Week 8 Assembly

Today Rooms 5 and 6 hosted our second assembly for the term. This assembly had a slightly sombre approach as we dedicated some items to the victims of the Christchurch shootings. We managed to lighten the mood a little with our dance - a challenge by Whaea Sally and Nga Rau Puawai accepted. We also shared some mahi we did on Women's suffrage, thanks to School Kit, and presented the song 'Shallow' with our very talented Carney playing the guitar. We were fortunate to have Kelvin Davis attend our assembly as well and speak to the school. Whaea Dana and Whaea Jess are ridiculously proud of our kids, they blow us away with their talent, confidence and resilience to overcome their fears of speaking in front of an audience.

Ngahiraka Mai Tawhiti

Last week we were very fortunate to be given the chance to learn about and board Sir Hector Busby's waka, Ngahiraka Mai Tawhiti. It is an exceptional, double hulled waka built with traditional rope lashings and made out of kauri timber. It is a thing of beauty. We also learnt some waka drills and about how those who journey on this waka use star navigation or way finding on their voyages.

It was an amazing opportunity and we are so thankful to have had that experience.

Switch it up challenge

Another item from our assembly was ' The Switch it up Challenge'. Satyn, Ocean and Tunisia learnt the dance themselves off You tube and performed it. What a great effort girls. Who is going to take up the challenge next?

Treaty of Waitangi

These are the facts we shared at our assembly. We each had to find a fact that we thought was important for people to know about the Treaty of Waitangi.  We are also doing projects with more information we will share these when we are finished.

E Ngaki

Another one of our assembly items was one of our favourite songs we learnt last year ' E Ngaki'. We learnt actions for it last week and then performed to the school. Hopefully we will teach the school the actions this term.

Welcome back to 2019

Welcome back to 2019. We have been at school for 2 weeks and are starting to settle into our new classes.  We had the challenge of being on the first assembly this year. We used what we had been learning in class about our school values and  The Treaty of Waitangi for 2 of our items. Here is our video showing the wrongs and rights of our school values. We hope you enjoy it.

Can Ice Cream be Breakfast?

This week we have been very fortunate to trial out the School Kit: Can it Ice Cream? 
Our kids loved this unit, we took a scientific approach to it and the kids learnt a lot about heat transfer and how this contributes to changing liquid to solid. The kids were convinced that ice cream could not be a breakfast, but a few clever ones found some research that proved that having something cold like ice cream actually shocks the system into alertness and causes them to wake up and be more focused. Who would have thought!!

None of our kids were brave enough to try the baked beans, Marmite or miso... believing that salt has no place at breakfast haha. But they really did produce some delicious breakfast flavoured ice cream. We added banana, weetbix and peanut butter to the mix too and found that these ingredients (especially the peanut butter) created a cereal flavour. The kids were mostly very impressed with their flavours, and liked adding oats and muesli to their ice cream mix.

Thank you so much for this amazing experience and giving our big kids a bit of fun for the end of the term #dairynzschools and #schoolkit
Check out the kids individual blogs to see the ice cream they created and how it turned out.

Te Rau Pou Manawa o Kawakawa

This weekend our kapa haka group, Te Rau Pou Manawa o Kawakawa, competed in the Te Tai Tokerau kapa haka regional competition. They performed exceptionally well and came 3rd in the competition, securing them a place at nationals next year.
Words can not express the pride we have for these students and the effort they put into their bracket. If you would like to see their performance go to this link:

https://tehiku.nz/te-hiku-tv/maranga-mai-e-te-iwi-2018/8674/te-raupo-manawa-o-kawakawa

Here are some pictures of our roopu and their beautiful new kakahu.

Swimming in Term 4

We are pretty excited that our pool is open for the remainder of the year. On Wednesday we had our first swim for the summer, although there wasn't many of us, we had heaps of fun. We will be learning swimming and survival skills and are looking forward to cooling down in there as it has been pretty warm lately.
 

Library Opening

Today we had our long awaited opening of our school library. We started our day with a blessing of the building and a walk through. The teachers dressed up as crayons and read the story "The Day the Crayons Quit" to the school. We then had a small parade of the students who dressed up as their favourite book characters then we joined up with a junior class and read stories to them and vise versa. It was great to see tuakana teina happening within our school and they seemed to enjoy reading to our juniors. The teachers also swapped classes to read a story too. It is so good to have our library up and running again and we look forward to getting our own books out next week.