Te Rōpū Kura Pounamu, Te Rōpū Whakaute and Te Rōpū Wawata have been learning about Maui and the Sun over the last few weeks. This has been lots of fun and we have learned so much. This week we decided to write about the story for our writing time as well. I was so impressed to see the students in Whakaute planning and writing their stories. Two of our writing groups worked together to plan and write their stories on big pieces of paper in pairs or threes. I was blown away by the writing that Blessinglonise, Milla and Isabellah did together. Below you can see how well they worked together using the word card to write their sentences. Ka pai girls this was amazing collaboration!

We made an advertisement persuading people to buy a jersey from us. We voted for the best advertisement and Kylah, Olivia and Caitlyn-Lee were the winners. Here is their video. Will this make you buy their jersey?

Last week I printed some pictures of interesting sand sculptures to inspire the students in the sandpit. They looked at these photos and really went crazy with some amazing sand sculptures. We had some amazing artists in the sandpit! Now these photos below can be used to inspire future sandpit projects. We hope you enjoy and take inspiration from our amazing sculptures!                                                 

In Social Science, we have been learning about Change. We learnt to understand why the past is important to people. Last Thursday, we had a trip to the Ferrymead Heritage Park where we spent the day in the 1950s, near 70 years ago. When we got there we changed into olden day clothes. The girls loved their dresses especially the bonnets. We sat in the old classroom where all the children sat in a row, boys and girls on each side. The teacher, Mr Brown used blackboard with white chalk to write. He also had a whip and stick. We were so pleased when he said he wouldn't use those on us. We also got to bake cookies and learnt to set the dining table, table manners and also some of the kitchen things people used to use. They also had toys the children used to play and we got to play with them, too. Lastly, we watched a movie called The gang (The little rascals) in black and white. It was a busy day but we had great fun! Mr Brown checked and stamp our work.

This afternoon we worked in our orchard. We picked a lot of feijoas and some of us are looking forward to eating them. Did you know you shouldn't pick feijoas off the tree? When the feijoas are ripe they fall to the ground and then you know they are ready to eat. We pulled out some stakes  which supported the trees but are no longer needed.  We also picked up the cuttings from the fruit trees which have been pruned. We have quite a bit more work to do yet and will keep you updated.

Last week was Samoan language week and it was great to see some of our awesome Samoan students sharing their culture with us. Tali, Tonga and Melakai came in dressed and ready to go on Friday to show us some of their traditional dance moves. A massive thank you to Fili for coming in and supporting these boys and dancing with them too! Check out the video below!

We have been learning about the Zones of Regulation this year, this has been a great way to describe our emotions and what to do to get back to the Green Zone (happy zone). This week we learnt to express four emotions in te reo. We learnt how to say "How are you?"  and "I am ___ ." Four emotion words we learnt are: good - pai, tired - ngēne, thirsty - hiamoe and sad - pōuri. In these video clips, you can see Essence and Harsirat practising the questions and answers about their emotions.