Newsletter Week 2 Term 3
Sawyers Bay School 4th August 2022
Principal's Message
Kia ora Koutou,
It has been absolutely amazing to see some sun this week. We were all getting a little stir crazy spending our days inside on the rainy days.
Board election nominations closed this week, and I would very much like to thank the candidates who put their names forward. The Board of a school does a vital job in ensuring that we not only meet all of the requirements placed on a school, but that we also provide the very best opportunities that we can for our children to learn. I have been absolutely spoilt in all of my time at SBS that I have always had the opportunity to work with Boards that prioritise the needs of the children above all else. Election papers will be coming home very soon and I would encourage you to take the time to vote.
Thank you to the families that have either returned a PCT Interview slip for next week, or been in touch with their teachers. We do not get enough opportunities to work alongside parents ant the moment so these are a very beneficial chance to sit down together. If you do not have a form but would like to have an interview with your teacher, please let us know asap. We will be sitting down together on Friday morning to plan out times for families and will send these times home for you on Friday afternoon.
Mā te wā,
Gareth Swete
Upcoming Events
- Monday 8th & Wednesday 10th August - PCT Discussions
- Tuesday 9th August - Board of Trustees Meeting, 6pm
- Tuesday 23rd August - Teacher Only Day
- Tuesday 6th & Wednesday 7th September - School Photos
STAR JAM NEXT FRIDAY 19th AUGUST
We challenge all children to wear their brightest clothes to school!
Dress up in your brightest gear to help get in the Star Jam groove.
Certificates Week 1 Term 3
Te Akonga o te Wiki
Papatūānuku
We are so pleased to see the sun, and enjoy lots of time outside this week. We have the skipping ropes back out and each day are trying to improve our personal best number of jumps in the big rope. We continued our learning about shapes that have a line of symmetry and reflection. We took our learning outside to find real items in our school environment. We are going to make a book using the photos we took on the i-pad. We found lots of leaves, and then noticed the Spider Climbing frame was symmetrical so we thought we’d better climb up as far as we could! We have started our Science topic about Forces and Motion. We have talked a lot about items that we “push” or “pull” to create movement, and we found out that some items do both. We are enjoying learning some new board games. We are learning to take turns, listen to and follow instructions, and enjoy the game time with our peers.
Just a reminder that Wednesday is our class library day. We will return books and issue new ones every Wednesday. Please feel free to keep the library books at home for the week and read them as many times as possible. Repeated reading of favourite books, has immense value, and adds hugely to the language development of learners! Wednesday is also now becoming our Show and Tell day. If your child has something they would like to bring, or a photo to share on the big screen (just email it to me please) then we would like to see and hear about that on a Wednesday. Thank you!
Report by Mrs Campbell
Hine-Rau-Whārangi
Mālō e lelei, kia ora, talofa, hello
What a great week we have had in Hine-Rau-Wharangi this week. We have been really enjoying the beautiful weather and being able to get outside to play games and go for a run, it makes us all feel so good to be outside and getting some lovely fresh air. This week with the weather being so beautiful the children and I decided that it would be a great day today to plant our sunflower seeds into our recyclable pots. We made our pots look interesting by drawing designs on them and then planted our seeds into them. We are going to use this for an opportunity to do some recount writing.
The seeds we planted today have come from the flowers Ranginui planted last year and the cups were from our Matariki breakfast, because the pots are recyclable, once our seeds grow to a good height they will be able to be planted straight into the garden. See our photos below. (Photo credit goes to Emerson Connor taken of the whole class)
Report by Mrs Brewer
Tāwhirimātea
This week we have begun working on how to write instructions. We began on Tuesday with the children giving me oral instructions to help me put on a jacket. It’s fair to say there were a lot of giggles until we got it right! Then we moved onto writing our own set of instructions on how to use a bottle of bubbles. Mr Swete just happened to walk through as Haydn had finished his instructions so we put them to the test. As you can see in the video below, there was a great deal of excitement when Mr Swete finally managed to blow some bubbles. Great instruction writing Haydn! In Maths we have been busy working on deciding which stack of coins we would want to have - 18x$2, 300x.10c, 20x$1 and 70x50c. We all used a range of strategies to work out the totals of each pile and decide which pile we would most rather have. Which one would you take? It is our turn to share in assembly this week so we have decided to share our raindrop poems. We are busy creating an artwork to display our poems which involve a photo of ourselves and umbrellas. We then had to use straws to blow dye down the page so it looked like the rain was pouring down and running off our umbrellas. Also below are a few of our poems. We will pop a photo of our finished artworks onto Seesaw at the end of the week to share with you ☺️
Report by Mrs Swete
Ranginui
Kia Ora from Ranginui
Ranginui welcomed Morgan Grellet-Hale into our class. Morgan is a Masters Teacher trainee and will be joining us over the term. We look forward to working and supporting her as she completes her teaching posting.
