Tena  Koutou, welcome to Kowhai.

 In Term One we had a wonderful start to the year, establishing routines, learning about each other and training hard for the cross country. We have all trained hard to reach personal goals and ran our best on the day of the cross country.

Together we created a class treaty that we all agreed to abide to. You will find it on our classroom wall surrounded by our gorgeous photos.

 Kowhai’s environmental responsibility is ‘Birds of the Valley’. Together we have developed this year’s action plan. The children have come up with lots of great ideas. We are hoping to make bird feeders/houses, learn more about the plants and trees birds like help band some birds and plant some flax and kowhai seeds. Dave our caretaker came and shared his knowledge about birds with us. He is a very clever artist and we are enjoying his bird quizzes he leaves on the white board for us to ponder over. If you have any bright ideas on how we can bring more bird into our school and Houghton Valley feel free to let us know.

Dave talking to us about the anatomy of a bird,

Term two is well underway. We have been working together to come up with lots of great ideas for our Art and Enterprise discovery topic. We will be exploring different art techniques and artists work over the next few weeks as we create and make masterpieces for the art exhibition. There are many very talented artists in Kowhai. The children are going to select two pieces they would like to display in the exhibition and the rest of the art will be displayed around the classroom.

 In week two we had a very productive art day with Caroline creating pieces of art based around Impressionism. The children were very enthusiastic and enjoyed using pastels. We are looking forward to working with her again later in the term.

We have decided to buy a puppet theatre and puppets for our class with the money we make from selling our enterprises. Keep posted to find out more. We have just completed a maths unit about money in preparation for selling our goods. We are hoping to make a small fortune to buy heaps of puppets. We are also working on improving our recall of basic facts to 10 by playing lots of fun games so keep learning them at home too.

 We are currently writing creative responses to music and pictures using our imaginations and descriptive language. It is interesting how everyone has such a different interpretation of a piece of music or a picture.

Kowhai have been working very hard and have produced wonderful work over the past four weeks of this term, Tu meke Kowhai Kids.

Lara Nemet