What's Up - Term 3 Week 1

Welcome back to Term three! As usual it’s a busy term for year 7 and 8 students. This term we have science fair, taranaki trophy, speech board, positive puberty and technology - so it is going to be full on.

This week we will be spending time working on science fair entries and learning how to correctly write up an investigation. Students should have their experiments well under way by now.

All students are going to undertake an adaptive maths test so we can see where we’re at. An adaptive test changes the questions to suit the student so that we can gain the most insight into what they can and can’t do. This is really helpful for teaching students to their individual needs.

Japanese continues this term. Students will continue to learn greetings, numbers, short sentences, etc. Myself and miss jury will be involved in professional development in this area on wednesday this week.

Tech will be in week 4 again this term. Students will pick their options this week and will meet for a planning session in the next week.

We will be involved in the Taranaki Trophy sports exchange  this term. Practices for rugby and netball will be on friday afternoons. There will be two netball teams this year - an A and B team. The B team will play nearly as many games as the a team. Teams will be finalised before friday this week.

Our first exchange is here at school next thursday against oakura.

Transport will be required for away games.

Have a great week.

Mystery Skype Challenge

Today we put our communication, team work, logical thinking and map using skills to the test in a mystery skype challenge.  This involved being paired up with a school somewhere in New Zealand and asking each other yes and no questions and racing to identify the other school. We had to use Google Maps to search for the school and it was really important that we worked as a team and listened to each other so that we didn't ask the same questions or silly questions.
We didn't win, but we did have a huge amount of fun. We were teamed up with a city school in Auckland. We really liked them and are going to stay in contact with them. They were quite different from us - a much bigger school, they wore a uniform, they were in the city. We spent time after the challenge finding out about each other and introducing ourselves.
During the challenge we all had roles - such as ambassadors (these people did the talking on skype), directors (these people keep everything orderly and everyone on task), detectives (these people did all the searching on Google Maps), the reporters (they ran the questions to the directors and ambassadors). We also had a scribe - who wrote all the things we found out up on the board, and a photographer who captured the learning and fun we were having.
Everyone was really engaged with their learning and learnt a lot from the experience.

Hollie and Troy were our Ambassadors 

Millie was a Director

Aylah kept track of everything we found out

Arlo was a Detective using Google Maps 

These are the Ambassadors from St Heliers School 

Art

 Our wonderful works of art are nearly finished and are looking fabulous! Here's a few of the finished ones. Check out your child's blog over the next couple of days to see their finished products.  They will be judged by the Toko Hall Committee over the holidays.