Another exciting Term is underway for our Year 7 students - their last as Year 7's before they move on as Year 8 next year. We have our term topic "pARTicipate" underway. This is an integrated PBL focus of the ARTS and Literacy.

As part of our ignitor for this unit, every class had two sessions with Stu Duval, a well known author, artist and storyteller.  In the first session he weaved his magic with words as he held our students enthralled in an adventure story for over an hour. During the second session Stu then worked on narrative writing skills, tips and tricks, creating characters and developing storylines. Classes will use these ideas over the next few weeks as we move into storytelling and narrative writing. 

Collaboration and communication will be two major focuses for our classes this term. Students will be undertaking a range of activities, team challenges and experiences where skills in working with others including negotiation, compromise and contributing will be important. Our expectations of students to continue to display our school values - PERK - Perseverance,  Excellence, Respect and Kindness - continues to be reinforced and explicitly referred to in all we do. 

As part of our theme PBL this term every class will work as a team to plan,  create,  write,  act,  film,  dance and use their talents and skills to put together a performance for  the rest of the Year 7 classes.  This week each class took part in a "genre reveal" where the school councillor popped a balloon to find out what their class focus for the performance will be - from Fantasy to Horror,  Western or Adventure, we look forward to seeing how each class interprets their selected genre in their final performance. 

Next week we move into the start of our EOTC activity for this term when our Long Beach Rock Climbing and Team building day gets underway. This is always a highlight of the year as students challenge themselves to achieve their goal on the rock climbing. Thank you to all  parents and caregivers who are able to come and assist on this day.  Classes will be emailed on the morning of their trip if the weather is in doubt. 

Ngā mihi nui

Lisa Dixon

On Behalf of the Year 7 Team