Week 5 Update

Well last week was a very unsettled week with ex-Cyclone Gita impacting on all of us in some way or other. Hopefully everyone has power and water back now and life is getting back to normal.

Even though we missed a couple of days of school we managed to complete our self portraits - which are hanging on the wall looking very striking! Students began planning their Waitangi dramas which will presented in assembly and will be recorded and posted on individual blogs when they are complete.

This week we begin CSI Reading which is a programme that will help identify strategies for reading and will encourage students to be active participants in reading. These things will help us when reading any text and is necessary at this level as nearly every subject involves reading in some way.

Students will begin investigating percentages this week and should come home asking questions about how GST impacts on your family. It would be very helpful if you could point out percentages in newspapers, shops, etc, so that students can see understanding percentages is a really useful skill.

We continue reading Refugee and it continues to capture the children's imaginations. Last week we began completing a venn diagram that showed similarities and differences between Germany 1939, Cube 1994 and Syria 2015.  The students have been quite surprised that the things we are reading about actually happened and are in fact still happening in some countries.

Reminders 
We are going to the Stratford Pool this Wednesday and next Wednesday for water and boat safety lessons with instructors from the pool. We will be leaving after morning tea and returning at lunch time. Students will need togs and towels. Those that want to have a hot lunch can have it when we return at 1pm. While we are there we will be completing time trials for those that wish to trial for the Turnball Cup relay team.


Students have been shared the House Leader criteria and those that wish to put themselves forward for this leadership opportunity will need to have a handed in a short piece of writing explaining why they would be good for the job by Tuesday.