Kia ora e te whānau

One amazing thing about my job is that I get to see smiling happy children during the week. To say I love it when they come in to share some work they are proud of would be an understatement. 

Today I celebrate the writing achievement of these two Year, 2 students, Harper and Laylah from Pukeko Sim. First, they developed a writing plan using a picture as a prompt. They had to write down keywords (describing words or adjectives) that they were going to use in their stories. Not only did they think up some great describing words, but they also wrote some really well-structured sentences and used full stops and capital letters as well. This made for an engaging read. 

Some other exciting news this week is that our EPro8 teams did so well today in the Epro competition.

The EPro8 Challenge is an engineering and problem-solving competition. Every year over 10,000 students from 800 schools from throughout New Zealand take part. Teams compete to:

• build large-sized structures
  
• solve practical problems
  
• engineer using pulleys, motors, gears, wheels and axles
  
• invent simple machines
  
• undertake fun experiments
  
• construct electronic circuits
  
• solve practical maths problems

Our teams got placed 1st, 6th and 7th out of 12 teams! Congratulations to our teams and to the Korimako and Toroa teachers who supported them. I have watched them practice with so much pride. They have been willing to give up their break times and work together as teams. 

Out teachers have all worked incredibly hard this year to keep programmes going as normally as possible so that our children have not been too disadvantaged by Covid-19. These are just two examples of how successful the teachers have been. 

Nga mihi nui

Jacqui