We hope everyone enjoyed their holidays and you all managed to get some well earned time with your children. We have a lot of events coming up this term so make sure you keep an eye on the calendar each week.

Reading 

Within reading this week students have had the opportunity to do some self reflection on their reading habits. These habits included; the comprehension strategies they use, alongside decoding strategies and their attitude towards reading. After analysing their reflections students then identified areas of strength and areas on which they need to focus. Reflection as a skill allows learners to strengthen their own capacity to learn and to become more self directed and more responsible for their own learning. We will continue to look at inference as a key strategy across the various texts. Inference is supported by active visualisation and this has been introduced this week alongside the inference strategy.

Writing

For writing, we are continuing to focus on Information Reports. We have started this week by talking about a country that the children may be interested in.  This will become our focus over the next few weeks where each child will search for some information about the country to write in their report. Feel free to ask your child what country they have chosen and to help them find some information about this.

Maths

In Prime Maths this term, we are trialling the students having the opportunity to be more self regulated in how they follow the programme. We have talked about how through the course books, we need to follow the 'Let's Learn' and the 'Let's do'. Once they have completed these tasks, they move onto their practise books to do independent tasks. During this time we will be drawing students down for lessons and touching base with them individually. We are hoping this will encourage the children to move forward and at their own pace.

Digital Citizenship

This week we talked the children about Powerful Passwords. It is important to change the passwords every 6 months, and for you to choose passwords that are 8 characters long. Another fact they learnt was to ensure we don't use information about ourselves that other know like our date of birth, name or address. Please read the attached information about this.

STEM

This term we are going to set up the children with some STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) activities to challenge their thinking, encourage collaboration within small groups, and problem solve. From the photo above, you can see that this weeks challenge was to build the tallest tower on a block only using paper/plastic cups and ice-cream sticks. 

Tikanga

Our focus this term in Tikanga is our Mihimihi. This is a time to learn and then share some information about themselves. We would really appreciate it if you could work with your child to find some of the information on the sheet. Please see the attached copy of our mihimihi so you know what we require. For some of our families from other countries it is sharing the river, mountain, city that you have come from.

Buddy Time

We are really lucky to be starting some Buddy Time with Rooms 2 and 4. This will be a time for our Year 4s to show some Rangitiratanga to the juniors by sharing some learning, reading to each other and playing some games. This will start in Week 3.

Physical Literacy

We will be focusing on invasion games for Physical Literacy. Students need to bring their sports shoes in their bag every Tuesday. They still need to come to school with their correct school shoes on to start the day.

NOTICES:

Below are some upcoming events for the first half of the term. Please add these to your calendar to remind yourself of them.

Week 2

- Scholastic Book Club orders are due to the library next Wednesday, 10th May.

Week 3 

- Science and Technology Week.  This will align with our STEM activities as mentioned above.

Week 4  

- Bully Free Week.  We have talked about this as a school at assembly this week as well as in class time. There will be more information to follow regarding some activities we will be doing.

- ICAS Digital Technologies Exam

- Sausage Sizzle

- Pink Shirt Mufti Day to raise money for Bullying Awareness

Week 5

- ICAS Science Exam

Week 5

- Whānau Hui

- Puss in Boots Show

- 40 Hour Famine Weekend

Have a great weekend,

Nicky, Tania and Vanessa