Kia ora Whanau,

This week we have been trying something a little different. Every afternoon at the end of lunchtime, there are two bells. The first one tells you that there is a few minutes left to get a drink, go to the toilet, and be ready for class. The second one means that lunchtime is over and we are back into learning. This week instead of the 'ding dong' bells, we have instead been playing a Jump Jam track. This means that if you happen to drive past between 1.12-1.15pm you will see our kids dancing their way back to class. It is all just for a bit of fun.

In the classrooms, each class is really getting involved into their Fairy Tale/ Myths/Legends inquiry topic. I have been blown away in particular by the children's own creative writing that comes from this. We will be aiming to share some of this with you in the newsletter over the next few weeks.

Classes are also very busy preparing their online portfolio samples for mid-year reporting. These will remain the same format as previous years and give you an animated picture of your child's current learning. We look forward to sharing these later in the term.

Ka mihi nui,

Gareth Swete

This week the trophy went home with Aletta .

This week we have been having fun in Papatūānuku with Mrs. DG. We have been practicing our reading and writing and learning all about fairytales. We have also really enjoyed playing with our special Papatūānuku sports gear. Our favourites are the big soccer balls and the yellow smiley face balls. We are looking forward to seeing Mrs. Campbell again next week, we miss her.

Report by Papatūānuku Tamariki

This week we have been learning how to use a number line in Math to enhance our knowledge of counting backwards when working on subtraction problems. We are also getting super good at counting back from 100. On Monday we went on a Nature walk to collect leaves for our Autumn writing and Art to show in assembly this Friday.

This week also in writing we have been looking at onomatopoeia and writing about our four senses: see, hear, feel and smell. We looked at the different words that you can use to describe something from our nature walk that makes our readers feel like they are in and can see from our piece of writing.

Report by Mrs Brewer

Over the past week, the Tāwhiri children have been enjoying lots of Fairy Tale themed activities. Miss Carston had us working in groups to choreograph and perform silent drama skits. Each group was given a fairy tale and they had to perform their skit to the audience to see if they could guess which fairy tale was being acted out. They all did so well and all fairy tales were guessed correctly! Imagine if Jack from the beanstalk met goldilocks, the big bad wolf or the gingerbread man! We have been mixing up our characters to write mixed up fairy tales. We all had to roll a die 4 times and each number corresponded with a main character, a second character, a setting and a problem (all from well known fairy tales). Once we have finished writing these, we will publish them onto Seesaw so you can have a read of them at home. On Monday we got news that Jack’s mum cut down his beanstalk and left him stuck up in the clouds. Working in teams of 3, we raced to design and build an invention that would help get him down before the giant found him and turned him into bread! This saw an impressive range of designs involving pulleys, nets for cubes, big slides with splash pools at the bottom, trampolines and parachutes, beanstalks, cushions for soft landings and more! The inventions were marvelous but I think the real stand outs for this activity were the teamwork and communication skills. Every group displayed such wonderful problem solving skills and used the engineering design process to overcome obstacles and make changes when things didn't go to plan.

Report by Mrs Swete

This week we had another great Kelly Sports session. Our focus this term is speed, agility and reaction. We played lots of fun games to test ourselves in these skills, like Rats and Rabbits. It was great to see the children listening to Coach Terryn and displaying fair play. Well done Hinemoana!

For our topic Telling Tales we are focusing on the Māori Myth / Legend, The Clay Woman. This story is about how Tāne Mahuta, God of the Forest, created the first woman, Hineahuone, sculpting her from clay and bringing her to life. For Visual Art, we have used this story as inspiration to create our own character to sculpt from clay (have a look at some of the photos of our character designs). In Writing, we are learning to write Six Sentence Stories with each sentence having a specific role. Our first go at a Six Sentence Story was re-telling The Clay Woman and the children did a great job making sure each sentence told the reader the specific details it was meant to. Our next task is to create a Six Sentence Story to go along with our own characters that we have created from clay.

Here is an example of a Six Sentence Story, re-telling the Myth / Legend of The Clay Woman. As you read, can you work out what the job of each sentence is?

Once upon a time there lived a clever god named Tāne Mahuta.

Tāne Mahuta lived in the dark depths of the forest in Aotearoa.

He was able to talk to all the birds and insects in the trees and underground.

Unfortunately, Tāne Mahuta was very lonely and felt like something was missing in his life.

He wanted someone to love and share his life with.

So, he closed his eyes and dug into the cold, hard clay and sculpted the first woman - Hineahuone.

By Aquilla and Ashley

Report by Miss Laing

We have been building up our knowledge of 2D and 3D shapes in Tane Mahuta recently. Over our last few lessons we have challenged ourselves by creating 3D shapes out of playdough and sticks. Once we’ve built our shapes, we have then looked at them from different angles and worked out how many vertices, edges and faces each of the different shapes have. We had to be careful when we were building that our shapes were strong enough to stand up by themselves, so we had to think carefully about which part to build first and then add on from there. It has been great to build up our knowledge of 2D and 3D shapes and do some fun making as well!

Report by Miss Tenci