Upcoming Events
- Term 1 Swimming - Monday 14th March - Friday 25th March
- Otago Anniversary Day - Monday 21st March
- Good Friday - Friday 15th April
Papatūānuku
Kia ora everyone. Swimming has definitely been the highlight of the week so far! The enthusiasm is running high and the excitement each day is lovely to observe. The best part is watching all of the tamariki, giving every pool task an amazing effort. It’s only been a few days but we’ve seen huge progress already!
A second highlight of the past week has been making toast! During our learning about the sound ‘t’, not only did we draw turtles, we also discussed and put into action, each step required to make toast. This incorporated further learning about halves and quarters. Everyone buttered their own toast and first cut it in half, then in quarters…..before devouring it. The class smelled amazing with the aroma of toast cooking!
We extended our learning about 3D shapes this week, by creating a cylinder to carry exactly 10 dinosaurs. We worked together with a buddy and used teamwork to solve the problem. The finished products looked amazing and clearly met the brief of being a cylinder shape, and the right size to hold just 10 dinosaurs. The ‘Toy Company’ were so impressed with our designs that they rewarded us with a new class game called Headbands. This is proving to be a fun game for learning how to ask questions and using our thinking skills to think…based on what I now know, Who could I be?
Report by Mrs Campbell
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Hine-Rau-Whārangi
This week in Hine-Rau we have been super excited about swimming. The students in Hine-Rau have conquered some fears and are doing lots of wonderful things in their swimming lessons. I am especially proud of the way the students have been using the Sawyers Bay School values in our class this week. They have been showing lots of care and respect by helping each other out in different situations. It also has been great hearing the feedback from Hine-Rau students about some of the activities they have been doing and new learning they are bringing back into the class sharing activities from using the Seesaw platform at home. We thought we would share some of our things from this week with.
At swimming I like doing arm circles on my front (Ella)
I like putting my head under the water when I am on my front (Herepo)
I have enjoyed choosing time in our Reading rotations and Math. (Isaac)
I liked writing long stories and learning to edit my work. (Willow)
We have lots of fun when we are writing. (Rex)
Report by Mrs Brewer
Tāwhirimātea
Did you know that the most common car colour passing our school is white? Closely followed by silver/grey? The least common colour is green. We enjoyed sitting outside on a lovely sunny day creating tally charts of the car colours passing by. Then we worked with a buddy the following day to create bar graphs to display our data. Our sound focus is 'ck' this week. We have learnt that it is usually found at the end of a word and follows straight after a short vowel sound. If it is preceded by a consonant or long vowel then we would usually use the 'k' spelling. Swimming is in full swing now and the children are all doing such a wonderful job. I am so impressed with the progress we are seeing already! We have been using flax and weaving a background to display our pepeha on. It takes great concentration to make sure we have the over pattern perfect! You may have noticed a lack of chip packages coming home in our lunchboxes lately. We have been asked to wash and collect these up as they are going to be used to make survival sheets which will then be distributed to those who are homeless or in need of a thermal blanket. What a great way to reduce waste and help others! Simon kindly lent us a survival blanket from his first aid kit to have a look at, but we decided to put it to the test. We wrapped Bailey up in the blanket and popped a thermometer inside. It showed the air temp was 20deg to begin with but it rose to 30deg after about 15 minutes! (see the photo of taking her temperature below)
Report by Mrs Swete
Ranginui
Our inquiry this last two weeks has been focused around dinosaurs and fossils. I asked the children what they have enjoyed the most this week and here is their response.
We made quiet critters last week which like to come out to hear us silently read as well as listen to us edit our writing especially telling us where to put full stops and capital letters. They have loved listening to all the new facts about dinosaurs. We have been working on making and answering questions about the bar graphs. One of the activities was to roll a dice and make a tally chart showing the number of times it landed on each number. Each number is related to a dinosaur. It was interesting to compare graphs and talk about the differences. The students also drew amazing pencil drawings of a Tyrannosaurus Rex and learnt the art of smudging to make more definition. Discussion about how fossils are formed led us to making our own dinosaur fossils by making imprints in playdough and filling this with plaster of paris. Students also chose a dinosaur of their own and found ten facts about it and made this into a slide show. We learnt how to copy and paste pictures into the slides. We are going to present these to the class and have a quiz on Friday. Lastly, we have loved going swimming with all making progress in a short time.
Report by Mrs Smith
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