Term 3 Week 1

Kia ora everyone! Welcome back to school for Term 3! The Rising Stars have settled in well back to school and are looking forward to a busy and exciting term of learning.

Theme for this Term

This term our theme is PRIDE in the World with a big focus on the Olympics, the area of Technology and also our class country Jamaica. Whenever we are researching a theme or topic, a good way of doing this is to follow an inquiry process model to help us to cover all areas of our investigation.  This term we will be using our school inquiry model which is divided into five stages stated below....

Stage 1: Exploring/ Defining/ Planning

Brainstorm what they know about the topic.
Creating questions they would like to investigate.

Stage 2: Locating/ Selecting and Organising

Brainstorming different ways they can find the information to answer their questions.
Which information will they select and use?

Stage 3: Processing/ Deciding and Judging

Researching and decide what information to use, key words.

How does this information support the inquiry?

Is my information easy to understand and suitable to the target audience?

Stage 4: Communicating/Presenting.

Students to plan and choose an effective way to present their inquiry learning.  

Stage 5: Evaluation/Reflection

Reflective questioning- What went well? What could we do better? Where to next?

Our School Waharoa

This week we went to visit our school Waharoa outside the school office and discussed the importance of our Waharoa, what it represents and what it means to us. At our Team assembly on Wednesday afternoon Anahera and Timothy shared their writing with all the High Flyers.  Check out their writing below...

Park and Walk Day

Yesterday morning some of our students met at two designated meeting places along Rowandale Ave and took part in our Park and Walk Day. It was great to see so many students walking together to school with their teachers and when we reached our destination we all received a hot chocolate.  Here are some of our thoughts....

It was so much fun walking with everyone and I even got to walk with my teacher.
Maddison

It was cool that we could see our friends there and all the teachers.
Sasha

It was fun because it felt like I was walking with half the school.
Glori

MaorI Language Week Challenge #3

Today's phrase is......

He mahi ataahua -

Beautiful work

 IPAD camera man: Stanton

Student 1 and 2: Margaret and Greta

Maori Language Week Challenge #2

Today's phrase is......

Ka wani ke -

You're neat alright or you're clever

 IPAD camera man: Stanton

Student 1 and 2: Audrey and Sasha

Week Nine

Mathex Competition

On Tuesday I was fortunate enough to take the Mathex team to participate in the annual inter-school Mathex competition which was held at Manurewa Intermediate this year.  Six of our Year 5 and 6 students trained for the competition and it involved groups of 4 representatives from each school working together to solve maths word problems.  The students who trained and attended the Mathex this year from the High Flyers were Timothy, Apoua, Paul, Taare (Rm 20), Tovo (Rm 23) and Jack (Rm 24).  It was such an amazing experience for our children to take part in and has left us eager to train for next years competition.  Thank you to all our parents who came to support us...it was awesome having you there. Here are some of our pics...

Topic Studies

As part of our topic studies theme PRIDE in my community, we have been investigating some of the work that some of the support agencies in our community do to help others. Some of the organisations we have been looking at are the Red Cross, Auckland City Mission, Kids Can, The Salvation Army and Feed the Need.  We have been working on forming our own questions, and finding and selecting information to answer those questions. We recognise the importance of putting the information we find into our own words and are thinking about the audience this information is for and how we can present it in a way that is informative for our class. Here are some pics of us working in our groups and presenting some of our findings.