Social Time

Being Engaged

Relationships and interacting in a positive way is important for us not just in school but for life in general.  We decided to create a time where we could all socialise and interact with each other.  Students selected activities to do and spent time socialising with different people.  We found that this was a great way to connect and get to know each other more.

Our next step is to make this a more regular activity and continue to make and maintain relationships and communication skills.

Self Assessment in Values

Whakamanawa Assess Ourselves

This year in Whakamanawa, we are self-assessing in our Values learning.  We have a value and behaviour expectation each week and have created a slide to assess ourselves in how well we show this particular value and what we can do to get better at it.  

This is the template we all have our own copy of:

Kiwi Can 2020

Kiwi Can is Back

We are really pleased to have Tia and Owen back to take us through the Kiwi Can Programme.  We have a new way of collating our Kiwi Can points and have made a great start to the year.  

Here are a few pics of one of our first sessions:

Cultural Learning

Our Cultures

In Whakamanawa, we have a great selection of books that teach us about different cultures from around the world.  Many of these are about children and tell stories of what life is like for them.  

In our Reading Alone time, we had a selection of books laid out for sharing and children could choose to read them.

Here are a few of our students engaged with the books they have chosen.  

Our aim is to grow our collection and have regular cultural reading as part of our classroom programme.

Getting to Know Our Cultures

Getting to Know Our Cultures

The beginning of the year is always good for getting to know each other and developing positive relationships.  This year for the first four weeks we worked in home base classes to develop routines, expectations and to get to know each other more.
We then pulled all of this together and had a Cultural Sharing Day.  Students were able to learn about our different cultures and learn more about their classmates.

Students in Whakamanawa worked on a Cultural Sharing slide and then presented these on the big screen to the class.  The engagement and encouragement from students were really lovely to witness.  All students were really focused and full of positive comments and questions during the sharing sessions.  

This is an example of one of the student's slide:

We had a class shared lunch and an afternoon of performances.

We are looking forward to sharing and strengthening our cultural knowledge and understanding throughout the year.

Cool Schools Programme

Training Our Peer Mediators

This year we have joined the Cool Schools Peer Mediators Programme.  We had Tracey from the Peace Foundation come in and train our Years 5 and 6 students who thought they might be interested in being part of this.  

Peer mediators are trained to support other students through conflict.  We are hoping to have our team in action starting in term two and think this will give students empowerment and skills to use in all areas of life.

Sharing Our Cultures

Multicultural Sharing Day 2020

To celebrate the first four weeks of school and getting to know each other, we had a Cultural Sharing Day.  In Whakamanawa, we started the day finishing off some slides that we have been creating.  We then had a sharing session where a few people presented their slides.  This was a really interesting and fun activity.  The food slides made us hungry and the music was engaging and inspiring.

After morning tea, we started to create our own flags to fly at our school parade in the afternoon.  We then started to prepare for our shared lunch.  We started to learn a karakia for kai and talked about the different types of food we had.

Lunchtime was fantastic and we all loved sharing kai and chats together.

After lunch, we got sorted for our school parade and ready to watch students from across the school perform.  The wind was pretty terrible and the Wifi wasn't much help either but when students were performing, they had the audience captivated.