Karaka have had a busy and fun start to the term.

Right from Day 1 we began practising Athletics. The whole group picked up the different skills very quickly – I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the athletes from this class make the Olympics in years to come! Athletics Day was fantastic. The sun was out and we were well prepared for our events. It was great to see everybody give each event their best shot! Well done Karaka. I’m proud of you!

We have also been very busy learning about sea creatures and sea life. We have been reading and writing about the sea and the treasures that live there as well as designing our own creatures for our three dimensional paper mache art. We have had fun getting our hands and desks covered in glue during art time.

As well as learning about the taonga (treasures) of the moana (sea) in the classroom we have been learning about these things outside of the classroom. On a windy, cold day in Week 5 we headed down to the Island Bay Marine Reserve to learn from the experts. It was a fantastic trip! We got to hold and touch sea cucumber, starfish, sea anemone, crabs and feed the turtles and fish. Even though it was a wintery day we also spent time in the rock pools exploring the life and habitats of many of the creatures that live in the marine reserve. Thank you to Victor and Judy for preparing interesting and stimulating activities for us.

Also in Week 5 there was the Kapahaka Festival Day held up at Karori Normal School. 14 members of Karaka volunteered to be a part of the day. It is very pleasing so see so many students from our class take up the opportunities offered to them. It sounded like it was a great day and all the students made Houghton Valley School proud with their sharp performance.

Term four is always a fun filled term with loads of events to look forward to. Keep an eye on the newsletter and other notices to check out all the upcoming events.

This year seems to have gone very fast and I can’t believe we are on the count down to the end of the term.

We have had a fantastic start to the year. In Karaka we are an enthusiastic and positive bunch! Karaka have been particularly welcoming to me as a new teacher to the school. They have taught me a lot about how the school works and where to find things that I may need.

We started the year by setting our class rules. We are focusing on three main areas of safety; safety of our bodies, safety of our feelings and safety of our belongings.  The class wrote the rules as a group and agreed to them by signing an agreement which is hung on the wall in our room.

Our class environmental responsibility is looking after the worms and composting. Dave has been into our room and shared lots of new learning about how we can keep the worms healthy and happy. Each day we empty the lunch bins and when the bins are full we layer the compost pile. We have learnt that we need to layer the compost to keep it alive. We first put paper towels in and then all the delicious food scraps followed by mulch to give the compost pile its structure like the bones in our body give us our structure.

Our class art has been a highlight. We have been learning about portraits and where the features on our face are positioned. We then learnt about Modigliani who is an artist who paints portraits. We used his ideas of do a Modigliani style portrait. They have come out amazingly.

We have got into the flow of full on reading, writing, maths and topic. We have been focusing on descriptive language in writing so our written work is interesting and paints a picture in the head of the reader. In maths we have just finished statistics. We have worked particularly hard on tally charts and bar graphs. We are also learning about the Marae in topic so we understand as much as we can before our visit in Week 8 which we are all looking forward to.

I was a proud teacher on the day of Cross Country. It was fantastic to see everyone in the class put their best effort into the event. I know that everyone pushed themselves hard because we were exhausted for the rest of the day.

We have been watching the caterpillar chrysalises closely. Hopefully we will have a butterfly soon!

What a fantastic start to the year we have had!