We have learnt so much about how our eyes work, light as an energy source and why we have shadows. I do hope the children are sharing their knowledge and experiments with you. We have written explanations on how scissors, can openers, and spray bottles work. We will apply the structure of explanation writing to ..I wonder why… ideas over the next couple of weeks. Thank you for organising a torch and a gadget both were well used to explore light and oral language presentations. Note: we will be requiring the torch again later on.
Personal news and special show and tell items will be limited to Friday’s this term. All children will have the opportunity to share on this day.
The children had so much fun at dance this week, (Tuesday afternoons 2-2:30) and will participate in singing with Miss Laing next Tuesday.
Look out for regular reading homework next week - some children still have their green reading logs at home and need them at school each day to record their home work. We seem to have gobbled up lots of our glue sticks already? If you have any at home please name them and send them to school, thank you. I appreciate that some children have very special ‘gel’ pens but I will be sending these home as we have our own class set of pencils and pens which I would like the children to use.
Again I thank you for keeping a vigilant eye on any signs of cold/flu etc.. We are so close to having a full class again. Thank you!
Report by Miss Ruzsa
Hinemoana
This week Hinemoana has begun writing to explain. Explanation writing is all about telling the reader how or why. Our first exploration into this style of writing was all about scissors! We had to explain how a pair of scissors work. It was super fascinating to learn that scissors are actually a simple machine and how much physics is involved in the working of them! From there we are now explaining how sound works - another fascinating topic that we have been learning lots about during our theme, Physical Phenomena and music time. Check out Christian’s introduction to his writing:
How does it work?
Sound
Sound is around us all of the time. We can hear sound as noise from traffic, a note from an instrument or as music. All sounds around us are vibrations.
Report by Miss Laing
Tāne Mahuta
For our Inquiry topic this term we are looking at Physics concepts and asking ourselves “What’s Going on Here?” We are beginning this unit by focusing on the phenomena of “Light, Colour and How we See”. We have started this learning by looking at the anatomy of the eye and how the different parts of our eye work together to help us see everything around us. We have had our minds BLOWN by how many different parts of the eye there are and how amazing this body part is! Did you know that there is a nerve called the optic nerve that connects our eyes to our brain? This nerve helps us interpret and make sense of the things that we see. How about the iris? Have you heard of the iris? The iris is the coloured part of your eye. Do you know that genes are passed down through your family and your parents that help determine the colour of our eyes? Take a look at some of the diagrams we have created so we can remember the different parts of the eye!
Report by Miss Tenci
Community Notices
School Closed Tuesday 23rd August
Sawyers Bay School Board Elections
Nominations for the School Board Elections 2022 have now closed. A total of 6 nominations were received, which means we move to a voting election. Please keep an eye out for voting papers coming home in the next few days.
Sawyers Bay School
School Board Elections Nominations Received
ASHTON Stefanie
CHAPMAN Holly
DAWE Anita
DICK Matthew
GIDDENS Tim
PRASAD Michael
Voting closes at 4pm on 7 September.
Kyla Martyn
Returning Officer
Contact Us
Email: office@sawyersbay.school.nz
Website: https://sawyersbay.school.nz/
Location: Sawyers Bay School 99 Stevenson Ave, Sawyers Bay, Dunedin 9023, New Zealand
Phone: 03 472 8981