Happy Holidays!

We have been having a very busy end of the year in Te Ana Ako.

On Monday, we had a farewell for our teachers who are leaving: Mrs Law (who is retiring) and Mrs Baird (who is off on other adventures next year).

On Tuesday, we had our last class swim in the school pool (until next year).  The Year Six students had their graduation dinner on Tuesday evening.

On Wednesday, we took all our art off the walls and started taking home our exercise books and our Christmas craft gifts.

On Thursday, we had our final assembly to celebrate student achievements and honour our Year Six leavers.

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And today is our last day at school for the year! Some of us will be blogging on the Summer Learning Journey over the holidays, so keep an eye on our individual blogs. We have been learning how to attribute our images today.

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Others are looking forward to participating in the Auckland Libraries summer reading programme called Kia Māia te Whai - Dare to Explore. 

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We hope you all have a safe and happy holiday. See you next year!

Futsal

This Term, our Kiwisport focus is Futsal.  Futsal is a smaller version of inside football where you get the chance to touch the ball in the game lots more.  You can find out more about Futsal here.


During our sessions, we have focused on developing our dribbling skills. While dribbling the ball, we need to be aware of others around us.  To improve our awareness, we have played different games while dribbling. Kingsley, our coach, challenged us to 'juggle' the football with our feet, our knees and even our heads.  We were working to get the highest number of juggles that we could in a row.


Our favourite part of the sessions so far have been the games of Futsal.  In pairs, we have worked hard with our buddy to try to score a goal for our team.  The sessions have been heaps of fun and we look forward to more chances to explore this sport.


We would love your feedback.  Have you ever played Futsal?  What is your favourite sport?  Please leave us a comment below.

Term 3 Koru Art

Towards the end of Term 3 we integrated three areas of learning -
Geometry, knowledge of Maori Legends and Visual Arts.
*Our aim was to create a piece of art using koru motifs to
create an overall pattern.
*We first explored and drew koru shapes and kowhaiwhai patterns,
then chose one shape and used this to make a paper transfer.
*Using the paper transfer, we transformed the shape to show our
understanding of translation, reflection and rotation.This created a tile pattern on the 12 squares.
*After creating the outline of the tile pattern, we chose which
parts to make positive and negative spaces by colouring in with
a black vivid pen.
*The last part was to think about which dye colours to use to
create patterns within patterns.
*When you look at the final pieces of art, see if you can find...
warm colours, cool colours, block colours, blended colours
AND
lines of patterns, chequered patterns, repeating patterns
*Enjoy viewing the process of our art creations.

Thank you for viewing our blog. We look forward to reading your feedback.

         

          

Rock Painting for the Remembrance Garden

Term 3 
Mrs Peterson organised heaps of rocks for us to decorate. These are part of a project to brighten up our school's Remembrance Garden.  
So, for most of this term we have worked on this project.
First we helped Dave clean the rocks, and then we explored and designed patterns which we could use.
We then painted the rocks with a plain colour.  Using our creative designs, meant we could choose one or two of these designs and transfer them onto the rocks.
Next, the fun began!   We were able to start painting our designs. 
This meant using fine brushes and painting with the gorgeous, bright colours...so much fun!! Because many of the rocks had uneven surfaces, this meant we had to sometimes change our designs, but that's what creative artists do.

It's been a fun and colourful journey.  We've learnt so much about painting and also learnt heaps about each other as we've worked along side our classmates. 

You can see the painting journey in the photos below.

                 We would love to read your positive and thoughtful comments.

Week 8: Cross Country

On Wednesday the 11th of September we held our annual cross country event.  This year, we have been working hard to fundraise for a canopy for our school courts as part of this. We have been very busy, gaining sponsorship for the different activities that we participated in on the day.  As well as running the course at school, we challenged ourselves to skip as many times as we could in a certain time, kick as many soccer goals as we could, traverse the tricky obstacle course and cheer other school members on while enjoying some cake and iceblocks for energy.    It was a fabulous day!  You can see some of us in action in the photos below.



