Kōwhai News Term 4 Week 9

Kia ora e te whānau

Welcome to the Kōwhai team's week 9 blog. We are fast approaching the end of the school year and many of our students are counting down the sleeps until Christmas.

We have planned lots of fun activities to finish off the term, including 6 football sessions, and we all very much enjoyed watching Kauri's production of, 'Oh, the Places We Will Go', this week.

Football Sessions

Our tamariki have been lucky enough to have football lessons in these last two weeks of term. They have been delivered by Kōtuitui, who support bicultural and multicultural learnings through playing football and is a free program for schools. They provide outdoor football sessions for tamariki to enjoy irrespective of their football ability levels or previous experience. This is a new program as part of the FIFA Women’s 2023 World Cup legacy.

The children have all been enjoying these lessons, getting outside and having a good runaround as well as learning valuable ball skills and working together as a team. 

Science

As you will know, our students recently had a visit from Kerry, a representative from the Department of Conservation. Kerry taught the children lots of valuable information about kea. During the visit, the children participated in a tracking exercise where they used a device to locate a toy kea in the park. This hands-on experience allowed them to connect with nature and learn more about conservation work.

Students have been very busy making kea cards for Kerry as a thank you for such an exciting lesson. Below is a photo of us searching for the toy kea hidden in the trees. It was fitted with a transmitter!

There was much hilarity involved!

Kea Cards

Sketching

Over the last few weeks, we have been learning about sketching, going out into the park and to Treemendous to sketch nature. This week and next week, some of us are sketching fruit and having a little taste of all the different fruits afterwards. Yum! We have been sampling cherries, apples, pears, kiwi fruits, mandarins, strawberries, pineapples and even lemons. The children have been loving the experience! Below are some of the sketches the children created.

Farewell to Roger

Last week, we said farewell to Roger, our ukulele and guitar teacher who is leaving at the end of the year. We enticed him over to the hub where we sang him a song and presented him with a card from the children. He has been teaching the tamariki ukulele for most of the year and we will really miss him next year. Thank you, Roger, for all your hard work and dedication!

Farewell to Kathryn

We are also farewelling Kathryn, our literacy and maths teacher, who has been working hard with all our tamariki since term 2. We thank you so much, Kathryn, for your dedication to the children and we wish you all the best in your future pursuits!

Finally, we would like to thank you for all your support throughout the year. We couldn't do this without you! We have had an action-packed and fun-filled year with your tamariki and look forward to being reunited with some of you next year. We wish the year 4's all the best on their future adventures in Pōhutukawa and wish you all a wonderful and restful summer holiday.

Ka kite ano,

From the Kōwhai team