Kia ora koutou whånau

We hope that you are all safe after this afternoon's earthquake. 

Mr Wallis

Last week Matua Peri (Peri Marks) introduced himself and this week I will tell you a bit about me.

I grew up in the North Island and trained in Palmerston North before moving to Christchurch to begin my teaching career. I am early childhood and primary trained and have worked for Kidsfirst Kindergartens and in Primary Schools for many years.

I am super excited to have joined the Merrin team and I want to say thank you for making me feel so welcome in your school.

My wife Emma  and I, have 3 children who are 7 (Maddie), 6 (Levi) and 3 (Asher). In my spare time I enjoy spending time with my family, friends and also renovating our home.

Learning

During Week 2

We talked to the children as a group and decided on a name for our Y5/6 pod. We are now called : ‘Mahuta’ which means to rise like a star!

Last week, we were busy drawing tally charts, bar graphs, pictograms and stem and leaf graphs. We enjoyed some listening art, spelling, fitness, digital citizenship and physical education. One of the highlights was starting our Chinese and Te Reo lessons which will continue each Thursday afternoon. On Friday, we had FC Twenty 11 come and run a football session with us. Here is a blurb from Jasmine telling you about the training session.

“The people in the teams work together and communicate. We played six full games of soccer. There were 5 people in each team and we switched sides every 10 minutes. Year 5 and 6 worked in different time slots. In each year group, we had 12 teams in total. FC Twenty 11 were running it and they brought all their gear just for us. Everyone enjoyed it, especially me! We collaborated and tried our best and in the end we found eight players of the day! It was the best day of our lives!”

By Jasmine Age:8

CAMP

A big thank you to those families who have already returned their camp notices. For those who haven’t completed their ‘Health’ forms can you please send them back as soon as possible so that we can collate the information.

The total cost of the camp is $125. A notice came home about this on Thursday and the fee can be paid at the office or via internet banking. If you would like to use internet banking please ensure that your child’s name and “camp” is in the reference. The a/c number is 030830-0309365-00.

Please see the attached letter for more information.

MATHS

At Merrin School, we use IXL to support our maths programme and a letter about this was sent home on Friday. We encourage you to please practise little and often rather than in hour long sessions. The children’s login and passwords are the same as last year so go ahead and start using it again.

This week, we are continuing to learn about statistics with the children, so it would be a good idea to start each practise session with some statistic activities.

MERRIN LIBRARY

The library has a new system that will allow you to search items in our school library from any device at school or home that is connected to the internet. You can reserve and renew books using your borrower number. You can also read book reviews, find books you like or read all about what's happening in the library. This is the address to the library site: http://aiscloud.nz/MRR05/

We hope you have a great week.

If you have any questions please come in and see us, or send us an email.

Kind regards

Geoff, Urmi and Peri