On Friday some of our students made sand saucers to enter a competition called The Festival of Flowers. We were very lucky to have flowers given to us from Moffat Flower Company. There was a lot of wonderful creations and we did a fantastic job. We won several prizes and made our teachers proud! We are looking forward to entering again next year. Here are some photos of our sand saucers. Have you ever made a sand saucer? Which is your favourite and why? These photos show the display at the hall. Our entries have a pink flag.

In the first two weeks of the term some of the students from Te Ara Whakatau and Te Ara Takitini were learning some swimming skills at Canterbury Swim School. It will be great for them to bring these skills back to our school pool when this opens. We want to say a big congratulations to Soheilla for winning a $100 swimming voucher recognising all the hard work she put in over the two weeks. Congratulations Soheilla!

On Monday Te Rōpū Māia and Te Rōpū Auaha worked on a  STEM activity.  STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. We used marshmallows and spaghetti to build the highest free standing tower. We were in groups of 3 or 4. We were only allowed to use the materials we were given. It was hard to try and not eat the marshmallows. It was also hard to try and make it stand by itself. At the end we were allowed to eat the marshmallows. We are looking forward to doing more STEM activities. Have you got any ideas of fun STEM activities you have done which we might like?

Today we continued working with Scratch. We didn't complete any new work, but looked at what we have learnt so far and enjoyed sharing our learning and helping each other. We are focusing on teamwork and taking risks with our learning... we tried new things with Scratch.  Here are a few photos of our afternoon. We are looking forward to sharing some new Scratch creations soon. Watch this space!

Last week our class had a lot of fun creating a race between a tortoise and a hare. This week we are making our own running race between three characters. Here are some pictures of us in action.                                                           And here are the students independent creations....  Which project is your favourite and why? Thanks for watching.

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to go and some of the boys in action at their rugby game on Saturday! Levi, Kaiden, David, Ryan and Jack all play in this team and they were all working so hard for their last game. They got a great result with a well deserved win for their last game! It was also great to see Jack cheering them on as he recovered from chicken pox. Check out the action below!

Our class had a lovely afternoon writing about themselves on their blogs using Explain Everything. We are all enjoying learning how to blog and hope you enjoy reading about us!

Last week we were lucky enough to have some great people and their awesome big trucks visit us at Ara Tū Whakatā - Gilberthorpe School. We got to go inside and I am sure that everybody could hear all of the students sounding the horns across the whole of Hei Hei and Hornby! Thank you so much to  Miranda for organising and all the awesome people involved for giving our students this amazing experience.

Yesterday at 1pm a group of students all sat down during their lunchtime to listen to a story. This was a really special storytime because many other people were reading the same story at the same time throughout the whole country! This was called National Simultaneous storytime and we joined over 1,062,000 other people that were reading Hickory Dickory Dash at the same time. Below is a video of someone else reading the story in case you want to check it out.

At the end of term 2 we celebrated the end of the redevelopment of our school and we shared our new hub, building and classroom names. At our celebration each class did a little presentation to share with the other classes, hub, and our Whānau how to pronounce them and what they mean. Take a look at the presentations below to learn more about our names and what they mean.

We are very excited to begin working with our new buddy school in Auckland. We are going to follow their blog (see the link on the left of this page) and comment on their learning this term.  Our blog buddies are Room 8 from Wesley Primary School. We look forward to getting to know them a little better by watching their learning that they share on their blog.  We took advantage of the Warehouse Stationery 'Get NZ Writing' postcards to send some greetings to our new buddy class. We did a 10 minute Quick Write to send them a little message. We hope the mail will give them a nice surprise and Make Their Day!

