Newsletter Week 5 Term 4
Sawyers Bay School 17th November 2022
Principal's Message
Kia ora koutou,
Once again we have had students out and about representing the school with five of our athletes competing at the Otago Champs Athletics meet on Tuesday. Well done to Liam, Kenzie, Luca, Aquilla and Olivia. Qualifying for the Otago Champs is a huge achievement.
With the completion of swimming last week, we have been able to enjoy a little more time at school, and in the classroom. It has been great to see the children really enjoying our careers topic and finding out all about the world of employment, wages and budgeting!
We do have an update for you all regarding the traffic situation next week. As of Friday afternoon, Station Road should be re-opened. Hall Road above the roundabout will be closed, but we have been assured that the footpaths will still be available to pedestrians. Lights will be in place through the roundabout as they are this week. However, if this wasn't making the school run complex enough, Monday to Wednesday there will be powerline work outside the school. Traffic will be limited to one lane and traffic management will be in place from our crossing down. Once we see it all in action, we will find a solution to help children continue to get to and from school safely.
Mā te wā,
Gareth Swete
Upcoming Events
- Final Assembly - 2pm Friday 9th December
- Final Day of Term 4 - 1pm Thursday 15th December
THANK YOU PTA!
Good on ya' PTA!
Assembly Certificates
Te Ākonga o te Wiki
Otago Primary School Swimming Champs
Three swimmers represented Sawyers Bay at the Otago Primary School Champs over the weekend: Christian Ralph, Scout Thomson-Keating and Olivia Dick. All three did extremely well, with a few personal bests clocked up. Christian also came third in the 9 and under boys breaststroke event. Well done to all three.
Papatūānuku
Greetings from Papatūānuku!
We ended last week on a high with a day we were allowed to bring a teddy bear or stuffed toy to school. We cared for our toy all day, and used our toy to help us with our learning. At the end of the day we put our toys in height order from shortest to tallest. Thank you to everyone who also did this at home with their own collections and sent the photo to school. It has generated lots of discussion! This week, we’ve started working on our posters, all about a job we would like to do when we grow up. We’ve shared what we know about what the job entails, what tools or equipment we’d need, and what specialist clothing we’d need to wear. In order to create a poster, we first looked at a variety of posters we have at school and discussed the “Features of a Poster”. Come along to assembly on Friday if you’d like to see us share the final products!
Report by Mrs Campbell
Hine-Rau-Whārangi
Talofa, Mālō e lelei, Kia ora, Hello
With swimming finished, we still couldn't miss sharing a photo from our game of Waterpolo last week. It was amazing to watch the kids in the pool and see their confidence in this game. I might add there were some pretty good players who became quite competitive.
What an amazing, beautiful week it has been for learning. In writing we have been busy learning about careers and have chosen a job that we might like to have when we are older. We are sharing and writing down the qualities we think we have as a person and will be doing some inquiry learning about our chosen option. Once we have finished we will be looking at how to make a Curriculum Vitae. In math we are continuing to practice our counting and adding skills while using a variety of equipment to help us. We have been practising our basic facts using the interactive whiteboard and playing an adding game called Smoothie Math. I have shared the link below as there is a really good variety of learning games that your children could play if they do have a little Technology time.
https://www.ictgames.com/mobilePage/index.html
Report by Mrs Brewer
Tāwhirimātea
Our dinosaur art continues to evolve this week - each child has found their own drawing tutorial for a realistic looking dinosaur and have used pastel or coloured pencils to colour using blending techniques. We then created backgrounds using paints and sponges- once again using blending techniques to create different tones and textures. We have learnt to make ‘springs’ from paper which we are using to stick our dinosaurs on to create a 3D effect. We are now in the process of learning about onomatopoeia and creating some pop art to incorporate a dinosaur sound onto our artworks. These are looking really amazing and the children have been asking if we can share them when we are next sharing at assembly. For writing this week we are busy creating a CV. Once we have done this we will look at writing a covering letter explaining why someone should employ us. We continue to design our dinosaur parks this week in math. We are having to revisit our time skills to help us creating a schedule for our park wardens to ensure there are plenty of shows for visitors, and all of the animals get fed for the correct lengths of time.
