WEEKS 3 AND 4 IN HAUWHENUA

Our days are busy - the term is going so fast. It is exciting to see the team consolidate their learning and share their successes. Our hub huis, every second Wednesday, are a great opportunity for classes to showcase their work.

We have been developing thorough research skills using our chrome books and we use our learning capabilities at the same time. Having access to free sites to publish our written work has been fantastic too. The balance of typing and handwriting is well observed in our hub. Our classroom walls highlight our student achievements.

Weeks 3 and 4

Kotuku: In Kotuku we have been finishing off our dream holidays and working out the different currencies from around the world. We have also been looking at our Writing Revolution and our SPO’s. Our inquiry has had a focus on New Zealand and we looked at some of the most popular areas that tourists like to visit. We also continued with our Keeping Ourselves Safe programme. Add to this the recent awesome results at the zone athletics. It has been busy!!

Pūkeko: Over the last fortnight Pūkeko has been using their creative mindsets and have been creating superheroes and Villains off ai. In Writing we have been focusing on our language features. These are our nouns, verbs, adjectives, ad-verbs and also Similes / metaphors. These help our sentences go from boring and stale to exciting and fresh! We have been using these during our editing time to help improve our writing. To help us get into the groove we have created our very own Superheroes / Villains using ai. We have to brainstorm all our ideas as much as possible including things like physical features, their powers, where they live and how they got their powers. This helped us later on when writing our story. In Math we have been focusing lots on financial and creating our destinations - ask your child where they are going!! 

Whio: Whio have been working well with many writing tasks. We have mastered new strategies and used these to create some factual pieces that are very impressive.

We were very fortunate to have Jeff from Get Wise visit our class and take a seminar on Scam and Safe practices. This was enlightening for all of us as we discovered scams can be very intricate. ASB sponsors this programme for all schools. We are grateful to them for having this available to us.

Weka: In Weka we have been learning a lot about how to work in groups and as a team, recognising how we all have thoughts, feelings and opinions. We are doing this with the RTLB service with the We Thinkers Programme. It is helping us a lot with our games outside in the playground. We have also been continuing with our Topic, and in art we drew some amazing pictures about how the Earth looks when healthy vs how it looks when we don’t look after it. Next week we will be having a visit from the experts at Project Jonah to show us how we can help…Lots to look forward to in such a short term!

Tūī: In Tūī we have been continuing our work on how our actions impact our future. This was a focus in our reading where we learned about the importance of the Tūī in Christchurch and partnered that with our understanding of koru patterns to draw and design a Tūī bird with those patterns within the bird. In Maths we are analysing and comparing the data of the Tūī bird population between Christchurch and Wellington and making predictions using the information we have been given. We are getting close to Beach Education for the year 7 & 8 cohort on Thursday, 14th of November.