School Newsletter – 16 March 2021

Term 1, Week 7 — School news, upcoming dates and notices

A Message from Hillary Team

Hillary Team Inquiry: Physical Phenomena

Over the past couple of weeks, Hillary Team has been doing an inquiry on physical phenomena. 

Physical phenomena are different sorts of energy. Our topics have been flight, heat, light, sound, magnetism and gravity. 

Our activity to go with sound was all about soundwaves. We placed some rice on a drum and banged the drums, causing the rice to fly everywhere. We also used cup phones, where you speak into a cup which is tied to some string and the vibrations of the soundwaves traveled along the string to the other cup on the other end of the string and it worked like a phone.

For flight we did some reading about flight, and how it works and then we did a kahoot containing all of the information we had read. We also engaged in activities to build a paper helicopter. We also learned about heat. Heat can be from fire and the sun, and even electricity! Heat can be fun to learn about but sometimes dealing with heat can be dangerous. 

Gravity is an invisible force that pulls us towards the earth and we also learnt about forces. We Light was very interesting, we did some experiments with dye, we dyed some paper sheets and then we hung them up in the classroom.

We also learned about magnetism. We tested about and experimented around push and pull.

Physical phenomena are very interesting to experiment and play/ try around with.

Meeting our teachers 

At the beginning of term, we were given the opportunity to meet all the new teachers in Hillary Team. Each teacher prepared a fun activity for the classes. One of our fun rotation activities was to learn to use rako sticks, we watched videos about what to do with a buddy. We would spin the sticks  to our buddy and catch the sticks with a fiscal amount of speed, to catch the sticks we had to keep in time with each other.

Our other activity was tessellations, again we would find a buddy then cut out shapes that would tessellate, we would stick the shapes together and not overlapping them on a black sheet of paper, making a tessellation.

Next rotation we did collaborative art, we would cut out our favorite thing out of  newspapers  then stick them to an outline of a face or other types of things. We also had fun doing science experiments, which were a bunch of different experiments including things like force, and push and pull and static electricity, like balloons. Next we did Bio poems, poems about ourselves including our name, our needs, wants, and things about ourselves and our families. Another activity was coding, where we learned about morse code and played around on scratch, a coding website. As another activity we did STEM, which stands for science, technology, engineering, maths.

The Kohimarama Way  –  Reliability

You know you have been successful in practising Reliability when you make promises you can keep, treat your agreements seriously, plan ahead, do your best, finish on time and find another way if obstacles occur.

News

Green Walking School Bus

Teacher Only Days

Please be aware of Teacher Only Days for this year. Thursday 1st April & Tuesday 26th October.

Sick Children

If your children have any signs of runny nose, sore throat or are coughing please keep them home.

PTA Fun Run

Community of Learning

A Community of Learning | Kāhui Ako is a group of education and training providers that form around children’s learning pathways, and work together to help them achieve their full potential.

The schools in our CoL are Kohimarama School, St Thomas’, Orakei, Stonefields School and Selwyn College. In each school there are within school CoL lead teachers. At Kohimarama these are Monique Browne, Kate Cadzow and Megan Lindsay (Clara Desousa will be taking on this position while Megan is on maternity leave).

The areas which we are focusing on this year are: 

• Collectively working together to understand the student support needs and implement initiatives to attend to these.
• Creating a coherent pathway partnership or seamless transitions between year levels and the move to secondary school.
• Share pedagogical practice that is culturally responsive and has proven impact. We will work together to create and design ‘Rich Opportunities for Learning’ for our students. We will continue to use the ‘Student Agency Survey’ to inform design and teacher practice. 

We look forward to sharing snippets of our journey with you in future newsletters and collecting your community voice.  

This year Kohimarama Schools celebrates 100 years.  This photo of the first building constructed for the opening of the school in 1921. It contained just one room and was overcrowded from the start, having been built for 50 children with 54 enrolled on the first day.

Over the next 6 months we will bring you updates on what’s planned as part of the celebrations – preparations are now in full swing for a full day of activities on Saturday 11 September followed by a fundraising gala dinner that evening.

Sports Notices

Missing player of the day trophies

Do you have a Kohimarama school player of the day trophy at home ?  We are missing a number for our Basketball, Netball and Touch teams.
Any trophies that are located can be returned to the school office.

Kohimarama School Swimming Sports

These have been rescheduled to Friday May 14. Looking forward to a fabulous day, even if it is going to be a little bit cooler.

Sports Results

Flippa Ball Results