Welcome Miss Brown

Our New Guest Teacher

In Te Rōpū Whakamanawa, we have a guest teacher with us until Week Nine of this term.  Miss Brown is a student learning to be a teacher through Grad school.  She has been with us for two weeks and the time is going by so fast.

Miss Brown enjoys our Cultural Diversity Day

We are loving having Miss brown here and we are enjoying the things she is teaching us.

Samoan Language Week

Samoan Language Week

Tālofa lava.  We are celebrating and enjoying Samoan Language Week.  This is a resource we used to support our learning.

Check out our student blogs to see how we have shared our learning.

World Cultural Diversity Day 2019

World Cultural Diversity Day 2019

This week, Gilberthorpe School celebrated World Cultural Diversity Day.  That means we shared and learned about the different cultures that make up our school.

In our school we brought food from different cultures to try, we had a sausage sizzle, some people performed items from their culture, we had a flag ceremony and parade and some people wore clothing or different items to represent their culture.

We had about twenty four flags hanging around our amphitheatre poles.  They looked beautiful especially when they were blowing in the gentle breeze.  Some people made flags and carried those.  

Some of our students sitting by our flags.

I will add more photos later.

Hornby Sport

Fabulous Fun at Football

Term Two and Three are our Winter Sports terms and today we kicked off with our first games.  We have two football teams this year with FC Barcelona and FC Real Madrid.  This week we were playing side by side so our sideline supporters could watch a bit of both games.

It was a great start to the season and our teams did really well, while improving as the games went on.  It was our first game together and we had games against Wigram and St Bernadette's.  

Our student coaches from Hornby High were both fantastic.  This was a new experience for them and they were great role models, positive and showed confidence.  We feel very lucky to have such great coaches for our football teams and are now even more excited to play again next week.

We are looking forward to the future games under the leadership and coaching from Dante and Mathias.

Bullying Free Week

Stand Up Speak Up

This week in New Zealand, it has been Bullying Free Week.  We shared a slide that our student leadership team created and watch some clips that show the impact of bullying and why it is such a big problem that we all need to work on to fix.

Te Rōpū Whakamanawa think that:

We shouldn't bully anywhere.

• It's horrible.
• Stand up to it.
• People don't deserve to get bullied because it takes people down.
• It makes people miserable.
• Bullying is no good.  
• Things bullies say are not true about you.
• It's just rude.
• It takes away confidence.  
• We don't want it around us.
• Some people bully to try to be popular.
• It leads to bad choices.

We had Pink Day on Friday and were very lucky to have stickers, posters and balloons that a parent organised for us.

Here is Te Rōpū Whakamanawa on the day.

Bullying Free Week

Our Guru Creation for Bullying Free Week

To help us learning about bullying, our Guru team created this slide.

Cyber Smart

Who is Cooper?

Today we looked at how we can find information about people/dogs online.  We viewed Miss Morgan's blog and commented on what we found out about her.  

Miss Morgan's Post

The comments we left for Miss Morgan.

We then viewed Cooper's blog and completed the questions sheet to see what information we could find out.  

This learning is important for us because we live in a digital world where information can be accessed from all around the world.  Our next step is to check in on what we post and share to make sure we are safe.

Mother's Day Competition

Appreciating Our Mums

Each year the wonderful team at Duffy Books in Homes and their generous and caring sponsors, provide a book to be given to one of our mums for Mother's Day.  Miss Harris organised a competition where children could nominate their mums for being the wonderful people that they are.

Here are this year's winners:

Lacie, Losalini and Colton.

Your lovely thoughts are sure to make your mum's day!

Keep an eye out for the Father's Day competition and gift in September

Week 2 Blogger of the Week

Let's Blog With Aliyah

Our Blogger of the Week for Te Rōpū Whakamanawa is Aliyah.  Her blog has had a recent change in appearance and she has been blogging since she was a student at Hornby Primary.  

Check out her blog and be sure to leave her some comments so she knows you have visited.

Link To Aliyah's Blog

Aliyah is working on having an introduction and explanation of the learning she is sharing, a visual and a reflection and next step.

New Zealand Sign Language Week 2019

Celebrating One Of Our Official Languages

This week to celebrate New Zealand Sign Language Week, we have been learning to sign our greetings for the roll in the morning.  We used this resource to help grow our learning and explore sign language in different ways.  

Our next step, is to continue to work on this next week and be able to refer to it so we can use sign language more regularly.

