Kia ora Whanau,

Firstly I would like to welcome Olivia and Chloe to the school. It is great to have you and your family with us!

I trust that you all had a good Easter break. There was certainly plenty of great autumn weather to enjoy. We are thrilled to have our kids back at school for Term 2. It is absolutely amazing to see how settled and ready for learning our children were right from Day 1. We have another action packed term of learning ahead of us.

The main Inquiry topic for Term 2 is all around Telling Tales. This will be an exploration into myths, legends, histories and fairy tales. As with all inquiry units, we never know where they will lead as we go with the direction that the children, their interests and their needs and strengths take us. What we do know is that we will be weaving in some magic along the way to keep us excited, watch this space.

A big thank you to all families for once again adapting to our ever changing COVID requirements. We do feel that we are inching our way back to 'normal'.

Ka mihi nui,

Gareth Swete

We’re thrilled to be back for Term 2! It is so lovely seeing the tamariki back at school and what a lovely week of weather we are having so far so we can get outside and enjoy autumn.

We have started the term developing our skipping skills! We are learning to skip in the big rope, along with skipping on our own, either on the spot or running as we skip. What I am particularly proud of, is when children think to themselves, or say out loud that they haven’t skipped before, or that this might be hard for them. Then, they give it a go, and before they know it, they are skipping! The look of delight as they realise their success, is so wonderful to observe. It is this “give-it-a-go” attitude, especially when faced with a challenge, that I admire with our young learners.

During mathematics, we are learning to count in twos. The tamariki are noticing patterns when we do this, and are also making connections to times of the day when we count in twos in real life contexts, like when we count groups of objects, or line up in pairs and count our class, or when we count our pairs of shoes!

This term we are learning about Myths, Legends and Fairytales. We started by reading Maui and the Sun, followed by drama retellings of each part of the story. We learned how to freeze frame our actions and look at other group’s freeze frames and see if we could work out which part of the story they were retelling. You may have noticed some awesome chalk art work on the pavement outside our classroom, which also illustrates the story of Maui slowing down the sun.

Another legend we read this week was that of Ranginui and Papatūānuku. We went outside to observe and discuss our earth and sky and then did a walk around our school linking what we were learning about, to the names of our classrooms.

Report by Mrs Campbell

'Malo e lelei' ‘Kia ora’ ‘Hello’

Welcome back to Term 2 and what an amazing start we have had to the term. It is so nice to see everyone back. The Hine-Rau-Wharangi students are settled and have been busy sharing their experiences about the holidays throughout oral language and their writing. We are excited about starting our new topic for the first part of this term Maori Myths and Legends, this has inspired us in our writing. We have read how Maui slowed the sun and retold this in our own words with a focus on capital letters and full stops.

We also have been producing artwork around this legend also and are very excited to be sharing these in our assembly this week.

We are also looking forward to beginning our Junior Arts rotations today where we will be learning Drama, Music and Dance. Next week we will be visiting Harold and our focus will be on being a team player.

On Monday next week your child will bring a homework book home with a word and sounds sheet pasted into it. This is relevant to our LLL weekly Reading and Writing. Your child should work on this over the week and return the book back to school on Friday morning.

Report by Mrs Brewer

Welcome to Term 2! It was so lovely reconnecting with all of the children on Monday and hearing about their adventures over the holidays. We hit the ground running with our new school wide topic “Telling Tales”. We will have a big focus on language this term - learning about the art of storytelling, tenses, verbs, nouns, adjectives and figurative language. This will hopefully all come together later in the term when we write and publish our very own Fairy tales. This week we have been learning about the suffix /ed/ and how it changes a word to past tense. We will use what we have learnt about /ed/ this week to begin writing stories about when we were little. Thanks to those of you who have already sent in baby pictures and stories. If you haven't already, can we please have these back at school by Friday. We are working on our small ball skills for fitness at the moment. Challenging ourselves to throw and catch balls without dropping them. It is amazing how quickly their skills are developing with regular practice! Odd and Even numbers have been our focus in math this week. We have played a few games that require us to be on team Odd Todd or Even Steven. We may have to explore these a bit further to check if the probability of odd vs even is fair.

