Monday 26 February 2018

Voting for the Sunnyhills entry into the Genesis Competition

http://www.schoolgen.co.nz/voteforyourschool/

VOTE VOTE VOTE everyone! Get your family involved with their device and help us with your votes.

Wednesday 14 February 2018

Tuesday 13 February 2018

Term 1 Week 2 & 3 in Room 3

We enjoyed seeing those who could join us for the Year 6 Parents' Camp Meeting and also our PTA Picnic and Meet The Teacher evenings. As we start to gel as a community of learners in Room 3, it is great to have our upcoming Parent Partnership Meetings. The students are invited to be part of that process as they own the learning.

 In Mathematics, we have kicked off our Statistical Investigations - exploring a theme through a purposeful question to drive the data collection.

  • What do we want to know? 
  • What question should we ask? 
  • Who do we need to talk to? 
  • What data do we collect? 
  • How do we collect that data? 
  • How do we present the data? 
  • What does the data tell us? 
  • What conclusions can we draw from the data? 
  • Reflection: if I was to do this inquiry again - would I change any aspects of the investigation? 


To add further to our discussions, we are asked to bring in data displays, graphs or charts to explore what other statistical investigations have found.
Are they good displays or poor displays?
Would there be a different way to show the data in a better way?

 As we head into the colourful Chinese New Year festivities, we will enjoy learning calligraphy, writing Chinese characters and comparing and contrasting the dragons in our cultures.

Our main focus over the last week and this week, is preparation for the adventures at Year 6 Camp. Let's hope that this weather gets the rain out of its system!

Wednesday 7 February 2018

Welcome back to school

Welcome to Term One in Room Three. We have started the term with getting to know each other in the context of Year 6 and the roles and responsibilities that entails. Everyone will have a way to contribute to school life and take on board something that they will take a lead in. Some roles are rotated and not obvious at the beginning. It will be great to see this leadership develop.

Before school commenced, the teachers have had a series of Teacher Only Days to focus on teamwork, our Sunnyhills vision and aspirations for the school in 2018. Mrs Driver set us the challenge of setting up the digital T.V.s for our Team Leaders - we managed without any 'left-over' bits. This came closely on the heals of breaking out of the Breakout Rooms. Year One and Year 6 Teams worked together (and with a couple of extra minutes) succeeded in solving the challenge and escaping. It took some serious lateral thinking!
A working digital T.V. Assembly Challenge

 
Successful escapees - the Year 1 and Year 6 Teams working together.

The fun and laughter we have already encountered bodes well for a good year of learning together. We kicked the year off with letters of introduction to our teacher: outlining talents, skills, dreams and aspirations, fears or worries, likes and dislikes, as well as interesting things about our family and interests. We also talked about identifying strategies for coping with challenges and building resilience. We'll unpack this more as we prepare for camp. The art pieces we developed around our ideas are great - come in a have a look!


A dip in the pool in Week One, when the weather was just too hot, was just what we needed. It cooled us down for settling into our creative activities.

In Week Two, we explored poetry writing and using our descriptive language
to set the scene of our favourite holiday place. This was inspired by James K. Baxter's poem, 'The Town'.

Our Personality Bags have been a huge hit - sharing a little about ourselves through five special objects brought to school in a special bag. It is a treat to hear personal stories.

I look forward to meeting you at our Year 6 Camp Meeting (Wednesday, February 7th 5:30 pm in the Staffroom) and at the PTA Picnic and Meet The Teacher Evening (Thursday, February 8th 5:30 pm).

My email address: lisl@sunnyhills.school.nz