If you have time, we would love some positive, thoughtful and helpful feedback.

Mural Art

Salaam. Hello. Kia ora. Selamat siang.

Our Art and Inquiry learning in the last few weeks is about the cultural patterns on clothing. We have been painting some large figures of children for a collaborative mural. Kaiwhare has been exploring patterns and clothing for an Iranian boy and a New Zealand European girl. Mokoroa has been exploring patterns and clothing for a Maori boy and a Malaysian girl.

Here is a slideshow Kaiwhare shared in assembly on Friday, showing how our ideas and designs have developed as we have been learning.


Although we haven't finished yet, we thought you'd like a 'sneak peek' into our project.

Week 4 - Maths week in Te Ana Ako

This week, Te Ana Ako have been celebrating the annual New Zealand maths week event.  We, along with many other students around the country have participated in daily challenges.  You can find out more about these challenges at the official website here.  https://www.mathsweek.co.nz/  Below, you can see some of our students collaborating to solve these problems.

We have also been focusing on Maths in different areas of the curriculum.  In writing, we have been creating stories inspired by Tangram patterns.  A tangram is a puzzle made up of seven geometric shapes: two large triangles, two small triangles, one medium triangle, a square and a parellalogram. The shapes are then arranged to create pictures. All of the pieces have to be used.  Firstly, we explored these patterns by making the illustrations in a story that Mr Riceman created.  Below you can see Lewis' experimenting with Tangrams in our shared story.

Then we have had the chance to create and describe our own stories. Here are Lily and Londyn's examples below.

Londyn's Tangram Storyboard

Lily's Tangram storyboard

We have been using games to develop our thinking. There are many aspects of maths that can be developed through game play. It has also been a chance for us to enjoy getting to know our other class mates.  We have enjoyed draughts, dominoes, card games, and mancala. We even upcycled egg cartons to create 25 game boards which we will use to play Mancala in our class.  Check out the slideshow below of us playing and creating games and enjoying using with our other Math equipment to develop our thinking.

It has been a great week so far, we are looking forward to the remainder of the week.  We would love some of your feedback below. Please leave us a positive, thoughtful or helpful comment.

Book Week

Book Week 
Romana, (Maddison and Leeya's mum) worked really hard to organise our School Book Fair again this year. She is our 'Guru Organiser' who helps assist and guide students and parents with their purchases.
In total, $3,167.50 worth of books were sold which meant we were able to choose $950 worth of free books -  two sets of shared class novels and all the other books for our Library.  

What a fabulous selection!

 

Week 3

Kiwisport - Squash

Our Kiwisport focus this term is Squash. 

We had our first lesson this week with Jude from Squash Auckland.

We have a mini squash court in our hall. This is fantastic! Before we started we learnt about the rules of squash; we had to practise throwing, watching and catching a ball to help us improve our hand-eye coordination. After that we were then able to have a rally with Jude. This was trickier than we all thought. Some of us showed exceptional skills.              

 
We can't wait until next week for our next lesson.

Week 1 Term 3

 Our whole school set out to make a difference in our community during Week 1. Along with the support of the Tread Lightly Caravan,  Be A Tidy Kiwi , Volunteers from 'Z Energy' and  parent helpers we took to the streets within our community to pick up as much rubbish as we could.

Each class had a different route and was given  a litter kit which included gloves, high-vis vests, litter grabbers and rubbish bags.   (We certainly need plenty of rubbish bags!)
Before we left the school we were told there were  'golden tickets' out in the community.  If you found one of these you would get a prize. That really made us search!

                                                       

After we had finished we were told our school had collected 32 bags

weighing a total of 200kg!

We certainly made a difference by making a tidier and cleaner community!

      Below is the audit report from our Tread Lightly Litter Blitz.

 

WELCOME TO TERM 3

This term both Mokoroa's and Kaiwhare's blog will be combined. This is because our learning environment is integrated and students are often in either section of our learning space.

The links to our previous individual blogs can be found on the top left sidebar.