Below is a picture of the Tāwhiri children finding sentences around the classroom. These were then written into their writing books with the verb being highlighted. I was so impressed with how all the children were able to quickly identify the verbs in each sentence!

Report by Mrs Swete

Kia Ora and welcome back

The children look happy and well rested after their two week break and I have loved hearing all the adventures they went on and things they got up to. Term 2’s inquiry is called ‘Telling Tales’ and we have begun looking at fairy tales by finding what problems the characters face and deciding how we might solve them now. We will be using STEAM and our inquiry cycle to plan, create, test, research and ask lots of questions throughout the unit. Many of our tasks will involve working collaboratively too. (team building skills) Our first task was to solve The river crossing problem, where in groups the children had to work out how to get items across a river but certain items were not allowed to be left together. I was very impressed with the communication and listening skills shown by everyone. Well done teams and a special mention to Francesca who helped us act out the problem.

Our maths programme includes Fractions and supportive activities, basic facts, open ended problems, and number activities.

Reading books will come home during the week and (words/sounds soon) Thank you for signing your child’s log books and for the supportive comments.

Kelly sports begin next Tuesday as well as a visit from the Life Education bus on Monday. The children will be learning about Friendships and Feelings. On Thursday afternoons Ranginui will join with the senior classes for sports rotations, appropriate footwear etc…

As always, please feel free to contact me via school, email, or a note. I look forward to seeing you again.

Report by Ms Ruzsa

Welcome back to Term 2. The children have come back with lots of energy and are getting stuck into their learning. We are also lucky to welcome a new member to our class, Chloe. It is wonderful to have you here with us!

We are learning to read and plot coordinates on a quadrant and the children are doing a great job reading their coordinates correctly. We are using all our learning from last term about direction and degrees of a compass (circle) to code Spheros (robots) to map out certain coordinate paths on a quadrant and reach a final destination and sink our enemy’s ships.

Our Theme for this term is Telling Tales where we are learning all about fairy tales, myths, legends and fables. Do you know the difference between them? We have had a good discussion and used our prior knowledge and made predictions about what we think each of these genres is about / involves. We have explored Jack and the Beanstalk and are now completing a STEAM Challenge to get Jack safely down the beanstalk with his bag of coins. There are some very creative and clever ideas happening in Hinemoana! And, we are looking forward to testing our designs and seeing if they are successful.

Report by Miss Laing

Did you know that we have started our new “Telling Tales” Inquiry topic for the term this week in Tane Mahuta? We have begun this unit by doing a number of different activities. These have included things such as - group tasks to unpack the differences between myths, legends, fairytales and fables. For these, the information and examples we have collated are going to be shared to the class as mini presentations through next week and we are going to learn about these different types of stories from one another.

In Literacy time we have also been looking at different myths/legends/fairytales and fables and this week we have completed some learning about the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur. Do you know this story? It is a famous old legend from Greece and it is full of adventure. We challenged ourselves to summarise this story individually and also thought about putting ourselves in Theseus’ shoes and trying to decide whether we might have been brave enough to battle the minotaur if we were in the same situation as he was! It has been very interesting getting to know some more about these stories.

Tane Mahuta’s Theseus and the Minotaur Collaborative Class Summary:

‘Theseus tells his father Aegeus his plan to slay the minotaur. This was important because the king was sending seven boys and seven girls every year to Crete to be fed to the minotaur that was kept in a labyrinth; he did this to keep the minotaur satisfied. Theseus’ plan was to go on the boat over to Crete pretending to be one of the seven boys that was going to be sacrificed to the minotaur. Instead of surrendering to the minotaur, Theseus was going to fight him! In the end he emerges from the maze victorious after slaying the minotaur but forgets about an important promise that he made to his father. This promise was that Theseus would change the sails of his boat from black to white as a symbol of success if he was able to slay the minotaur so his father knew he was safe. He forgot to change his sails to white and made his way back to Athens still flying black sails.’

Report by Miss Tenci

Port Chalmers Library - Book Club

Kia Ora All,

In May we will be holding book club a week later than usual on Monday 9th where we’ll be making friendship bracelets.

Nga Mihi

Port Chalmers Library Team