We've been busy in Year 7, students have been working hard on their application letters for leadership positions and working on their collaboration skills in our inquiry.

We had a fantastic time with Top Team last week. Students completed 13 different challenges within teams and had a great time! As part of developing our teamwork skills, students reflected afterwards about their performance as a team member and thought about what behaviours they want to continue and what they want to implement next time. They will get to put these ideas into action very shortly with Waipara Camp just over a week away. 

Our focus for Maths continues to be developing number knowledge and strategies. Students are working on various facets of this depending upon their areas of need. These include:

* Place value of whole & decimal numbers

* Addition & subtraction strategies

* Following the BEDMAS rule to solve equations involving more than one operation

* Multiplying & dividing numbers by 10, 100 & 1000 by moving up & down place value houses

* Rounding and estimating

* Application of strategies to word problems

You can help at home by supporting students to work on their times tables if they are still establishing quick recall of these. Some ideas include flash cards, using Maths Buddy games or Prototec Maths. 

In Literacy we have been working on our sentence grammar and have been learning on identifying the subject and predicate in a sentence. We will be continuing to develop this through the use of conjunctions and subordinating conjunctions to develop increasingly complex sentences correctly. Students have learnt how to structure a formal letter and have practiced doing so by writing letters of application for various leadership roles. The closing date for applications has been extended to Monday 11th March. They also have been learning to structure an email correctly. We will be focussing on reading comprehension in the coming weeks. 

You can help at home by encouraging your child to read daily. This does not have to be a novel - it could be reading a book to a younger sibling, reading magazines or non-fiction books about their areas of interest, or reading the instructions for games, crafts or recipes.  

Students have completed self-portraits in Visual Art and have begun workshops developing their shading skills using tonal bars. They will continue to learn techniques using various mediums and will build up to creating an artwork using a medium of their choice. 

Each week our students have been learning waiata and haka in Kapa Haka. Their improvement has been super. Next week is our last session of everyone attending, from Week 8 students who want to participate in the Kapa Haka Performance Group will continue weekly sessions. 

In Digital Technology, students have been working on developing their typing skills and also increasing their competence navigating various websites to enhance their learning in Maths & Literacy.