Today we made the most of our excess carrots and bananas that we had delivered as part of our Fruit in Schools programme. We have had lovely roasted carrots for the last three days. The smell of them cooking made all of our tummies rumble each morning and the tamariki gobbled them up so fast when they came out of the oven.  Miss Corry and a small team of professional bakers whipped up two banana cakes today for the tamariki to eat. There were queues for a piece of lovely cake at the start of lunchtime today. We love having a kitchen to be able to learn in and would hugely appreciate any donations of baking ingredients that you could spare to keep our tamariki learning such wonderful and practical life skills. Olivia mashing the bananas. Miss Corry helping with the measurements. Olivia and Amira leading the washing up team. Gobbling up the roasted carrots. Deegan measuring the butter. Impatient kids waiting for the microwave to finish. 6 minutes is a long ti

Last week we were lucky enough to have a visit from the Duffy Theatre Show. It is always so exciting at the beginning of each year to watch the very funny and entertaining theatre show. This year Duffy showed us how the power of reading can help bullies learn to use kind words and change their attitudes towards others. We also something else really cool about reading, it is a great tool to relax. This means it is awesome to read before you go to bed so you're nice and relaxed and fall asleep really easily! Look at this awesome Duffy song with sign language included!

We had let our sunflowers dry out for a few weeks and today it was time to remove the seeds from the plants. There were excited squeals as we gathered together and scraped and flicked the seeds out of the flower heads. Seeds flew everywhere! We ended up with a lot of seeds. We are going to prepare some of them to eat and put away some of them to plant next spring! Lucy, Casey and Hakeem removing the seeds from the biggest flowers. Rylan was so excited to find big fat seeds that he put some in his pocket to take home! Natania and Payton loved picking the little seeds out of the smaller sunflowers. Olivia and Hakeem showed great attention to detail, leaving no seed behind!

Today we were able to harvest many of the vegetables that we planted at the end of last year. Kale, corn and tomatoes were all ready to be picked! There were very excited squeals as we peeked inside the leaves of the corn to see if it was ready and we saw the beautiful yellow kernels emerge.    The tamariki dug over our first garden and have prepared it for our next planting. They tidied up after themselves, cleaned our tools and put all our waste into the compost.  They are so proud of what they have grown and they are looking forward to being brave and trying some kale chips tomorrow! Our kale, corn and the first of our tomatoes This garden is all ready to plant again. Our next plants will be beans and lots of radishes in this garden.

Te Rōpū Kura Pounamu were very proud of themselves during their Te Reo lesson last week. They all managed to stick their own Mihi into their books all by themselves. Gluing things into books can be tricky, but not for these kids! They are developing their independence and insisted on managing this task all on their own.  Tino pai mahi Te Rōpū Kura Pounamu. Ka rawe!

Today we learned all about how to fill each other's emotional bucket with the little and big things that we do for others. The tamariki made beautiful little messages for each other to fill their friends' imaginary buckets. Later in the day they reflected upon what they had done during the day to help fill another person's bucket. Here is the story that we all read together. Here are a few amazing bucket filling reflections: MJ and Nikau filled their friends' buckets. Trisanah filled her friends' bucket today too.

We were so excited to arrive back at school after our Christmas Holidays and find our little sunflower seeds that we had planted had grown into beautiful yellow flowers. They made us smile every time we looked out the windows at them. The tamariki have loved comparing their own height to the sunflowers and deciding if the flowers were taller than them or not. After the big wind last week the sunflowers had begun to die off and today we were able to harvest the flower heads to retrieve the seeds. We had lots of keen helpers collecting the heads, pulling out the big plants and fixing up the garden so that the remaining flowers could carry on growing. Oskar was amazing and determinedly followed through the process from the start to finish. He is a very passionate gardener and shared lots of stories about what he does in the garden at home with Mum. The tamariki then helped carry the dead plants to the compost, watered the rest of our gardens and packed away all the garden tools. They

At the end of 2017 the Gilby's Got Talent Show was held. It started with semifinals in each of the hubs, before 5 acts were sent through to the Grand Final. Congratulations to all our entrants, there were so many brave students that got up there and did their best. It certainly made it difficult to decide on the top 5. Finally a big congratulations to Jonte and Sapphire for winning the Junior Prizes in the Grand Final!