Newsletter Week 4 Term 4
Sawyers Bay School 10th November 2022
Principal's Message
Kia ora koutou,
Firstly I would like to welcome Hadassah to Papatūānuku this week. We are very happy to have you with us, Hadassah.
Well done to our children for their incredible swimming efforts again this week. We know that it is hard work having two weeks of daily swimming, but they have all handled it wonderfully. The progress made also justifies this approach. I look forward to families seeing this progress for themselves the next time they go swimming together.
The weather has certainly been cranking up a gear over the last two weeks. It is a timely reminder to all families and children, that as a SunSmart accredited school, sunhats must be worn everyday in Terms 1and 4. This includes cloudy days as UV radiation doesn't just come out during the sunny days. If your child wishes to bring a hat of their own, it must be a wide brimmed or bucket hat that covers the ears and neck. Caps just don't quite cut it unfortunately. Thanks again to all of our children for helping us to keeping them sunsafe.
Mā te wā,
Gareth Swete
Upcoming Events
- Final Assembly - Friday 9th December
- Final Day of Term 4 - 1pm Thursday 15th December
Assembly Certificates
Te Ākonga o te Wiki
Papatūānuku
Kia ora koutou,
What a fun week we’ve had at the Port Chalmers Swimming Pool!
Every child in Papatūānuku has made incredible progress in the pool this week. I am so very proud of them all. They’ve all listened well, followed instructions and in many cases, stepped out of their comfort zone and tried something new. This is a great example of our tamariki displaying SBS School Values in such an important and valuable learning experience.
Our class jobs are going well, and Pay Days are VERY exciting! The tamariki get bonus classroom dollars, for having their ‘tools’ ready (e.g. Poem books, Literacy books, being ready for learning themselves) and also for a huge effort in a task. Pay Days are fun to watch the kids counting their hard earned classroom dollars. Their addition skills are developing, as are their grouping, doubling, partitioning and place value skills. It is surprising how much learning occurs in this ‘classroom life’ experience! In addition to that, we have some great examples of work ethic, happening in their ‘job’ roles!
We are also learning to write our numbers in order and in the correct formation! We have learned a new game that involves a slight bit of chance, plus some team work, to write the numbers in the correct place on a number line, after adding two dice together.
Also in Mathematics, we are learning about measuring lengths of items. There is a huge amount of language surrounding this concept. We all have pet worms now (pipe cleaners!) of varying lengths, and there is a lot of discussion around which one is longer than, shorter than, and finding classroom items that we can put in order of longest to shortest, and vice versa.
After ordering our class pets in height order, I set the tamariki a challenge. To order their own stuffed pets or toys at home, in order of height. Of course these can be any toys - animals, dolls, cars, whatever they have a group of that are varying heights. Be creative! It would be great if they put them in order of height, took a photo, then emailed it to me on hilaryc@sawyersbay.school.nz then we’ll share it with the class. Thank you in advance for helping with this home learning activity!
Report by Mrs Campbell
Hine-Rau-Whārangi
Talofa, Mālō e lelei, Kia ora, Hello
Once again it has been a wonderful week for swimming. The progress the students have made over the past two weeks is amazing, they have been working super hard at their swimming skills and are so proud of their achievements, as they should be. We have been working on our writing by retelling the story about Grandpa's Slippers and making sure we have a beginning, a middle and an end in our written work with a focus on making sure we have full stops and capital letters and are using our sound knowledge to correct the spelling of words. Today we took the opportunity to pop outside in the sunshine and practice some skip counting in twos making sure we get our numbers around the correct way. We are also really enjoying our Sports Rotations and have very much enjoyed the variety of activities that have been set out. With the nice weather, it has also been super pleasing to see all of our outdoor activities in Hine-Rau-Wharangi being used outside and shared with other classes.
Report by Mrs Brewer
Tāwhirimātea
We are now well into our last week of swimming and the progress is truly amazing. We have children learning to swim with a kickboard while having our faces in the water and no adults holding onto us, some are swimming full lengths of the pool on both their front and back, others working to develop correct kicking and arm skills and some of us are even having to jump into the deep end and swim to safety at the side of the pool. We continue to enjoy being business managers of our dinosaur parks. We are now learning about scale and area to create a plan of our dinosaur parks including enclosures that are the correct size for each dinosaur, and other attractions which we think would be beneficial for our parks such as toilets, a ticket booth, playgrounds and shops. Next week we will begin using our knowledge of time to create a daily schedule for our park wardens. Another big focus we have had this week has been on editing and publishing. We have been reading passages and finding where missing full stops and capital letters belong. Once we have read and edited the passages we are then using our best handwriting to publish the edited passage, ensuring we copy carefully to avoid any errors. We will continue to work on these skills next week, but we will begin to look at commas and a variety of other punctuation. A highlight this week has also been working on some dinosaur art. Each child has researched and found their own dinosaur drawing tutorial (this had to be as realistic as possible). Once the dinosaurs were drawn they then needed to be coloured in. We could use a variety of media including pastel, coloured pencils, pencil and vivid. Later in the week we will get the paints out to create a background that we can layer our dinosaurs on top of. On Thursday afternoons this term, the Junior Team are participating in sports rotations. This involves children being put into whanau groups (a mixture of children from all 3 junior classes). Each teacher is taking 3 sessions of a sport before the groups rotate to the next teacher. Mrs Campbell is taking big ball skills, Mrs Brewer is teaching striking skills with t-ball and Mr Slabbert is teaching about speed and agility through relay and race type games.
