Welcome to the Kōwhai team's week 5 blog! 

Transition Plan for 2024

As we near the end of the year, students will no doubt be starting to think about classroom placement for 2024, particularly the Year 4’s who will be moving hubs. To support this transition for our Year 4 students, they will have a couple of opportunities to spend time with the Year 5 students and to meet some of the Year 5/6 teachers. This will involve two Kōwhai teachers taking the Year 4’s to Pōhutukawa for Discovery, while the Year 6’s will come to the Kōwhai hub to spend some tuakana/teina time with Year 3’s. The objective of this is to enable our Year 4 learners to re-establish connections with their Year 5 peers, familiarise themselves with the new hub, and ensure students have a positive transition.  

Inquiry: Ngā manu (birds)

Over the past two weeks, the Kōwhai children have begun learning about birds as part of our inquiry topic. Students have enjoyed learning more about some of New Zealand’s native birds and exploring some of their defining features. There was great conversation around the question, "What makes a bird a bird?", and lots of debate around whether penguins were birds! In the coming weeks, students will have the opportunity to observe birdlife within the Beckenham Te Kura environment and inquire into why these birds are suited to this particular habitat. 

Students have enjoyed looking at the candidates for bird of the century this week and some classes submitted their votes. If you are interested in learning more about this and having your say, follow this link. 

Art

Linking into our inquiry topic: Ngā manu, our art focus for the term is sketching, with a particular focus on the natural world. Students will have opportunities to explore sketching techniques and apply this to different contexts. They will be sketching things in nature, such as plants, birds and insects. We are looking forward to seeing their artistic growth.

Uniform

Over the past few weeks, we have noticed that some students have been wearing non-uniform clothes and footwear to school. While we understand that this is sometimes for a good reason, it is important that, where possible, students are following the dress code for Beckenham Te Kura o Pūroto. For more information about school uniforms, please visit this link. Thank you for supporting your child to wear the correct uniform.

Being SunSmart

It has been great to see so many children remembering to wear their hats at school, especially with all these sunny days we have been experiencing. Please continue to make sure that your child has a hat at school every day and that it is clearly named. There is always the option of keeping hats at school, either in tote trays or in an allocated hat tub. We also encourage everyone to have sunscreen on. This can be applied before coming to school and we also have sunscreen at school if anyone needs to top up or they forget to put sunscreen on. Thank you so much for your support with this.

Discovery

Here are some pictures of what students have been up to during Discovery:

Have a lovely weekend, 

Ngā mihi nui