Author Archives: Nick Bruce

Kōwhai News Term 3 Week 5

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Te Whare Tapa Whā

This week, we have been exploring our school's new wellbeing definition with our students. It is based on Mason Durie’s Hauora model. The students have completed a word sort to learn more about the actions and behaviour that comprise each element of the definition. We have also created role plays of how we show the definition in our own lives. 


Rākau 

The children have been designing and creating rākau (sticks) to perform traditional Māori stick games. Here is a photo of some of their rākau designs.


Book Character Day

The children had lots of fun dressing up for Book Character Day last week. Here are some of their costumes.







Amazing Dancers

Congratulations to Caoimhe, Penelope, Izzy and Poppy who performed a dance at assembly last week. They spent weeks choreographing and practising it. Their performance was outstanding.

Have a great weekend!


Kōwhai News Term 2 Week 3

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Kia ora whānau,

We have been doing a lot of exciting activities in the Kōwhai Hub this week.

Discovery

This term, during Discovery, a group of children have been learning to write computer programmes using Scratch. The children have been learning about concepts such as events, if statements, loops and variables. Some children have been making their own computer games while others have been programming interactive stories.




Science

We have been learning a lot during our science lessons and have been having lots of fun at the same time. Here are some photos of our crystal growing experiment.




Statistics

Next week, we will be starting a new maths topic focusing on statistical literacy and investigations. The children will be learning about fair surveys, graphs, spreadsheets and more.

Celebration Assembly

Last week, we were able to have Celebration Assembly indoors for the first time in months. It was great to be able to get together again. At the moment, half the school goes to assembly at one time to help us maintain a safe level of social distancing.

That's all for this week.

The Kōwhai Team

Cyber Safety and BYOD Agreements

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Kia ora koutou


Last Friday, we sent out a Learning Conference newsletter that did not have the links to the cyber safety agreements. Here is the cyber safety section of that newsletter with the links attached.

Cyber safety Agreements (all students) and BYOD Agreements (Y5-8 students)

You are encouraged to take some time before the Learning Conferences to read through our cyber safety agreements so that you can bring any questions you might have about them to the Learning Conference. At the Learning Conference, you will be given a copy of these agreements to sign. 

Kōwhai News – Week 10, Term 3

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Litter-Free School

This week, the Kōwhai students have been working hard to keep our school litter-free. Each home group has been involved in one of the daily clean-ups and we even have some students who have taken it upon themselves to scour the school for rubbish in their own time. We are really impressed with the wonderful difference the children are making to our environment.

Gymnastics

The children had a lot of fun and learnt some new gymnastics skills during our recent trip to the Christchurch School of Gymnastics. Here are some photos of our trip:






Recorder

This term Nick and Kate's home groups have been learning to play the recorder with Josie, our recorder tutor. The students have worked really hard and have learned to play several songs.

Paulette and Rowe's home groups will have the opportunity to work with Josie next term.


Year 4 – Keeping Ourselves Safe Egg Challenge

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As part of our Keeping Ourselves Safe Unit, the Year 4 children are going to become chief babysitters for an egg! Yes an egg! The children will be responsible for the egg for up to four days and will have to take care of the egg at all times. The children can name their egg and create a bed or house for their egg. If the children want to leave their egg, they have to engage another person to egg-sit!

The aim of this activity is for the children to learn to look after themselves and others – a theme that comes through the KOS programme.

The children will hopefully get an appreciation of the hard work you do as parents!

This will be an egg-citing challenge, and an egg-ceptional week. I am looking forward to watching your children become responsible and egg-tremely great parents!

Thank-you for your co-operation!