Hook In Day

The Awatea team had their hook in day yesterday to kick start their Inquiry Unit. 

We had an amazing race where we had to complete a range of activities on World War 1.

Here are some photos of everyone having a great time. 

Our Value of the Week is HONESTY

Supreme 15 made some posters to share their ideas about what honesty is. Here are a few...

Gala Art

Look at all the fantastic art you can buy next weekend at the Whakarongo School Gala.

Extending sentences...

Today in Ropu Awatea we were working on extending our sentences.  We took the simple sentence "I like dancing" and our students worked in buddies on www.telescopictext.org/write to add description and detail to the sentence.

Here are a couple of examples showing how we added details like who, what, where, when and why...

From Emily F & Charlotte W

From Samantha & Natasha

Please add your comments...

Using blogger is a new thing for all the classes at Whakarongo School.  We would greatly appreciate your feedback, especially from parents and whanau in our Ropu Awatea community, so please feel free to add comments below.  We love positives, and we will take on positive constructive criticism, but please avoid negative criticism as this is a public space where our students go to often.  If you have any concerns as a parent or family member, please contact your child's teacher or the team leader directly.  The first port of call should be your child's teacher.  We thank you for your support and look forward to your comments on our blog.  As we move through the year, this blog will be more and more controlled by our students so we look forward to your support in sharing in this!

Nau mai, haere mai,
Ana Matangi

Matt Radford - Room 14:    

 mradford@whakarongo.school.nz

Jo Beauchamp - Room 15:

  jbeauchamp@whakarongo.school.nz

Ana Matangi - Room 16 (Team Leader & Acting Assistant Principal):

amatangi-hulls@whakarongo.school.nz

Identifying the different ways we are SMART

Did you know that a very clever man named Howard Gardner identified 8 different ways in which people are intelligent?  He found that people had different strengths and these could be in a range of areas, not just our normal academic areas but across life.  He identified 8 multiple intelligences, which for children we refer to as SMARTs.  With the Awatea Team, as part of our Ko Au unit, we have been doing a simple questionnaire to help us identify our SMARTs and then describe our strengths and weaknesses to help us better understand ourselves as learners.  Here is an example from Blanche...  You can see the graph that our questionnaire produced... it's pretty clever and has really helped us to think about how we learn... FANTASTIC!

Sensational 16 looks at COOPERATION

Our value this week is Cooperation.  Today all the home classes in Ropu Awatea discussed what this meant to them.  Sensational 16 came up with the following keywords and rules...  We thought cooperation was a really important part of school because in life we always have to work with other people in different situations so learning how to work together well is something we should learn...

Ropu Awatea: Literacy Learning Together

As a modern learning environment, our three Year 4-5 classes in Ropu Awatea are working collaboratively more and more.   It's quite a change to a normal single classroom but we think thinks are doing really well and have settled into the new routines and are enjoying the benefits of working together.  Take a look...