Kia Ora. Welcome to our class blog. We are a year 3-5 class at Oturu School located in the beautiful Far North. Our teachers are Whaea Stacey and Whaea Bella. We look forward to sharing our learning journey with you. Tena koutou katoa.
This week our country went into level 4 lockdown. Unlike last time we did not see this coming and we were unable to prepare ourselves or our students for reassurance or home learning. It has been our priority this week to get in touch with all of our whanau to check their well-being and to start making plans to send learning packs and chromebooks home. The main focus during lockdown is to keep everyone safe and happy so please just do what works for your whanau.
We have been learning to identify bullying behaviour and see its effects on the peoples involved. We have been learning about the different roles people take in the cycle of bullying. We split our class into smaller groups to create a story line and role play about bullying. The students did really well presenting in front of our class for most students this was a scary task but they all did so well. Here are some of our plays.
Below are our Maths-Whizz superstars for term 2. This is a significant achievement showing that these students have shown great determination, resilience and accelerated learning in maths. These student's should be very proud of their efforts that they have put in over the term. Keep up the amazing work!
Today Te Roto had their turn at hosting our school assemblies. Whaea Dawn always has the most fun assemblies with some awesome prizes at the end. Today some students and teacher's were selected to compete in a pie eating competition. Matua Hohua and Trinity represented Te Awa. We think they did an amazing job. The winner in the end was Whaea Bridget, she was like a little vacuum cleaner.
Video form left to right: Whaea Ali, Matua Hohua, Whaea Bridget, Awaroa, Trinity and Diontay.
This term our main focus for H.P.E is to set personal goals with our fitness levels by tracing our cross country achievements. Each student set a personal best record for an amount of laps running our our cross country track. From here we set realistic goals that we wanted to achieve by the end of the term. Most children added 2 or 3 laps to their current amount of laps that they could do. Next we thought about all the steps that we could take to meet this goal and listed them in our blogs.
Below is an image of our cross country corse. We measured it to be around 444 metres with a slight incline and decline in areas. We can not wait to see if our students meet their goals at the end of them term.
This term we have set the challenge in our class for each student to complete one quality blog post per week. Some of us have posted some blogs when we have been working with Whaea Donna but we still need a bit more help until we can confidently blog on our own.
Here is a link to our new blog pages that were added to our Te Awa site this term. Now it is possible for us all to see and post positive comments on our class mates blogs.
This year we have a really big class and we have been finding it very difficult to get all of students involved in our hothouse and chicken learning. So we have designed a 'Morning Enviro Rotation' we our students are divided into 5 groups and each group has a day where they go and do our enviro work. Each day is slightly different but the groups care for and learn about our hothouse, our chicken and the Rongoa Garden. The students have enjoyed doing our enviro mornings in these smaller groups as they get more of a chance to do the jobs and the chicken comes closer to the students when they are in smaller groups. They have throughly enjoyed eating our cheery tomatoes from our hothouse too they are really sweet at the moment.
Every Thursday Matua Hohua takes our whole school for Kapa Haka. We practice the waiata that we will be singing at our assemblies, pohiri whakatau and our end of year prizegiving. It is a great time for the Te Awa students to show their excellent role model skills and for the school to participate in an activity together, showing our school values of Kaitiakitanga, Whanaungatanga, Manaakitanga, Rangatiratanga and Ako.
We have been learning about the meaning behind our classroom names.
Te Roto, Te Puna, Te Awa, Te Moana.
We created some visual art to represent our classrooms.
Te Roto represents the Lake. It is situated next to Papatuanuku and Te Wharenui o Oturu. It was given its name because it is close to our centre. At this point in time it is our new entrant class.
Te Puna represents the spring. Te Puna is where the fresh water begins its journey, preparing itself to travel to Te Awa, the river and out to Te Moana, the sea. Te Puna is likened to the journey our junior tamariki take when beginning their learning journey at Oturu school.
Each Monday morning (9-10.45am) we focus on replenishing our students hauora in a fun and engaging way. Each week is slightly different but we will always try to work on all four dimensions in Whare Tapa Wha. We want to make our students feel comfortable and safe in our classroom and to give them a little bit of time to get back into the routine and kaupapa of our classroom.
