It has been a week that has contained a significant number of outside the classroom events and opportunities.

As many of you know our PE and Health focus has been about cooperation and working together. This has been shown in the interactions and sporting events many of our students have been part of this week.  Seeing our Year 7 and 8 touch team out on the back field practicing their skills with Donna has been really good.  We have seen more cooperation and teamwork develop as they work together for a common goal.  This has been evident also in the way the class has played lots of different games during our PE time.

Congratulations to Isla and Tara who along with Zia from Otautau School competed in the gruelling Southland Junior Secondary Schools Adventure Race on Wednesday, no easy task navigating the course at Sandy Point across 5 hours and many different disciplines. 

Our Year 5-6 Miniball team have had an amazing first season and on Tuesday night played a nail biting final against Myross Bush.  It was a great game with the lead changing throughout.  Congratulations to our team who took the win and are Southland Champions. 

The wonderful thing with both the Adventure Race and the Miniball is these have been student driven.  The students have come to us to enter competitions and stepped up in leadership to make this happen. Student Agency at its finest!

In the classroom we have been continuing to look at number in Maths.  Our Year 7-8 ākonga have been breaking down fractions and finding lowest common multiples to learn to add and subtract fractions with different denominators, and also simplifying fractions into their lowest form.  Our Year 6 based group have been continuing to develop more number strategies to be able to solve multifaceted equations and word problems.  Some of our Year 5s have been exploring equivalent fractions looking in particular at 1/2, 1/4 and 3/4 and how they all relate to 1.

In Literacy we are continuing to work on our comprehension strategies through many different ways.

We have also had our Year 8 Big Day Out in Queenstown and the Year 7 Leadership Course at Lorneville this week.  Well done to everyone.

Welcome to Hanna and her family who have joined us.

Next week we start swimming, please ensure students have their togs, goggles and towels ready to go as we will be departing for the pool at 8:45am.

We hope you have a great weekend.

Liz and Steph