Report by Mrs Swete
Ranginui
Kia Ora
Ranginui’s ‘I Don’t Know? POPCORN!’ Business is heading to full production.. Posters, T.V ads, surveys, research, the company jingle and packaging are all completed- and before the deadline! Over the coming days we will be working as a manufacturing company and producing popcorn boxes ready to be distributed around the school. Fantastic effort team Ranginui.
Swimming finishes this week and I must say that the progress the students have made is incredible. Each person has put 100% effort into each lesson. I thank you for putting a little bit extra into their lunch boxes as they certainly have used a lot of energy. Ranginui would like to thank the instructors for their time and teaching skills- Ka Pai.
As the weather is being so kind to us, please remember to apply sunscreen before school if you can. We all will be wearing our hats whenever we are outside and it pays to be protected.
Our little gardens have grown so much over the past few weeks and your child should have brought theirs home. Happy planting and eating as they were all looking YUMMY! We will be planting some tomato seedlings and growing our own giant sunflowers next week so more delicious edibles to nurture along.
Please feel free to contact me with any enquiries. joslynr@sawyersbay.school.nz
Ka Kite
Report by Miss Ruzsa
Hinemoana
This week sees us finish up our swimming lessons. It has been a full on couple of weeks with swimming lessons everyday but the children are still absolutely smashing it in the pool.
In swimming I am learning to do butterfly. (Maddison)
I am doing backstroke and freestyle. (Monty)
I am doing breaststroke. (Liam M)
We are building upon our CVs and now writing cover letters for specific jobs. We got to decide what job we are applying for from Hinemoana’s Job Vacancies - Artist, Zoologist, Teacher or Sport Coach? The children chose a job that interested them and from pulling out key words in the advert decided what skills, qualifications and responsibilities they had that would make them the best person for that role. We have looked at cover letter examples and discussed what they contain and how they are formatted. We are just beginning to create our own to sell ourselves in the hopes of landing the job!
Hinemoana’s Got Talent is well and truly underway and the children have some very cool talents to share. We’ve had videos, photos and live performances and the children are absolutely shining showing off what they can do. This Wednesday we saw Beth play the keyboard and Harrison showed us his flips and tricks on the trampoline. We are looking forward to continuing Hinemoana’s Got Talent this term and seeing what everyone else's talents are.
And lastly, LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION (DRONE?)! Earlier this week our very own Sylas (alongside some other children from Tāne Mahuta) got to participate in a solar power presentation with School Gen Trust. Sylas has been learning about solar power and energy from the sun during reading time and got the opportunity to share his learning with others. Well done Sylas!
Report by Miss Laing
Tāne Mahuta
We are really enjoying this term’s Inquiry topic ‘Jobs and Careers’ in Tane Mahuta. This week we have been lucky to have some visitors come to join us who have given talks and answered questions about their jobs! So far we have had a visit from Polly (Miss Tenci’s sister) about what it is like to be a doctor and work in a hospital. On Thursday afternoon we are having a talk from Chaya’s Mum, Leah, about her interesting job as a writer. Polly shared with us what a ‘typical day looks like in the hospital’ and walked us through many of the different procedures doctors have to carefully follow in order to do their jobs properly. She demonstrated and told us about the process of ‘scrubbing in’, a sterile way to get prepared to assist in a surgery. Polly even bought some gloves to demonstrate this step of the process! We had a try ourselves and found out that it was much harder than some of us originally thought it would be! Take a look at some of our photos and clips to see some of what we got up to for Polly’s visit.
We are gaining insight into the working world and learning lots of new things about the different parts of having a career. Did you know that in the past, people didn’t choose their jobs? They more often than not just followed in their parents footsteps and did whatever jobs their parents did… Even if they didn’t want to! We were thinking about and having discussions around if this were still the case today. It was interesting to hear the children’s perspectives on whether or not they’d like to have the same jobs as their parents or not. Feel free to ask your children about some of the new learning they have done about jobs and careers at home, I’m sure their answers will really interest you!
Report by Miss Tenci
Sports News
This Week's results:
Touch Rugby
SBS Force 5-4 W POD Liam M.
Futsal
SBS Stars 5-0 W POD Olivia P.
SBS Spurs 1-7 L POD Freddie
SBS Sparks 2-2 POD Stevie
SBS Steamers 2-2 POD Parker
SBS Sweepers 7-1 W POD Asher
Community Notices
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