Well, it has been a blast. I have really enjoyed your company this year. here is a very special memory of 2024. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Together we achieved so much.
Michael, Sports Canterbury, was in town, so he popped out to school for some cricket sessions. As well as building on the skills coaching session he taught us a new game. There are four batters, instead of two, one bowler and the rest are fielders. The bowler can bowl to any one of the batters, if the ball is struck you must run. Three strikes and you are out, caught on the full you are out, or one hand one bounce is out, or you can be run out. The batters are a team and once the batting team has three people out we swapped in a new team.
It was fast and furious but a great team sport. We look forward to playing it in class.
Have you had anyone visit your school to teach team game skills?
As soon as we had completed our work for the week we ducked outside to make the most of the weather. It is always so changeable in spring. There was a quick game of Seaweed before racing into Paper, Scissors, Rock.
As a class maths activity, we are weeding the sycamores from the old playground. There are literally thousands of them. Each day we count how many groups of twenty we collect, and multiply this by the number of collectors. Today we estimated the number of seedlings we think there might be and wrote on paper. We have kept a running total of the seedlings we have weeded out on the board. Mrs Hickford will have a prize for the person who has the closest estimated number.
This afternoon it was a bit drizzly but fine enough for Rōpū Sports. It was lovely to get out before the weather got too wet. Hopefully, we will get a finer weekend and things settle down as we head into Summer.
Can you guess what we are doing? Today is the Big Shakeout. We practised our earthquake drill this morning, so we know what to do in an earthquake.
We need to be under our desks as small as we can, holding on to the table legs, or chair legs, to protect as much of our body as possible.
Do you have an earthquake plan at your house? Where will you meet when the shaking has stopped?
Before finishing last term we studied Hayley Scott, an artist from Auckland. She paints amazing murals of native flora and fauna. She works on a large scale and her artworks can be seen all over New Zealand. Whilst Hayley works with aerosols we did our work in acrylic paint.
Before we started work we learnt about background, middle ground and foreground. We focused on creating depth in our work by layering paint. Firstly we painted the background, then some vegetation. Then we added our animal before another layer of vegetation.
Then we used stencils from the Warehouse to create our own stencil works. We are pretty proud of what we achieved. Here are some of the completed works.
They look pretty awesome on the class wall.
The past week was Maori Language Week. We had several challenges to complete. Together we have had kai, worked on our Pepeha or Mihimihi, listened to a local pūrakau about Aoraki, learnt a traditional game, learnt an new craft, practised our greeting and pronunication, learnt and practised the actions to our school song and created Aotearoa based art using a celebrated New Zealand artist Hayley King who goes by the name of Flox. We are writing the date in Te Reo Maori and English at the start of our handwriting
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What did you do for Maori Language week in your kura?
Piwakawaka has been mapping our playground, not all of it just what we call the old playground. We would like to make this into a sesnory space to cater for all our students who need a bit of sensory play to help them regulate themselves.
First, we measured the dimensions of the playground and found the perimeter and area. The perimeter is the distance around the outside. and the area is the space that the playground occupies. We played Battleships in class to learn how to use a grid to place all the existing play equipment. Once we could all read the grid, we marked a grid on the ground using metre spacings. In teams we had one person stand on the number and another on the letter then triangulated our position and marked it on our paper copy.
We will collate all our plans to produce one map for the landscape architect to work from.
We are excited to be able to take part in this project. Have you every mapped an are in this way?
To say we are over the rain is an understatement. We get one fine day every four days, and never at a weekend.
Today we had sports in our classroom and played various games for the last hour. We had the class favourites, Uno, Uno Flip and Uno 99. We tried Battleships, Chess, Suduko, Connect Four, Tic Tac Toe and Scrabble.
Playing games teaches us to share, and listen to others when we play together. We would love to have a hall or covered area to play in when it is wet, but we only have the decks outside the classrooms. What do you do on rainy days at your school?
We challenged ourselves this week to learn about personification. We did this after reading a poem called Awa by Goeff McConnell. We discussed how it can be used in our writing and the impact on our descriptive work.
Personification is when we give non-human objects human characteristics. The poem Awa is about the sea. We chose to write about the sea or a stream, but you can do the same exercise with emotions. We are making a presentation at the assembly this afternoon.
Here are a two of examples:
Have you ever played Korfball? Four years ago we would not have known what it was. Now we get really excited when Torston comes.
Korfball is a fast-paced game played in mixed teams. It is a bit of a cross between netball and basketball. The rules are pretty simple: girls can only defend girls, boys defend boys, goal hoops are in first and last thirds of the court, you can shoot from anywhere, we can pivot but not run with the ball, you can not pass over the centreline defending or attacking, it is a non-contact sport, and you can not knock the ball from another players hands. It was developed in the Netherlands in 1902.
There is an annual inter-school competition in Hokitika. There is also a primary grade after-school sessions in the fourth term.
Here are some photos of today’s action.
