Kia ora whānau, 

It's been a busy start to Term 3 and spring is just around the corner. We can't wait! 

Keeping Ourselves Safe (KOS) 

This term, our wellbeing focus will be the Keeping Ourselves Safe programme. Your child/children may bring home some tasks which you can help them to complete (such as learning their phone number and address). 

Keeping Ourselves Safe is a comprehensive child abuse prevention programme for schools. Its purpose is to:

• teach students a range of safe practices that they can use when interacting with other people, both online and face to face
• teach students how to recognise the difference between healthy and unhealthy relationships, and encourage students who have been or are being abused to seek help
• prevent abuse by making parents and teachers more aware of their responsibilities to help students avoid abuse.

School Community Officers are available to support schools to plan and implement Keeping Ourselves Safe.

source: Keeping Ourselves Safe

Readathon 

Your child should have brought home the yellow slip for Readathon last Friday. On Friday the 20th we will have a book character day to celebrate the Readathon, where your child can come dressed up as their favourite literacy characters. We do not expect you to go and buy a costume for your child for this. 

Learning Games 

Please remember that if your child wants to play the Maths and Structured Literacy/Spelling games at home, they will need to sign in with their school Google account. Please talk to your child's homegroup teacher if you are not sure what this is. 

Here are a few picture of our first few weeks of Term 3.  

Have a lovely weekend. 

The Kōwhai Team - Laura, Nick, Rowe, Quynh and Meagan 

Kia ora Kōwhai whānau, 

(NB: We sent this post out on Tuesday using the new HERO app. If you didn’t get it through HERO, check your settings on the HERO app so that you get instant notifications. This will eventually become our primary way of sending team notices out so please do try and get your login working. Our staff in the hub, and in the office, are happy to help you if needed.)

Kōwhai students will be attending 2 gymnastics sessions at Christchurch School of Gymnastics (QEII) in Term 3 on Thursday August 26th and Thursday September 2nd. 

Each session will be 1.5 hours long. The Year 3 session will run from 9:30 am to 11.00am and the Year 4 session will run from 11.00am to 12.30pm. 

Children Need to Wear Clothing they can move in:

• School shirt or equivalent (eg a red t-shirt) 
• Leggings or shorts
• Easy to remove shoes
• No tights, extra long pants, school dresses, skirts, jeans, hoodies, belts, buckles or zippers
• Long hair must be tied back. 

We will not need additional parent help for these trips. 

The student annual donation is used to help cover the cost of these sessions. If you have not yet made a contribution to your child's school account please do this as soon as possible. You can access this information by logging into HERO. Information about this can be found on the school website.

Ngā mihi, 

Laura, Rowe, Quynh, Meagan and Nick 

 Kia ora whānau, 

Here's out final update for the term. We have had a fantastic and busy term with our tamariki. The students have been so engaged in our coding and chemistry lessons this term. 

Four Square Festival 

This week some of our students planned and organised a Four Square Festival.  Well done to Eadie, Isla, Toby and Nikoda for their amazing leadership and enthusiasm. A huge thank you to Sue and Jo for helping facilitate this. 

Here are some photos of the festival. 

Pokemon Cards

Please keep Pokemon cards at home. The students are not allowed to play with these during school time. Students have been trading these cards, and can become upset when they realise they may not get that card back. Thank you for your help. 

Next Term 

We are changing out home group spaces next term. We moved to these spaces on Friday. 

Here is where the new homegroup spaces are in our hub:

Nick - Pathway

Meagan - Atrium

Quynh - Nook 

Rowe - Breakout space

Laura - Theatre

Gymnastics 

Kōwhai will be starting a Gymnastics unit and we will be visiting the Christchurch school of Gymnastics in Week 5 and 6. More information about this will come out at the start of Term 3.

We hope you have a lovely holiday and come back to school well rested on Monday the 26th of July. 

Ngā mihi, 

The Kōwhai Team - Laura, Rowe, Nick, Meagan and Quynh 

Kia ora whānau, 

This term has certainly flown by! The last few weeks have been full of many great experiences for our tamariki. 

Hillcrest Cross Country

Georgie took some of our keen runners to the Hillcrest Cross Country on Friday. She shared that she was so impressed with our tamariki and they way they displayed our school values throughout the event. Ka pai to everyone who participated! 

Well done to the following students who came in the top five of their year group: 

Laura Stoney - 1st Year 3 girls

Bianca Ashworth - 4th Year 4 girls

Ben Stoney - 5th Year 3 boys

Matariki

We have been learning about and celebrating Matariki in a variety of ways over the last two weeks such as art, weaving, singing and dancing. Our children have impressed us with their knowledge about Matariki.

Maths

Fun Run

We are really proud of the students who chose to run in the fun run to raise money for Kids Can today.

Discovery

Here are some photos from Learning through Play and Kapa Haka over the last few weeks. 

Have a lovely weekend! 

The Kōwhai Team - Laura, Quynh, Meagan, Nick and Rowe

 Kia ora Kōwhai whānau, 

We hope you all had a lovely long weekend last week. The teachers had a very productive staff only day on Tuesday, learning about many different things. This week the students have been learning more about Changes during our science lessons. They have also been exploring how to code during inquiry as well. We have some future master coders in our hub! 

Literacy Classes

With our structured literacy approach the teachers are constantly monitoring and checking students understanding of letters and sounds. Throughout the year, as we look at where the students are at in their learning, we may reshuffle of our literacy groups to best meet student needs. Your child may not necessarily bring a reader or journal home each night. On these nights, they can choose a book from home to read. 

Small containers

If you are a family that uses My Food Bag or something similar and have many of those little sauce containers around, we would love to have these in the hub. These are great for some of our science experiments and storing paint (with the lids on). If you have any spare please send them in! 

Four Square 

Some of our students have recently started playing four square during Discovery and play breaks. We are still learning the rules, and how to manage ourselves when playing. 

We are focusing on the following:

Being a good sport.

Playing according to the rules.

Cheering for each other - even when someone is out we can say "good try", "you had a great run!"

Here is a video of the rules, so you can try and practise these at home! 

Many of the Kōwhai kids are very excited about the Disco on Friday the 11th of June in the hall and have been practising their dance moves!