Mobile Phones in the Classroom

After much consideration Bill, Bex and Jay have decided to trial allowing senior students to keep their mobile phones on them while at school. Children in the middle and junior school will still be expected to hand their phones in to Hela before school starts each day.

The reason for allowing senior students to hold on to their phones is that, we believe, mobile phones can be a valuable learning tool in the classroom. Some ways in which we will be encouraging senior students to use their mobile phones will be to encourage them to use the camera, calculator and internet functions on their phones.

The responsibility for looking after a mobile phone will reside with the kids, which links directly to developing the key competencies from the new curriculum. Children will be welcome to continue to leave their phones with Hela during the school day, if they choose to.

The trial will last until the end of Tern 4.

Speech Competition

Yes! The moment we’ve been waiting for and dreading for weeks is nearly over - SPEECHES. The senior speech competition was on Thursday last week, that’s sixty kids performing for a whole day! Anyway, the judges gave their comments and by the end of the day we had our semi-finalists: Anna, Asia, Hannah, Ngawhera, Raiha Matt, Olive, Rohit and Georgina. They had all given fantastic speeches. But unfortunately there could only be two children going to the Central Zone Speech Competition. On Monday, this week, we had another speech competition for the senior finalists. The judges had a really hard job choosing the winners as the standard was so high. Ngawhera and Olive won. They will represent our school tomorrow. Good luck!

Olive and Ngawhera

Welcome to Term Three

We have a whole lot of fun stuff in store for this term. Here are some of the highlights:

DRAMA
This term we have a professional drama teacher coming in every Wednesday morning to teach us about the performing arts. So far we have had one lesson and we all thought it was great. During that lesson we played heaps of fun drama games. Next week we will be starting to play different characters. Later on Mel (our drama teacher) will be picking some of our talented students to create and perform a play at the end of the term.

GYMNASTICS
As part of our P.E our class will be doing gymnastics every Monday and Friday. We will be using the beam for balancing, the mats for forward and backward rolls, the box (also known as the horse) for jumping onto or over and our mini trampolines for jumping on.

3 WAY CONFERENCES
This term we will be doing three-way conferences. This is when we show our parents what we have been doing at school and how well we are doing. At the moment we are preparing as hard as we can to get all our work together. The first ones start next week on Monday and go on for at least two weeks. For the people who are going next week we wish them luck.

STUDENT TEACHER
We will be having a student teacher coming in to help out Jay with us naughty kids. Her name is Mariah Miles and she will be joining us on the 3rd of August.

We all can’t wait for this term to end! Just joking, we really can’t wait for this term to kick off.

By August and Jess

DAYS OF OUR LIVES

Hello and Welcome to another instalment of our blog.

This week we have been doing dance photos. We found dance photos on the internet and printed our favourite one. We then made a border for it and wrote a question about the dance in the picture. They are all displayed around the classroom and they look awesome.

As usual, our noses are being kept to the grindstone with the love-it-or-loathe-it STAGE CHALLENGE. Thankfully, most people seem to be closer to the love it end of the spectrum.

In the dance side of it we have been practising like mad and we have two sections of dance. Pagan comes in once or twice a week to help us.

On the production side of Stage Challenge, we are doing things varying from designing the costumes to stalking the dancers with video cameras. The costumes are baggy white T-shirts with black trackies for the boys and black leggings for the girls.

By Hannah and Asia.

POETRY

This term we have been learning about poetic writing. We have been practising our use of figurative language (personification, simile and metaphor) to make our description more interesting.

This week we wrote some poems that compared being confident with being self-conscious. This helped us to think about how we will need to mentally prepare ourselves for Stage Challenge.

Here are two of the poems:

We were learning about personification, how it gives human abilities to some things that are not human.

‘The tree waved its arms in the wind.’

But trees don’t have arms, they have branches and that’s why we use personification to make our writing more interesting.

We have also learned that similes and metaphors make writing more interesting.

‘Jay’s hair is as curly as the roaring ocean.’

This is a simile for it has an ‘as’ in it but you can also use ‘like’ to compare different things.

Metaphors use ‘is’ to leave a vivid impression on the reader.

‘Her hair is black silk.’

Thank you for taking the time to read what we have been writing about recently.

By Jan and Alex

Back To School

We’ve just done a statistics test this week to see if we have improved since our last statistics test (from the beginning of the year). We have also done our first measurement test, as this will be our focus for this term.

This term our main focus is Stage Challenge. We have been working with Pagen to make a dance about technology.

We went to the Museum of City and Sea. We went to look at a pottery exhibition. It had different types of pots, from big to small, plain to colourful and old to new. Then we went to a work shop to make a sushi plate. It was very fun though some of the pottery was hard to make. Unfortunately, some people were not allowed to come because they hadn’t brung a water proof jacket.

By Jono and Keegan

Term Two Curriculum

Here is a basic overview of the major curriculum focuses for this term:

English
Listening comprehension, performing monologues, journal writing, explanatory writing, poetry, spelling/vocabulary, punctuation, reading a range of texts, reading comprehension.

Maori
Basic language skills

Learning Languages
Japanese

Mathematics and Statistics
Measurement and Number (place value and addition/subtraction/multiplication/division).

The Arts/Inquiry
Stage Challenge (Dance)

Physical Education and Health
Child-led games and sports, fitness.

Technology
Mount Cook School Technology classes