Kia ora koutou,

This week you may have noticed a few extra adults in the school. We have been playing host to 28 students from the University of Otago College of Education's Masters programme. These students are having their first experiences of the classroom and we have been lucky to host such a great bunch.

Thank you to everyone for returning your PCT discussion forms. We will be sorting these into timeslots tomorrow morning and will send your time home with your child on Friday afternoon.

There will also be a letter coming home today explaining an upcoming Teachers Only Day on Monday 24th April. School will be closed for instruction that day and all of the details are included in the letter home.

Mā te wā,

Gareth Swete

Thank you for sending these forms back. If you are yet to return your copy, please return this information with any amendments to last year's details asap. If there are no changes, please simply sign and return.

Please contact the school office if you require another copy of this form.

Kia ora!

We have had another fabulous week in Tāwhirimātea this week. We have been busy working on our self portraits and poems to introduce ourselves, both of which we hope to share with you at Friday’s assembly. We are making prints from our self portraits on Friday morning so fingers crossed they are dry enough to share by the afternoon! We have been learning about taking measurements in Maths and are now using our data to learn about graphs. Next week we will pose our own questions to collect data and display in our graphs as well. Below is a recount written by the class about a futsal training session we had on Tuesday.

On Tuesday we had a futsal practice with Kris. We had fun learning to dribble balls around the field. We learnt to use the inside of our feet to control the ball better. We also learnt to guard our ball while dribbling so other people couldn’t kick our ball out. It rained on us but we kept on playing.

Rīpoata na Mrs Swete

This week Hinemoana have completed their pepehas. A pepeha is a way to introduce yourself in Māori and the children are all working hard to say their pepeha clearly and correctly. To go alongside this we are exploring our Taku Whakapapa (Our Family Story) and presenting this visually drawing inspiration from New Zealand artist Raewyn Harris. This Friday keep an eye out for a note coming home where you can help us with this activity.

We were also fortunate to have a futsal session with Football South this week where the children learned important skills for futsal and then put these into practice for a game. We learnt how to dribble and control the ball while also being aware of our surroundings (looking and listening) and how to aim for the space in the game to keep the ball moving.

In Maths, we are exploring Statistics and learning to follow the Statistical Investigation Cycle. In buddies we have posed different questions and collected data. We have put our data into tally charts and talked about what we have noticed from the information we have collected (making conclusions) Our next step is to display this information in a bar graph.

In Writing, the children have been learning all about nouns and adjectives. We played ‘idea ping pong’ to come up with lots of different and exciting adjectives. This is where we have turns, bouncing ideas off each other until we run out! From there we used the thesaurus to help us find synonyms for different adjectives and learn new and exciting words.

Lastly, if you missed Assembly last week and Hinemoana sharing their AMAZING self-portraits, feel free to pop into our class where they are proudly on display.

Rīpoata na Miss Laing

A lot of interesting learning has continued to happen this week in Tāne Mahuta! We have engaged with the Statistical Inquiry Cycle, nearly completed our Class Korowai AND completed our All About Me Profiles. The children have shared many highlights, and have shared that they have particularly enjoyed our Statistics learning. For this Statistics learning we posed a class “Problem”, aligning with the first step of the Statistical Inquiry Cycle, this problem was “What Pet do Tāne Mahuta children think is the Coolest?” a very important problem to solve! We collected data as a class and compared the 9 year olds data against the 10 year olds. Guess what came out on top? The dogs! Tāne Mahuta children believe that dogs are the coolest pets! This must mean that there are a lot of awesome dogs out there in the Tāne Mahuta children’s homes. We are moving on to plan and conduct our own statistical investigations now and have constructed our “problems” and decided on how we are going to collect data to solve them. We have everything from “What is the most popular cake flavour in Tāne Mahuta?” to “What is your favourite basketball team?” It will be very interesting to answer some more of our statistical inquiry questions and display this data.

Rīpoata na Miss Tenci

Tuesday 28th Feb 2023, Cancellation date 1st March

Registrations 5pm at Port Chalmers Swimming Pool

First race 6pm.

5-7 year olds:

Run ¾ lap around rugby field (400m ), swim 3 widths (30m)

8-10 year olds:

Run 2 laps around rugby field (1km) swim 2 lengths (60m)

11-14 year olds:

Run 3 laps around rugby field (1.5km) swim 5 lengths (150m)

Cost $10.00 per person in a Team or $10.00 Individual, Entries forms available Port Chalmers Pool and Moana Pool. Or email liciamihaka@gmail.com Entries close 25th Feb.

Contact Person: Licia Mihaka 0274178798