds to find items we could use, that had fallen from trees or plants. The photos below show our work-in-progress. Come along to assembly on Friday to see the finished products!

Rīpoata na Mrs Campbell

Konnichiwa, Kia ora, Mālō e lelei, Bonjour, Hello

We have had a couple of cool things happen in Hine-Rau-Wharangi the past two weeks.

Last week we had the pleasure of having some masters students spend time observing our class and the other classes in our school. It was helpful having lots of extra hands to help teach new games. On Wednesday we had a parcel arrive for our class and it was a whole set of the Countdown Farm Series and a game which we are going to be using for a variety of learning activities while doing our reading rotations. This week we have been working on our Pepeha art works to go alongside our class korowai, the class will be showing these in assembly next week. Below there is a link to a variety of learning games your children are excited to learn and play at home if they are allowed. We are also looking forward to meeting with our Buddy Class Hine moana on Friday to teach them a Math game the children have been learning.

https://ictgames.com/

Rīpoata na Mrs Brewer

Tāwhirimātea have been working extremely hard on their math skills this week. We have been really enjoying learning a new game called number dots. On Friday we are going to be teaching this game to Tane Mahuta so we are frantically trying to become experts to give us the upperhand. A copy of the game will also come home with your children on Friday so you can play a round or two at home as well. We have also been exploring statistics through posing questions and displaying data on graphs. We wondered if the colours in bags of skittles were evenly spread or if there was one colour that had more than others. We sorted our own packs of skittles and recorded these on a tally chart which we then collated as a class to find out that there were similar numbers of all 5 colours. We then went on to learn how to record this on a bar graph. Armed with these new skills, we are now asking our own questions, surveying the class and will record our findings and make statements about what our graphs show. This week we have also been busy learning about and writing our pepeha which we will publish and practice presenting to the class next week. One topic this term is called “A safe harbour for learning” and we are looking at our community and why it is special to us. The children have shown a real interest in learning about the history of our area, especially the history of our school. This is something that we will look further into over the coming weeks. One reading group have been reading about how pens have evolved over time. They were fascinated about how dip pens worked and we just so happened to have some at school so we got them out and gave them a whirl!

Rīpoata na Mrs Swete

We have spent time this last week building onto the routines we have been learning and will use throughout the year in Tāne Mahuta. Last week and this week we began our new spelling program and have had a “Spelling Rule of the Week” to focus on. We have used these rules in different ways to enable us to build new spelling habits. Last week we learned our rule in buddies completing different tasks and using mini whiteboards. This week we took time learning our new spelling rule and then built words out of scrambled letters that all contained our rule. We have been enjoying puzzling together these new spelling rules and using them in a variety of ways, we have talked about ‘building our new spelling habits’ and we are well on our way to doing so.

We also added on to our fun Oral Language activities which we fit in as part of our Tāne Mahuta morning routine. We learned this week about a new activity called “Picture Talk”. For this activity, Miss Tenci randomly selects groups and images. Once we are given our image we have to come up with a story that explains it while working together. We think about what may have happened before, during and after this image was taking place and collaborate our ideas to come up with a mini presentation which we then share back to our classmates. For our first try we did a fantastic job this week! We shared ideas, and pieced together creative stories and finally shared them back to the class. Nice work kids on your great effort with these new activities!

Rīpoata na Miss Tenci

This Week's results:

Touch Rugby

SBS Stingers 2-0 W POD Braxton

Futsal

SBS Stars 4-0 W POD Alfie

SBS Strikers 5-0 W POD Ava

SBS Sparks 0-4 L POD Braxton

SBS Sweepers 12-0 W POD Liam R.