Welcome to Term 4! We have a busy term ahead, with lots of engaging learning experiences planned.
Weeks 1 - 3: Athletics practice (hurdles, shotput, relays, and long jump).
Weeks 3 - 6: Navigators/Waka Hourua - Tamariki will learn about the journey of the first people to live in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Weeks 4 - 9: Cashmere Technical Football Club - Football in Schools programme (two sessions per week)
Weeks 7-10: Fairy tales - Children will learn that a fairy tale is a fictional story, often passed down through generations. We are very keen to incorporate fairy tales from all cultural backgrounds within our team. Please, if you have a fairy tale you wish to share, please let your child's home group teacher know. This unit will conclude with a trip to the Isaac Theatre Royal, where we will watch a performance of Cinderella by the Southern Ballet Company.
Teaching Assistants
This term, we welcome two new teaching assistants to the Kahikatea team. Laura and Karen, we are looking forward to working with you!
Laura
Karen
Sunhats
Sunhats are compulsory in Term 4. No hat, no play. We find it best to leave sunhats at school each day to ensure that children always have a hat at school. Each home group has a bucket in which these are stored. Please make sure that your child's hat is clearly named.
Little Learners Texts
We encourage children to bring their literacy folder to school at the start of each week with their previous week's text inside. This way, we have enough texts to use in our teaching for the following week. If you have any Little Learners texts lying around at home, please send them our way!
Word of The Week
This week's word of the week is 'upstander'. An upstander will use their words and/or actions to help someone who is being mistreated. The following video has been shared with your child/ren this week.
Library
Please note that Krystal and Katie's home groups have changed library days this term.
Library days are:
Tuesday: Lisa/Quynh & Katie's home groups
Thursday: Amber & Krystal's home groups
Please support your child to have their folder at school on their library day.
How is the holiday break going for you all? We do trust that everyone is having a wonderful, relaxing time, and finding plenty of opportunities to recharge and re-energise for the final term of the year!
We wanted to be in touch in advance of next week, with a few reminders and notices for the term ahead:
Hats - firstly, a very important reminder for all, that sunhats are to be worn every day throughout Term 4, whenever the children are outside at school, so now is the time to ensure that your child's named sunhat is packed in their school bag, ready to go on Monday.
Library books - we realise that there are a great many overdue library books at homes around the Beckenham area, and would like to urge you to hunt out any library books which might be at your place and pack them into your child's schoolbag now, ready to be returned to school on Monday (we'll be asking children to put their library folders into the library container first thing on Monday morning, if they're not there already!)
Friendship List - once again, our Friendship List will be updated at the start of this term, so if you would like your name and contact details added to this list, please email Georgia (georgia.mckenna@beckenham.school.nz) by the end of the first week and she will send the new list out in Week 2; if your name is already on the Friendship List, please don't worry about emailing again.
Stacey and Elizabeth's days in Term 4 - throughout Term 4, Stacey will be teaching on Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays and Elizabeth will be teaching on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays; occasionally there may be an adjustment made, and if you do need to double check to know for sure on any particular day, a good idea is to look at the whiteboard when you arrive at school, as the photos of the adults who are going to be at school that day will always appear there!
Sarah's Home Group: throughout Term 4, the children in Sarah's Home Group are going to be starting and finishing the school day in Kōmanawa which is the building facing the courtyard and closer to the park; these children will still leave their bags in the blue cubbies, and will need to unpack their Literacy folders and leave them in the usual Literacy folder containers, and take their lunchboxes and drink bottles over to the set of shelves just to the left inside the door into Kōmanawa; these children will be leaving from Kōmanawa at 3:00 p.m. each day
Junior Park Explorers: you will have received information through Hero about this outing which is taking place on the Friday of the first week back (Friday, October 13th), and thank you so much to those parents who have already emailed to say that they can parent help with this; we still need several more helpers (some for each of the 3 Home Groups) so please do email your child's Home Group teacher if you're able to come along and support on this day (a reminder that the times are as follows: Elizabeth and Stacey's HG - 9:00 - 11:00 a.m.; Sarah's HG - 10:45 a.m. - 12:45 p.m.; and Georgia's HG - 12:30 - 2:30 p.m.)