Te Reo Māori Assessment

Objects in the Classroom

In week one we did an assessment on classroom objects in Māori.  We had to move the objects to the right name.

I think I did alright so my next step is to learn all of these.

Prototec May 2019

My Basic Facts

Today I did Prototec at Stage 4 because my Math group is at this stage.  My score was 1/60 and my time was 40 seconds.  I didn't really try very hard in this because it was just an example for my class.

My next step is to actually try and work on my subtraction to ten.  

Then and Now

Awww...Too Cute

A few years ago when we were redesigning our website, Laura who was our school secretary and also a professional photographer, took some beautiful photos of our tamariki at school.  These photos so were so stunning that we had some of them printed onto canvas and displayed them in our old admin area.

When the building was being revamped, these pictures were stored away for a bit.  When Te Ara Takitini was ready for us to inhabit, we brought a few of them into our space to continue to be on show.  

Some of the students have moved on but a few still remain.  Recently, one boy who had moved schools, paid us a visit for the day which meant we could have a go at recreating a particular photo.  Kids have grown a lot since the originals were taken with some students being in their final year here at Gilberthorpe.

Here are a couple of then and now photos that we have done.

Although the photography of the recent photos is not so great, being able to repose together sure made our day.

Bring Your Own Device

Fun Friday Term Two

To acknowledge meeting of expectations and to put our value of Play in action, we have a thirty minute slot each week where students select a fun activity from a range of options.  It is a great time to mingle with other students and teachers and to do something fun.

This week Miss Waho's option was BYOD which meant children could bring their own devices and choose school appropriate online activities.  

Next week we have another selection of activities with Miss Waho taking hockey for juniors.

Fun in Fitness

Our Daily Fitness

To kick off term two, we started doing daily fitness in the form of circuits.  At this stage it has just been Miss Waho's Numeracy groups who go out after morning tea time but Whakamanawa will start doing this also.

Here is our slide showing the exercises we do at each station and a few photos of these in action.

Squats

Planking

Burbies

We aim to improve our fitness, co ordination and stamina.

Bloggers of The Week

Takitini Bloggers

This term we have started our Bloggers of the Week.  This is where one student from each home base class has the rest over the hub visit their blogs and post comments.  This is how we share who will be the Bloggers of the Week.

Acasia was the main blogger from Whakamanawa and her are a few comments posted by classmates.

 This is Acasia's blog page and link.

Link to Acasia's Blog

Our next step is to ensure we post, view, share and comment on blogs on a regular basis.

Expectations: Before School

Making Our School A Safe Space

Each week to help reinforce our school values and expectations of everybody being ready to learn, engaging in positive relationships and to help us all feel safe, we have one school wide expectation to focus on.
In week one of term two, we looked at what we do before school in order to prepare for the day.  In Te Rōpū Whakamanawa, we looked at our school chart and then identified four things that we will do individually. 

Our next step is to make sure we actually do these things.

One Week of Steps-Modelling how to post

Term 2 Steps

This week we have done Steps two times.  This is what I have done so far.

My goal for next week is to reach 110 minutes.

Kiwi Can Term Two

Welcome back to Kiwi Can

Today we have our first session back into Kiwi Can.  Our topic this term is Integrity.  We will be learning more about Honesty, Responsibility and Reliability.

We started playing a game that needs honesty and integrity.  

A key statement we looked at was:  Understand that we have to ask questions and reflect on other stories or perspectives to find out the whole truth.  

What is a perspective?

We played a game called 21 questions where we had to ask questions to try and figure out who the mystery people 

We asked closed questions?  They questions that have only yes or no as answers.

Our next step is to show honesty, responsibility and reliability in all situations.  We are great at knowing what these things mean, however at times we struggle to show these.

Dancing Like the Stars

Let's Dance

Our music today was Marshmallow which was a popular choice as far as Whakamanawa students were concerned.  We got to meet our dance tutor Shawn.  

The styles we are doing are Bollywood, modern jive and tango.  

We learned about hand space-If you can do a 360 and don't bump into anybody, you have enough room to stretch.  We started with warm up stretches.
We were able to do the first 25 seconds of the song and I must say, this is even more exciting than before the class.
Check out student individual blogs to see what kids thought.

Warming Up

Stretching in time

Our first move

Here is what we have so far...

We are all very excited and looking forward to working with Shawn and developing our dance skills.