Kia ora koutou

Evening everyone,

Nau mai haere mai ki te wiki o te reo Maori! 

I hope you all had a good weekend and enjoyed all of the sport that was happening around our district as well as on the TV. Congratulations to all of you HSOB fans out there for your win over the weekend and commiserations to our Ngatapa supporters!

It was great to be back in class last week and all of our students were settled and looking forward to our third term at Gisint. 

Thank you so much for the awesome cushion donations - we are all enjoying the bigger mat space which allows the children to spread out a lot more during work time. 

Last week we had a large group of 22'ers who tried out for our school theatresports team which will be named this week. I am constantly impressed with our class for putting themselves out there and giving things a go. We have a number of students travelling to Tauranga at the end of the week for the winter sports tournament. I will add a pic of this group tomorrow night to ensure I don't miss anybody out. This week we have lunchtime zumba starting so I encourage interested students to bring their running shoes in and Miss Caldwell and I are thinking about starting up a roller skating club so if your child has some skates (Roller and inline) stashed away in the wardrobe they may need to dust them off. Stay tuned for more details. Term 3 badminton has restarted so if your child is keen they need to get a notice from the office. A friendly reminder that out of town travellers for action week should be aiming to have all of their money paid by Friday 5th September. The dates may be slightly different for our three Samoan travellers. The next action week meeting is next Wednesday @1pm.

This week we have the following things happening...

Monday 
Tech middle block

Tuesday
Normal Day

Wednesday
Zumba @ lunchtime with Elena - all welcome
Turanganui Titans Team Hui

Thursday
Tech last block

Friday
Winter Tournament - Tauranga
No Focused Friday
Assembly

I will be giving out a term homework task like we had in term 1 as a number of students have requested extra homework which is awesome. These tasks are optional but the students can complete their tasks and then bring into school at the end of week 8 to be celebrated. Other homework should include basic facts practise, mathletics tasks, Dragon Maths book tasks, reading, completing unfinished class and tech work and some form of fitness. Science Fair projects need to be completed by the end of week 4 and Mrs Hannah has made herself available every Monday and Friday at lunchtimes to give students extra support. We will continue to work on these in class over the next two weeks as well.

Congratulations to Bray Scott who is our very first recipient of a GOLD Mathletics certificate this year. We are really proud of your effort Bray and now the challenge is on for your classmates to see who will be second. 

Last week we began a skilled games player unit for PE where the students are designing their own invasion games to teach to the other borough groups in our class and then to Room 23. Tomorrow each borough will trial their game in preparation for their first teaching and learning session on Tuesday. There are many collaborative skills involved with this task and I will share each borough group's journey on our blog after each session. 

We also completed our final session with Quentin for Life Ed and the children have been making videos to share their learning about decision making, stress, friendship and keeping themselves safe online. There is some fantastic work being completed which I will share on here in the near future. As we had a few students away due to sickness last week, they will be able to attend with Mrs Joll's or Miss Gee's classes so as not to miss out.

Congratulations to Kalais Piahana-Harrison and Jayda Pellow who received our class certificates at assembly last Friday. Tau ke korua!

Finally, thanks to our parents who have emailed to say you can help with transportation to and from the Mindlab on Tuesday 11th August at 12:15pm. Could you please email me this week if you are able to assist so I can organise our car groups and the $2 Mindlab fee can come into school anytime from now up until the day we go. We are going to be focusing on building apps during this session. 

Have a good week everyone!