This week the trophy went home with Willow!

This week, we are thrilled to welcome Chase to Papatūānuku and Sawyers Bay School. Our maths learning has been all about patterns this week. We've created all sorts of continuous patterns out of the variety of equipment in Papatūānuku. We've extended this to sequential number patterns and it has been exciting to see the delight in tamariki's eyes, as they use classroom materials to illustrate the problems and then realise the pattern, and keep it going. We retold the myth that Miss Richardson read to us called Pandora's Box. First we made finger puppet butterflies, and the next day we made symmetrical butterflies using paint, then drew half a butterfly on our folded paper before cutting out the shape. These look great on our wall. We are really looking forward to our trip to the Art Gallery next week.

Report by Mrs Campbell

Mālō e lelei, kia ora, bula from Hine-Rau-Wharangi

This week in Hine-Rau we have been investigating different ways to greet each other and others. We also have continued to be super busy getting our Fairy Tale houses produced. After the drafts had been drawn we made prototypes and discussed if we thought it was suitable for purpose. The children had all agreed that making a Fairy Tale house out of paper wasn't the best idea, so the new designs and construction began, the children used a variety of materials to achieve a different result.

I was super proud of the children in HIne-Rau-Wharangi the other morning as I came in from duty to see they had been collaboratively learning using equipment from our Math area to make repeated patterns. They had made a chain right around the whole class, it was so long I could only take a picture of some of it. “Well done guys”

Report by Mrs Brewer

Kia Ora

This week in Ranginui we have begun to publish some of our own myths. Our myths are about the characteristics of New Zealand’s native birds. For example: Why does Tui have two voices? so she can speak to all the birds in different languages. Why Kea likes shiny things and is often attacking metal on cars and why fantails are always friendly. For math this week we have explored making many equal sets (multiplication and division) and finding the next number in number patterns. We have worked hard and today when we played Numble all of us talked about how many times tables or skip counting we used!

With colder weather it is really good to see the students wearing jackets, hats and gloves etc.. If possible please bring a spare pair of socks/pants. A couple of students have slipped in the mud lately.

Miss Ruzsa

One day long, long ago fantail was flitting around a waka looking for scraps that had been left behind by the men from the mornings fishing. Tawhirimatea blew a gust of wind SO HARD that the rope that held the waka to the bay snapped and drifted away.

Fantail was afraid of the sea and wanted to go home but he was too scared to fly. So when he saw the men going out into sea to find the waka, fantail was delighted.The men found their waka and brought fantail safely home.

That is why fantails are always so friendly to people.

Created by Nahoa

We have begun learning about Matariki in Hinemoana this week. We have started a KWL chart, sharing what we already know and asked some questions about what we would like to find out. We have even added a few things to what we have learnt already! Did you know that there are actually nine stars in the Matariki cluster, not seven? We read a story called The Stolen Stars of Matariki where we learnt the legend of the patupaiarehe (fairy people) trying to steal the Matariki stars and learnt that there are actually nine stars in the cluster. This story also led us to one of our questions - what are the names of all the stars in the Matariki cluster? We will be endeavouring to answer all our questions over the coming weeks.

Wet Your Pants Wednesday went off in Hinemoana this week and the children had so many jokes prepared! However, there can only be one joke master and this week it went to Kenzie. Kenzie’s joke provided many giggles and was just too good not to share with you all. Enjoy!

Why do ducks wear shorts?

So, you don’t see their butt-quack!

Report by Miss Laing

We’ve had a lot of fun this week in Tāne Mahuta creating crafts based off the story of Pandora’s Box. This task has linked both with our inquiry topic of “Telling Tales” and focusing on Myths, Legends and Fairytales as well as our instructional writing unit. As we have created unique crafts we have noted down our key steps which we are elaborating and making sure are specific when we create our final instructions. We have been careful to make notes that make sense to us so that no key craft steps are missed and so that we can share our instructions with others so they too can make our crafts! We have made all sorts of things related to Pandora’s Box, such as: hammers (to construct the box), the box itself and the crazy things that can be found inside the box! This has been a fun way to integrate a lot of different learning together. Take a look at our photos to see how some of our crafts are coming along.

Report by Miss Tenci

The best part about it this year is that Noel Leeming are using this event to raise money for Kids Can. 2.5% of all sales goes towards providing for those children in NZ who need it most.