Pōhutukawa Camp Term 4 2020

Kia ora whānau,

Great news! Planning is underway for our Pōhutukawa Camp at Living Springs. The camp will run for three days and two nights from Wednesday the 25th to Friday the 27th of November, which is in week 7 of Term 4.

The cost of camp is likely to be no more than $180 per child. You can start making contributions for this as soon as you are able to, by setting up a small automatic payment. If you set that up this week, $9.50 per week would ensure that your contribution towards camp was fully paid by the time camp happens. To set up an automatic payment, please copy the school’s bank account number:

12-3148-0131641-00 into your internet banking and use your child’s name and 'Y5/6Camp' as the reference.

We will be needing some parent helpers for the camp, and will be putting out the call for parents who may be interested and available early next term. Next term you will receive more information about the camp, as we firm up the camp programme of activities.

We hope you have a restful and fun filled holiday break.

Pōhutukawa News Term 2 Week 12

Kia ora whānau,

What a busy term we have had! 

Winter Sport
We've been very unlucky with the weather this term for winter sport. Thanks to all of you who put your names forward to help with winter sport development and competitive teams. We are continuing next term on Thursdays - if you are unavailable to help next term please let us know, otherwise we look forward to working alongside you again in term three. 


Learning Conferences
Thanks so much for booking in for the learning conferences. We are looking forward to supporting all our learners to share their learning with you.  The weeks since returning to school after the Rāhui have flown by. Below is some information on what we have been up to.

In recent weeks, our focus  at writing time has been on identifying, understanding the grammatical structure of and creating simple, compound and complex sentences. The children have been  self assessing their writing skills in this context and will share more with you about this at the learning conferences this week.

A large amount of time and focus has been directed at the area of place value in mathematics. Place value is an area of the mathematics curriculum that will be covered every academic year through primary and secondary school, with a view to building upon previous knowledge. An understanding of place value forms the basis of many areas of mathematical understanding. Initially the focus might be on place value columns and reading numbers accurately, then it develops to being able to quickly identify the number of tens, hundreds, thousands and so on in numbers, in conjunction with using place value knowledge and understanding to manipulate numbers in addition and subtraction calculations, for example.

Another area of focus in mathematics this term has been tracking both reasoning and recall ability in relation to addition, subtraction, multiplication and division facts. The children have done a great job of assessing their abilities in this area, and setting some goals for future focus. They will be sharing this with you at their learning conferences, and we will have some work that you can continue at home to support our learners in achieving these goals. Rob has created a brief video below to help you to understand the tracker system that we are using. The children are experts at this, so they will also be able to help!