Matariki

Welcome back to Term Three! This week we celebrated Matariki. Matariki is a celebration of the Maori new year. It is a time of harvesting, family gatherings, flying Manu Tukutuku and eating food. On Thursday the whole school celebrated Matariki. In the seniors we did a three way rotation. The three activities were making fried bread, making kites ( Manu Tukutuku ) and doing some stop motion to retell a Matariki story.
Mrs Jones made the fried bread using self raising flour, water and oil. We then rolled the dough out and cut it into pieces and fried it. Once it cooled we put toppings like Golden Syrup, Nutella and Jam on them. They were delicious!
Miss Daly  did stop motion animation. We used paper and playdoh to retell a Matariki story using the stop motion app on our chromebooks. This was quite hard as we only had a short time to complete them. Some people were very creative and made fantastic characters out of playdoh.
Mrs Law made Manu Tukutuku (Maori kites) out of patterned paper strips woven onto bamboo frames. We made a few small ones and one really big one which we have displayed in Waitemata.
What a great day we had. Did you celebrate Matariki?

Cross Country

On Thursday we decided to have a Cross Country. We were supposed to have it in Week 11 but it rained and got postponed to Week 12. We had different activities set up all around the school including the run. The senior leaders (Year 6's and House Captains) led games for the year groups. The games included Handball, Tennis,  Duck Duck Goose, Blindfold game, warm up station and warm down station on the playground. All the students have been training for weeks and everybody did a great job! The weather was awesome and lots of families came to support their children. Everyone dressed in their house colours (Pukeko = Green, Ruru = Blue, Kea = Red, Tui = Yellow) so it was a colourful wonderful day. What a great way to end the term!
Here is a video of our day!

Winter Gardening

Kia Ora bloggers.
We have been busy in Te Waka Ako getting our winter garden sorted. During the Lockdown and because of the drought, the garden had become dead and empty. So we began by bringing the compost up from our tumble bins (we also stunk out Te Waka Ako for two days as it was a little stinky). Then we added more bags of potting mix to top the garden bed up. Next we planted winter veggie seedlings. We planted kale, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, broccoflower, celery, beans, lettuce, brussel sprouts, chives and parsley.  It's looking good!

 

Before Lockdown we had our green house finished with the wonderful volunteers at our school working bee. Our greenhouse was covered and the clearlite roof was put on. Dave, our fabulous caretaker, has been busy putting in shelves and building a door. Now we can use it to store and raise our seedlings. We have some more winter veggies planted and some Kowhai seedlings that we have grown from the seeds we gathered from Waikowhai Bay.

 

LOCKDOWN SMACKDOWN

Last week all the students in Te Waka Ako participated in a digital lockdown smackdown. This a way of sharing knowledge and skills with many people in a short length of time.


In pairs students had to create a slide describing a digital app, website or activity that they had used over the lockdown period.

Students then had 2 minutes to stand up and to share their slide with the syndicate. Examples and links to relevant sites or documents were added so students could go back into the slideshow in sandpit time to checkout anything they were interested in from the sharing.

Many had nerves standing up the front but the quality of the slides was high and we all saw new ideas or skills presented. Congratulations to all the participants.
General Feedback for the future is to speak louder and make sure each person knows what they will say or talk about.

GO THE WARRIORS. CONGRATULATIONS! #ALLIN

WOW! What a fabulous start to the Warriors post Covid-19 season in Australia. The game against the Dragons was awesome to watch and Te Waka Ako are very happy we are supporting them and connecting with them in 2020.

 Back when we were in lockdown and were distant learning through Google Meets, Te Waka Ako had an awesome opportunity to connect with the Warriors quarantine camp in Australia.

One of the players, Chanel Tavita-Harris came into a google meet and answered our questions. Two of the Community Coordinators (Georgia and Petrece) for the Warriors set it up and introduced the discussion and question and answer session. Georgia is a league player as well, playing for the Warriors women team and the NZ Kiwi Ferns. It was an amazing opportunity for everyone.

The students were given an activity to create a raft of questions to
ask Chanel about being in lockdown, his background, being a sportsman and his dreams for the future.
Many students were keen to field questions and had thoughtful ideas of what to ask.  The call was super interesting and everyone was very keen to create signs to encourage them in training and in the start of their season.  A transcript of the answers is linked below.

Chanel

Georgia 

   

LINK to DOCUMENT 

LEVEL 2 BACK AT SCHOOL

Well we are back in our classrooms with about 80% of our students. It has been a lovely start to the term on site, with happy, excited, keen to learn children, warm sunny weather and fun relevant activities. We certainly hope it continues, so we are 'playing by the rules.'

We have new rules to follow and changes of course and but our kids are adaptable and keen to do their bit. Hand sanitising stations and staying apart from others are major ones changes. One tool we used to help everyone understand the second one, was putting the rubber PE dots on the ground for different activities.







Another way we used them was we ran a lockdown scavenger hunt where students needed to find other students who had completed certain things while in lockdown, but they had to move to a dot before they could ask someone a question. 

 How many of these activities could you say yes to doing during lockdown????

Some VIDEO 'AWESOMENESS' happening in TWA!!

                            Check out the slides in this slideshow to see different students work.

LOTS of them have videos you can watch or listen to.

Rael playing piano

Last week we set up a Lockdown Creations Slideshow for the syndicate. We asked the students to fill in a slideshow with four activities every day. Each activity on a new slide. They had to do a set page in their Lockdown Diary, then they could choose one activity from their maths class tumble, then one activity from their reading class tumble, then finally one activity from all the other tasks set up on the Syndicate Site. The emphasis was on creating things. Heaps of the students loved having choices and creating, so we received some awesome videos and recordings of 

                              student activities. This blogpost is going to have many different links you can connect into and check out what's been happening out there in Te Waka Ako Level 3 Land!

Marcus & Mum dancing

Brittany rapping 

Pao Sign Language

Maddison & Mum Reading