Newsletter Week 3 Term 2
Sawyers Bay School 19th May 2022
PRINCIPAL'S MESSAGE
Kia ora Whanau,
This week Tāwhirimātea have taken over the Principal's message part of the newsletter. Mr. Swete was in our class while he was writing the newsletter so we took over!
All of the classes have been learning about Fairy Tales. We have really enjoyed the autumn weather because lots of people love playing with the fallen leaves and throwing them in the air. It is really beautiful outside.
All of the classes have been working on a math's game altogether called Numble. You get three numbers and you have to use those three numbers to make as many equations as you can. Each class is doing numble together and we will share our answers at next assembly.
Tane Mahuta got to finally go to the Ecosanctuary this week and we are looking forward to going next week as well as Ranginui.
Kia pai tō koutou rā
Tāwhirimātea tamariki
Upcoming Events
- Monday 6th June - Queen's Birthday
- Tuesday 21st June - Board Meeting No. 4
- Friday 24th June - Matariki
Certificates Week 2 Term 2
Te Akonga o te Wiki
This week the trophy went home with Anya.
Papatūānuku
Kia ora whanau.This week Papatūānuku have been diving into Fairytales! With Mrs Dixon-Grant, we read Jack and the Beanstalk, The Three Little Pigs and The Three Billy Goats Gruff. We are learning that Fairytales usually start with “Once upon a time…” and they finish with “And they lived happily ever after”. In the story there are good characters and a bad or evil character. To illustrate the fairytales we have been learning about, we made Little Pig masks, a poster, and now we are breaking up the story of The Three Billy Goats Gruff, into stages, and making a crayon and dye picture for each part of the story. The tamariki’s drawing skills are developing so well. We talked about the part of the picture that was the background, and the part that is the main point that we want to get across when we draw. We are learning to retell a fairytale by telling the story in stages, rather than just jumping to the end!
Our Mathematics learning this week has been a huge variety of tasks. We helped the Three Billy Goats walk backwards (from 20 to 1) to find their way back to safety. We learned to count some numbers in Te Reo and also learned how to write tally marks. We are getting better and better at these. A favourite class game is our Ten Pin Bowling game where we always mark our scores in tally marks. Our Kelly Sports session today was a fun game of Valleys and Volcanoes, followed by a running race to get the cones. We are learning to run with speed, agility and good form. Today a big surprise arrived, in the form of a big bag of sports equipment for our class. We took the balls out first, and explored their shape, colour, size and texture, and then wrote descriptions for our favourite ball. We are excited to see what comes out of the big bag tomorrow!
Report by Mrs Campbell
Hine-Rau-Whārangi
We really enjoyed Kelly Sports on Wednesday. We played two new games this time with a focus on agility, speed and endurance. The games we played were truck and trailer where you were a pair and the trailer had to tag your partner the truck and our other game was volcanoes and valleys. The volcanoes had to turn the cones upside down into valleys and the valleys had to turn the cones right side up into volcanoes. It was fun and we enjoyed the tag games and all of the fitness and running, it was great working in a team and learning new sports skills
Report by Isaac and Stan
Next week we begin our second part of our Topic about Fairy Tales, so we are asking for any pieces of cardboard (not too large) your child might be able to bring to school for a STEAM project.
Report by Mrs Brewer
Tāwhirimātea
This week we have been getting arty. We have each created a scene with Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf in the forest. The children really enjoyed experimenting with different techniques such as mixing dye colors to create our forest background and dragging different shades of brown across paper with cardboard to create bark effects for our trees. We really enjoyed playing around with the layout of our trees, wolf and Red Riding Hood before deciding on their final positions and sticking them down. Earlier in the term we retold Red Riding Hood's story in a given tense so we have attached these to our artworks as well. When we were all finished we took some time to admire each other's work and pass on some positive feedback. Below are some of our artworks. I wonder if the audience will be able to guess our tenses when we share them at Assembly on Friday?! We have continued to work on our own past, present and future writing this week and I am so impressed with how they are looking. Our publishing skills have really improved this term! We can't wait to show you the finished products. In Math we have been looking at probability. We created our own spinners with snacks that we would like to eat and also snacks we wouldn’t like (we made these sections much smaller!). We put our spinners to the test, keeping a tally chart of our spins and have written statements about the probability of each option on our spinners.
