On Monday we began our final term for 2017. It was exciting to see everyone looking relaxed and rested after a great holiday break. We took these photos of our wonderful Year 6 children who began their final term at St Albans School. We will miss these beautiful faces next year so will make lots of memories and do lots of great learning together this term.
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Josh is a very talented person and an outstanding athlete ... and a genuinely all round nice guy! Josh is a wonderful role model to other children with his work ethic, willingness to give things a go and his determination to do his best. We are accustomed to seeing Josh achieve great sporting success at our school and we felt proud when he went onto the Canterbury Cross Country. We were even more proud when he went onto the National Cross Country at the end of last term. Josh arrived with three medals at school this week! He was placed second in this event!! He was also placed first in the teams even and received a participation medal. Josh, we admire you and think you are a very talented person. Thank you for your humble attitude and the way you inspire others. Finn from Waimakariri also competed in this run and he was placed 7th. Finn, we think this is an amazing achievement too. Congratulations to you both. We were so lucky to have Stacy Gregg visit us at school. Stacy is a New Zealand author (although she lives in England now). Stacy has written lots of books - she usually writes stories about horses. She talked to us the way she gets her ideas from real life experiences that she bases her stories on. She told us about one of her stories that is about a real princess who's Mum died and how the Princess took care of a pony who also lost its Mum. We laughed at some of the naughty things she did! Stacy's latest book is based upon the Kaikoura earthquake. Stacy read us the first chapter of her book which we felt was amazing and would love to read more. You can find out more about Stacy Gregg by looking at her web page here. Welcome Back
Welcome to the last term of the year. Term 4 will fly by and we have continued to plan for a great end to the school year. Adam Clark is currently on teaching placement in Ōtākaro from the University of Canterbury. He will be with us until the end of week 5 and working alongside Renée. Rosina Tippen continues to work with us throughout the week. Next time you’re in the hub take the time to have a look at the Piet Mondrian art she started with the children. Olivia continues her part-time role working in Ōtākaro on Fridays. Glen McKenzie also continues to teach every second Wednesday in our hub providing leadership release for Renée. Topic We continue with our overarching theme of Buildings and Structures. As a part of a reflection of our visual arts teaching and learning we decided painting skills and techniques would become our main focus with an emphasis on building creativity. Sport We have been practising for our athletics sports in week 3. It is great to see the children setting themselves personal goals and exceeding them already in their training. This term instead of participating in Hagley sport we will be running a sports education programme here at school. EOTC Children received written information regarding our upcoming Wainui Camp at the end of last term. Thank you for promptly returning all of the necessary forms. The excitement is brewing! Closer to the time children will be informed of their camp tribes, bunkrooms and transport. We have a meeting on Thursday 23rd November at 5pm for parents who are helpers on camp. Our Year 5 children will be participating in Beach Education at Waimairi on Wednesday 22nd November. It would be great if parents could contact Renee if they already know they are available to help on the day. It does involve you assisting us in the water and we do appreciate this as beach education is vital for our children to participate in as we are surrounded by beaches and waterways in New Zealand. Music Ros Emeleus will work with our Orchestra and Choir this term. The Music Festival Choir will be performing at Horncastle Arena on Wednesday 25th October with a rehearsal in the morning (9am - 12:30pm). In the second half of the term Ros E will work with the Year 6 children learning and practising a celebration song. Core Curriculum We will continue to run our collaborative environment with the children moving across the hub for Reading and Mathematics. Our teaching and learning programmes will be based around the following: Reading: Plays Writing: Punctuation and structure along with explanations Mathematics: Revisiting Numeracy Domains and Strands Uniforms Students are required to wear a hat during Terms 1 & 4. As they are a part of the school uniform we ask that they are a school hat. These can be purchased from school. Please get your children to make sure all of their school uniform items are named. This makes it a lot easier to return to them if they are left behind or found lying around the school. We look forward to another successful term as we countdown towards the end of year and Christmas. Please make sure you come and see any of our team if you have any queries about any of the events happening this term. Renée, Sam, Jodi, & Rachel We had our third trip to Les Mills gym this week. We had a great time and did lots of activities to improve our fitness. We have been learning about area and perimeter in maths over the last two weeks. This week we have spent time creating a zoo to scale. We were given specific requirements for various animals and had to create enclosures that met each animals requirements - each enclosure had a specific area and perimeter as well as requirements for water and trees. We also included a footpath to walk around the zoo as well as a ticket booth, food stalls and so on. When we finished our zoo we then created an advertisement to encourage people to come to our zoo. It was so much fun. Some people drew posters, others used the online tools we have learned about during the year to create their advertising - adobe spark, canva, google slides, docs and picmonkey were all used. It is exciting to see the children applying their learning to new situations and transferring skills to different tasks. Each zoo is different and unique, all of the zoos meet the criteria. The advertising information showed excellent use of digital tools being independently applied to a new task. We even had lots of correct punctuation which has been our literacy focus! The area and perimeter calculations were accurate and showed skill - it was great to see the children challenging themselves to create irregular shaped enclosures. We were so excited to receive a letter from our friend Hunter. He is at Reefton School now.
It was fun to hear how things are going for him. We wrote a letter back to Hunter and took some photos of our new space to share with him. We are exited to see the blossoms appearing on the trees around our school and city. We are loving seeing the leaves on the oak tree appear. To celebrate spring arriving and moving into our new space we created spring blossom trees using water colours. We began by creating a background and then sketched a tree. Next we added little blossoms with our fingers. We loved having Ros back in our hub. She started a really fun art activity with us based on Piet Mondrian's style of working with blocks of primary colours and white. We learned that Mondrian was a Dutch artist who painted in cubism style. We had a turn at replicating his art work. Our work is displayed in our hub. Come and have a look! This Thursday is mufti day.
We are raising money for Westpac Rescue Helicopter Trust. We would appreciate a gold coin donation please. |