What a week it has been. We began this week at school and are now all working and learning at home. It has been great seeing so many of our community work hard to make this transition as seamless as possible.

There have been many children who have quickly engaged in Reading, Writing and Maths as well as The Arts and physical challenges.

Upcoming dates

*School holidays

The government has brought forward the school holidays. They will be from today until Wednesday 15th of April (Easter is the previous weekend). You can email us during the holidays however the replies may take some time.

*Term 2

Term two will begin on Wednesday 15th of April. We will continue to be learning online until Lockdown is lifted. More information will come later on for what exactly this will look like.

Parenting Support

A great article has been written by Karen Boyes. She is a respected New Zealand speaker and Affiliate Director of the Institute for the Habits of Mind. She has a great article on parenting while under lockdown during Covid19. It is worth reading. 

Learning at Home and Online -

For all information about what we are doing, please go to ‘Teachers Online Hub 6’. The Google Slides contain information relating to:

*who to email

*holiday activities and ideas

*useful websites

*links to the Hub 6 Google Classroom

*conference schedules

GOOGLE CLASSROOM - The place for student learning and recording

We are encouraging parents and students to record what they are doing over the next two weeks. In the Google Classroom there are sections set up to allow recording of their learning. This can be completing a sketching challenge, baking a cake or even … cleaning the bathroom! Please take lots of pictures and allow your child to upload them onto the Google Classroom documents.

Now is as important time as ever for our students to display CARE values. Here is a list of some of them that they can be doing to express them. Please take photos of these ones too!

Art challenge - Draw the teachers

Aashvi and Charlotte W have created two outstanding renditions of the hub 6 teachers. They are keen for other hub 6 students to take up the challenge of creating their own ‘masterpiece’.

Maths and Math Whizz

We are signed up to a fantastic website called Math Whizz. As many of you know, it does a great job of assisting our students with maths skills and knowledge. As our students have a lot more time at home with the lockdown, there is the desire by some to raise the usage cap for new learning.

The creators of Maths Whizz recommend for every 60 minutes of ‘Tutor’, students should do 30 minutes of ‘consolidation’. The aim is to ensure they consolidate new learning and develop a wider maths understanding, than race up the pole to get to the highest level.

[From the maths whizz team]

We constantly get asked to raise the Usage Cap for New Learning even though the Consolidation Area has unlimited access and is rarely used by students. Raising the usage cap is usually driven by parents who want their students to make excessive progress, however without consolidation this can be detrimental to their overall learning, and can cause the programme to get too hard for the student (parents often help them answer questions raising the level) and then students can get disengaged and have to resit their assessment.

For more information go to https://www.ilearn.co.nz/Parent-Information-Page

Prototec - Mathematics Facts

Another great website is Prototec Maths. It is a New Zealand made website that focuses on basic facts for the different stages in the New Zealand Maths curriculum.

https://maths.prototec.co.nz/

That is all for now,

Hub 6 Teachers

PS: Keep calm, be kind. We’ve got this!