2020 Has BEGUN

Welcome Back to the Te Waka Ako Blog. The first few weeks are always a very intense time of the year in the Senior Syndicate of Waikowhai School. Students have many opportunities and responsibilities that they need to be trained up for and organised around. This builds student independence, community service and confidence as senior students. Many activities can be added to the school programme because of this student involvement.

We also all need to get to know each other so as a school the staff and students complete Getting To Know You Forms. The students forms are written in class and will be printed for a wall display. Later they will be blogging these on their individual blogs. The teachers forms in Te Waka Ako are included below. This is our second year working together and we feel we work very cohesively. We certainly enjoy working together and look forward to another year designing programmes that hold activities and learning that sparks the imaginations of all students. 

As the school has a pool we can have swimming lessons twice a week and lunchtime free swims twice a week. In this hot weather we love the opportunity to cool off.
Last year the school was gifted some bikes, so students have been able to ride the driveway and courts during break times.

Zone Sports training of Rippa, Softball and Football have all started up this term as well. All in all there are lots of physical activity opportunities for students to involve themselves in. They can also train for Jump Jam, Librarian duty, Backtrack duty, Leadership and House Captain roles, Peer Mediation, Environmental Group, Gardening Group, Sports Monitors, AV System monitors, Wet Day monitors and Bell ringing. As you can imagine, some students can have very busy school lives!


Over 90 of our students also participated in the Summer Learning Journey over the break. Three of our girls completed every task set and commented on many other students blogs across New Zealand.  All the students received certificates and the three winners received awesome prize packs. Congratulations to Pao, Maddison and Izumi.  

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 TEACHERS Getting to Know You Forms  

          

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Big Foot Bike Adventures!

Te Waka Ako were lucky enough to have 2 sessions with Big Foot bikes this week. These fun sessions showed us how to check our bikes and helmets are safe as well as basic road safety rules.

It was really good to learn how to make sure our helmets fit properly.
Some tips they gave us were:
* Use the dial at the back of the helmet to make sure it fits tightly enough. (When you shake your head it shouldn't fall off.)
* There should be a 2 finger gap from the top of your helmet to your brows.
* The straps on the side should form the letter 'Y'
* The strap under our chin shouldn't be too tight, you should be able to fit 1-2 fingers in the gap.

We also learned how to do a 4 point bike check.
To do this you have to check the brakes, reflector lights, tyres, and wheel bearings.

They provided each of us with a mountain bike and helmet to ride during the 2 sessions. This was the fun part! We had the opportunity to practice hand signals. We had so much fun riding through the obstacle courses and learn through playing different games.

Although some of us had already done this before it is always good to have a refresher!

The big unveiling!

Today was the day that months of hard work was unveiled. We sang our new school song for the first time, and we opened our friendship/memorial garden...AND we presented our 'Cultures of our School' fence mural
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Wow! How awesome does our school look!!!
The fence mural art was done mainly in Term 3. Each class was given two cultures and two genders to research, design and paint. This was done in rotation as they had to be painted inside in Room 7.
The rocks for the friendship garden were painted by the Middle School. These have been set around the friendship bench and a plaque has been added to dedicate our Kowhai tree to the victims of the Christchurch massacre. This garden is a place for friends to meet, talk and reflect.


The song sounded fantastic! It is a beautiful piece that incorporates the values and diversity  of our school. Thanks very much to Levonne Phillips and Talia Heta, both of whom have worked on the lyrics and music for this amazing song.
Next time you visit the school, make sure you check the new installations out!

Food for Thought!

Te Waka Ako has been very lucky to be a part of the Heart Foundation Food for Thought program. With nutritional advisor Isabelle, we looked at making healthy food choices and how these affect our tinana. 
We learned about the different food groups, how to read food labels and the sugar content in sugary drinks. We were all very surprised about the sugar content in some drinks. Did you know that a  350 ml bottle of fruit juice has 10 teaspoons of sugar? Or that a 600ml bottle of soft drink has 16 teaspoons of sugar?
The program was topped with a visit to our local New World supermarket. Here we had to put our new food label reading skills to the test. We had to identify what foods could be classified as 'Everyday' foods or 'Sometimes' foods. Our results were surprising. Foods we thought were good choices, we found were actually 'Sometimes' foods when we analyzed the labels more closely.

Futsal!

This term the seniors are learning how to play Futsal. If you don't know what that is, it is a variant of association football played on a hard court, smaller than a football pitch, and mainly indoors. It features similarities to five-a-side football. Futsal is played between two teams of five players each, one of whom is the goalkeeper.
Our coaches Kingsley and Luke have been teaching us how to 'dribble', 'juggle' and freeze. We do warm ups where they call "dribble!" And we all dribble our balls around the hall till they call a part of our body out like "Elbow." We then have to stop our ball and put that part of the body on the ball, holding it still without using our hands. This is a lot of fun.
We also play Numbers, this is where we are numbered up in two lines 1-10 opposite each other. Kingsley calls one or two numbers and we race to the centre and try to score a goal against the opposing person with the same number. 
We are really enjoying Futsal and can't wait till we start playing a full game. Our dribbling skills are improving each week.

Our Hauora House

Our overall Inquiry theme for the year has been Wellbeing - Hauora. We sectioned the learning into four terms and focused on one 'wall' each term. The Hauora House has Taha tinana or Physical Wellbeing, Taha Whanau or Social Wellbeing, Taha Wairua or Spiritual Wellbeing and Taha hinengaro or Mental Wellbeing. We used an activity created by the New Zealand Mental Health Foundation about Te Whare Tapa Wha; finding our balance.  It is a model of health that helps us to identify where we need extra support. Finally a connection with the land or whenua forms the foundation. Everyone thought about their strengths and weaknesses in these four areas and completed the chart. Here are few ideas people had about themselves. Many of the students wrote very honestly. The second activity they completed was to create an animation of the Hauora House showing all the different parts.  Below are some examples of both activities.

Toby's thinking about his 'walls'

Ama's thinking about her 'walls'

Atreyu's thinking about his 'walls'

Below are animations done by Ishaan and Jaimie, showing the different walls we need to build to be a healthy person. Click through the slideshows.

Ruapehu Rap

On the bus trip back from camp, Donald (Neeve and Indie's Dad) and the students made up a rap about camp. At Waitemata's assembly we decided to perform it... with our orange beanies on of course! Have a look.