We have a very busy term ahead, including House Games at various times throughout the term, whole school athletics on Thursday, October 26th (more information to come about this event), and our Junior Park Explorers programme, as mentioned above, on Friday October 13th, along with many exciting learning experiences focusing on bugs and birds, water play activities, and the giving of gifts and various ways to show gratitude.
In the meantime, we wish you all the very best over these last few days of the holidays, and we're really looking forward to seeing all of those beautiful bright eyes and wide smiles on Monday next week!
What an amazing end to Term 3 with the talent show! Beckenham has a lot of talent. Each team got to experience a variety of performances in their hubs, and from there 2 acts were chosen to represent each of the teams.
Thank you to the Student Council for their organisation of the show and to all the performers for sharing your talents with us - We Make a Difference.
BOT Update
SchooI Board Parent Mid-Term Election 2023
Board of Trustees Nominations
Our school will be undertaking a mid-term parent election for 3 School Board vacancies.
This process will start with the issuing of nomination papers to our caregiver community today,
Friday 22nd September 2023.
We have employed CES to undertake the election process on our behalf. This year with
legislative change, our nomination form and full instruction on how to place your nomination
into our own School’s Election website will be emailed to you if we have your email address
in our database, or you will receive it by post if we don’t have your email in our database.
Nomination papers will also be available at the school office. The school will send those on
to CES for processing upon receipt from candidates.
Nominations close on Wednesday 11 th October at 12 noon. Election day is Wednesday
15th November 2023.
Our school needs to have people on the Board who reflect the wonderfully diverse community that makes up our school population. This means that we need as many different world views sitting at our board table together, to enable us to have a deep and rich understanding of the needs of our tamariki and the best ways to support them to be successful.
We look forward to your participation in this process.
Wishing you all a safe and relaxing two weeks. See you on Monday 9th October for Term 4.
Ngā mihi nui
Sandy Hastings
Tumuaki - Principal
Important Dates
NB: You can find our Community Calendar on our school website. You can embed this calendar into your own digital calendar and stay up-to-date with events and information.
What an action-packed term! We've managed to squeeze so many varied learning opportunities - from novel studies in literacy to ski day up at Mount Hutt, from Koru Games to learning about Pacific navigation and Waka building. We think everyone has earned a good rest, and hope you all manage to rest recharge safely over the next two weeks.
Kauri Museum Exhibition
Today (Friday), while the students were off at Christchurch South Intermediate for Technology, the rest of the school came through to see our Waka Hourua creations. The reaction from teachers and students was all positive - there was so much praise for everything that had been made.
Koru Games
We really enjoyed hearing about the efforts of our students at Koru games this week. There was a lot of incredible sporting skill on show, and all our students represent our school values. Please see the school newsletter for a full rundown of the week.
Beckenham Talent Show
We finished our term with the return of the school talent show. There were tremendous acts from across the school, and from Kauri we had Harriet playing a wonderful rendition of Grieg's In The Hall of the Mountain King and Ella T salsa-ing up a storm. Hamish did a great job as one of two MCs, and the IT crew did a great job of making sure everything went off without any technical glitches. A big thank you to the student council and Nicky for organising and putting on such a wonderful event.
Looking Ahead
Term 4 is set to be another busy term, but we look forward to more sunshine and warmer weather. Please make sure that all students have hats ahead of Term 4 and that they apply sunscreen before coming to school. We also announced to the team this afternoon that our big focus next term will be a production, which they seemed quite excited by. We look forward to telling them more about it next term!
Once again, our grateful thanks to those parents who were able to join us on this outing and support the tamariki as they engaged with particular art works and then participated in the lesson which Jackie and Julie, the Gallery Educators, ran for us.
Please see below, some photo highlights of our time at the Gallery:
What a wonderful learning experience our wee ones had - so many of them are extremely eager to get back to the Art Gallery again, so what a great idea for a holiday outing!
For now, though, all that remains is to wish you all a very safe and happy holiday ahead, as we sail through towards Friday.
