Kia ora whānau,
What a fantastic and busy term we’ve had in Te Pūawai! 🌱 Since our last update, we have been diving deep into our learning about 🌊 Our Oceans, exploring Healthy Oceans, Our Moana in Aotearoa, Kaitiakitanga, and Making a Difference. Through this inquiry, we have learned about 🦈 marine reserves, 🐙 sea creatures, 🦐 marine food webs and chains, 🌿 seaweed species, and—most importantly—the impact and influence we, as humans, have on our moana.
As we move into the final two weeks of the term, our focus will shift to ANZAC Day 🇳🇿🇦🇺, ensuring our tamariki understand the significance of this important commemoration, which takes place during the upcoming school holidays.
In ✍️ Writing, we recently reviewed our 🎡 school gala, reflecting on the highlights of this exciting event. To extend our digital skills, we explored 🎨 Canva to publish snippets of our reviews, which we have shared on our individual blogs.
Looking ahead to Term 2, we hope to begin our mahinga kai learning 🌱—provided Ranginui 🌧️ blesses us with some much-needed rain to end our current drought!
📖 Reading Reminder: Please encourage your tamariki to read every night to build their reading mileage! They have access to 📚 ReadWorks and 📖 ReadTheory, which offer a range of passages and articles to help expand their general knowledge and strengthen their comprehension strategies.
➗ Mathematics Focus: We will continue with a strong number focus next term. So far, our Year 4️⃣ students have been working with three-digit numbers for addition and subtraction, while our Year 5️⃣ students have extended their learning to numbers up to 10,000. We have also covered 🔢 identifying, reading, writing, ordering, and comparing numbers, along with estimating sums and differences and using addition and subtraction strategies with and without regrouping.
⚽🏉 Sports Update: This term has been packed with sporting events, including football festivals ⚽ and rippa rugby tournaments 🏉. Our students have demonstrated outstanding determination and sportsmanship at these events—ka mau te wehi! 🎉
🗣️ Te Reo me Tikanga Māori: We have been exploring pūrākau 📖 connected to our school pou 🏛️. Over the holidays, we encourage students to continue working on their pepeha/tātai rangatira 🌿, as we will be focusing on presenting these in Term 2 to our class and syndicate.
🍎 Food for Thought Nutrition Programme 🥦
This term, we were lucky to take part in the Food for Thought nutrition programme, which ran over three sessions with Whaea Melissa. Our tamariki learned how to read nutrition labels, explored the different food groups, discovered how much sugar is hidden in our drinks, and discussed ways to make healthy choices about what we consume. To wrap up our learning, we were fortunate to receive a gift card to organise our own class morning tea 🍽️—a delicious way to celebrate the end of a busy term!
👨👩👧👦 Whānau Welcome! As always, whānau are welcome to visit our class at any time. Thank you for your ongoing support—we look forward to another exciting term of learning ahead!
Ngā mihi,
Te Pūawai 🌿