Report by Mrs Swete
Ranginui
Kia Ora Whanau
Our fairytale theme has continued this week, and at our assembly on Friday we presented our wanted characters from fairy tales. Villains!
We are writing our favourite story and creating a house for the characters to live in. Today we had our first puppet show, with Madeline using stick puppets to retell her own story. Everyone is keen and eager to have a go.
We have been exploring different ways to solve maths problems this week. We had to apply our fraction knowledge of equal sharing. I was very proud of the children's ‘can do attitude’ which meant they all tried different ways without giving up, and the rich maths language they were able to use to explain their solutions showed their current learning.
Next week our class STEAM challenge is to build a bridge for the three billy goats (and the Troll) to cross. Please send any useful items on Monday.
Report by Miss Ruzsa
Hinemoana
Following on from our visits with Harold on the Life Education bus last week Hinemoana is learning all about Emotional Intelligence. Emotional Intelligence is all about knowing our own emotional make up, managing our emotions, responses and reactions and to be respectful of the emotions of others. For our first activity we played the Categories Game, where we had to stand up if a statement related to us. This was a way to explore how we all have differences and similarities. From this we completed an activity called About Us as learning and understanding more about who we are, what we like and dislike helps us to then understand our feelings and emotions better.
The Three Little Pigs is still our current inspiration for writing and STEAM. We have put ourselves into the shoes of The Big, Bad Wolf and written a diary entry from the wolf’s perspective, justifying why we ate the little pigs. It has been interesting (and humorous!) to hear the creative excuses the children have come up with.
For STEAM we are designing and building a house for one of the three little pigs. Our house has to be able to withstand weather elements such as rain and wind and hopefully protect the little pigs from The Big Bad Wolf!
We are continuing to learn about fractions with this week's focus on learning to find fractions of groups / sets. For example, what is ¼ of 16? We have learnt a rule (maybe you could ask your child to teach you!) to help us solve these types of problems and this is allowing us to learn all about division and division strategies at the same time.
Keep up the epic learning Hinemoana!
Lastly, please note if your child wishes to share news or something special this happens on a Tuesday (Tuesday Newsday) in Hinemoana. Our Mondays are reserved for revealing the Champ of the Week!
Report by Miss Laing
Tāne Mahuta
This week in Tane Mahuta we were lucky enough to attend our catch up session at the Orokonui Ecosanctuary! We were pretty excited to see different types of native birds and plants. Highlights were things such as watching the kaka feed, seeing the takahe and taking a big walk down the track to the bottom of the ecosanctuary to see New Zealand’s tallest tree! Did you know that the tallest tree in New Zealand is 81m tall?! We were pretty amazed by this new fact! Though the track was a bit slippery and steep it was interesting to see all of the different types of plants along the way, we found horopito - which is a spicy leaf! Have you heard of it before? We even found a yucky smelling tree called a “poo plant”... This one really smelled disgusting! Thank you to all of the parent helpers who came and gave us a hand at the ecosanctuary.
Report by Miss Tenci
Writers of the week!
Community Notices
Terra Nova Keas and Cubs
Terra Nova Sea Scouts have spaces available in their Kea and Cub sections for those in the West Harbour area! Keas is for those 5-8 years old, and Cubs is for those 8-11 years old.
Keas takes place at our Hall on Athol Place on Mondays at 4.30pm and Cubs is on between 6pm and 7.30pm on Mondays.
If you want to know more, look on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/terranovascouts, or on the ScoutsNZ website https://scouts.nz/groups/terra-nova-sea-scouts.
Contact the Group Leader, Mark Forbes (021 276 2214) for more information!
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