What the children had to say this week:
“Mrs Swete gave us a Jelly bean challenge in Maths. She didn’t want us to find the answer but most efficient way of working out the answer. I like writing our CV’s and can’t wait to publish them!” (Izzy)
“I really like that we have been running around the bike track for fitness. It is helping me get fitter and will be good for my gymnastics” (Bailey)
“I am really liking learning how to do new things with paper and paints in art.” (Cooper)
“I like doing the pop art and making the springs in art.” (Silas)
Report by Mrs Swete
Ranginui
Kia Ora
We did it! We have produced over a hundred popcorn boxes! Great Team effort Ranginui. We will be presenting a slideshow at this week's assembly showing all our hard work over the last few weeks- Hope you can be there. For writing we are creating our own C.V’s. (Hinemoana inspired us last week) We have listed our experiences and responsibilities and are talking about our skills. We will publish these on our chromebooks. We would like to say a huge thank you to the PTA for the lovely bean bags in our library. The colours are so cool and it was so relaxing reading our books.
We have planted our tomato seedlings into the school gardens and our sunflowers are nearly ready to plant out. The warm weather has really helped them sprout!
Part of our daily maths has been an open ended money problem. You have $20.00 to buy fruit and vegetables. The children have explored different ways of spending $20.00 and I asked how we could make this a bit harder… An answer was- use the real prices because they are so dear and it would cost more than $20!! Too TRUE!!
As it is getting warmer please send a water bottle for your child to use in class if possible.
Ka Kite
Report by Miss Ruzsa
Hinemoana
In Hinemoana this week we have been very lucky to have Miss Richardson (of Papatūānuku fame) teaching us. It is really exciting to have Miss Richardson back in the school for a few days.
For Written Language, we have been writing cover letters for our CV's. This will help us to 'apply for our jobs' later on. We are learning to write a good cover letter that tells people all of our good skills, hooks the reader in with a good introduction and follows the correct letter writing format.
In Maths, we have continued our learning around money and financial literacy. This all fits together with our careers study and is a great motivator for applying for a well-paying job!
Senior Sports rotations have continued this week and we got to have a session with the parachute. This is always a very popular activity with all of the Hinemoana kids.
Report by nga Tamariki o Hinemoana
Tāne Mahuta
This week has flown by quickly. We have again been lucky enough to have a great parent visit for a career talk. From this talk we have gained more new knowledge! On Wednesday, Judy Buckingham (Ida’s mum), came in to talk to us about her job as a school counsellor. We engaged in some interesting activities as well as learning new things. We practiced some breathing exercises and learned that exhaling for a long time can help our bodies to calm down. We also practiced a ‘butterfly hug’ which meant to put your hands in a butterfly shape and then place the palm of your hand on your sternum. Once you’ve done this you find the space between your collarbone and first rib and tap… this is another way to help your body relax and release oxytocin! We tried this butterfly hug technique and some of the kids certainly noticed a difference! We have really been enjoying learning new things from family members of our class about their interesting jobs.
We have also continued our focus on persuasive writing. This week we have given mini presentations in small groups about different pieces of persuasive writing. We have not only shared these pieces of writing with the class but identified the conventions of persuasive writing. Some of these conventions are: rhetorical questions, sequencing words, modal verbs and personal pronouns. We were able to identify many different conventions and features within these different texts. We are feeling ready to begin crafting our own pieces of persuasive writing now and to see how many of our class members we’ll be able to convince of our point of view! Take a look at our clips to get an idea of what topics we were persuading each other about this week.
Report by Miss Tenci
Sports News
This Week's results:
Touch Rugby
SBS Force 2-0 W POD Beau
Futsal
SBS Stars 7-1 W POD Emerson
SBS Spurs 0-some L POD Callan
SBS Sparks 0-4 L POD Liam R.
SBS Steamers 4-0 W POD Liam M.
SBS Sweepers 1-1 POD Arden
A friendly reminder to please check the school app prior to your futsal game day for the match draw, to ensure your child arrives on time and doesn't leave their team short of players. Thank you.
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