Newsletter Week 10 Term 3

Kia ora koutou,

I often talk about how the week has been quite busy, but the last two weeks have been exceptional!

Last week, Tāne Mahuta and I had a wonderful time on school camp. There are far too many highlights to share with you so I have included quite a number of photos below. I would like to also thank Miss Tenci for her amazing work coordinating the camp and our truly amazing parent team, thank you all.

This week you would have received a notice home to give you more information on our Keeping Ourselves Safe programme. We love having Constable Plew with us at the school, and just before holidays, it is a timely reminder to all families to ensure your children are actively supervised and safe while using the school grounds during the holidays.

Tuesday saw two of our classes, Tāwhirimātea and Tāne Mahuta go to the local golf course to help plant 200 plants beside a waterway there. The purpose is to help improve the water as well as contributing to our local community. You can see a video below.

Wednesday was a very busy day this week with 18 senior students representing us very well in the Otago Schools Triathlon at Watson Park, and also golf coaching sessions with Melanie Harper. If your child came home and was particular interested in pursuing golf further, please let me know and I can help point you in the right direction with the local club.

With the holidays coming up, please also remember that the school grounds are dog free unless specific permission has been granted. This is an important condition for using the grounds and we appreciate your support here. We also had a significant amount of careless vandalism, and quite frankly disrespectful behaviour, at the school during weekends recently. We have worked extremely hard to ensure that our grounds remain open and exciting for our local community and we do not want to put limits on the use of our land or exclude anyone from being able to use it.

Have a safe and happy holiday

Mā te wā,

Gareth Swete

Unfortunately, as many of you will know, we farewelled Mr Fisher this week as he moves to Fairlie. John is certainly a fan favourite in all of the classrooms and we will dearly miss his energy and sense of fun. Chris Slabbert will be joining us in Term 4 to cover John's absence. Chris is known to many of the children and will be a great addition to the team.

Some of you may also be aware that Mrs Barr is currently on leave as she works with a Professional Development company. Jo is really enjoying this new challenge and has made the difficult decision to not return to SBS. We thank Jo for her outstanding service to the school (20+ years), and look forward to saying a proper thank you and good bye at the end of year assembly.

• Calendars Orders due Friday!
• Friday 30th September - Last day of Term 3

• Monday 17th October - First day of Term 4

Congratulations to Aarlo, Riley, Chloe, Ayla and Nahoa who were their Person of the Week for their classes, Term 3 Week 9. This week the trophy went home with Nahoa.

We can’t believe it is the last week of Term 3 already!

We have had a wonderful term full of new experiences and lots of fun learning.

This week is no exception! Today we had a lot of fun learning the skills required to accurately hit a golf ball! The coach, Mel, was super impressed with the Papatūānuku tamariki. She said they were fantastic listeners and followed the instructions well. She was quite impressed with the hand-eye coordination and the talent some of our kids are already showing in this area!

This week we have also had a visit each day from Constable Emily. We have been learning which adults we can trust to help us, especially in situations like if we get lost. Our challenge this week is to learn our home address, and a parent’s cell phone number. In the photo attached, you can see Constable Emily reading us a story about people learning their home addresses, and notable features that they live near. This is all helpful information if someone happened to get lost.

We were excited to show our board games in assembly last Friday. Hopefully you’ve had a chance to play your child’s board game at home! It was a culmination of a variety of learning and is a fun way to learn the parts needed to make an electric circuit!

We are sad to be saying farewell to Miss Richardson this week. Miss Richardson had put a lot of energy into creating and delivering fun learning experiences for our class, over the last 3 terms. Soon she will graduate as a teacher and next year will have her own class. We wish Miss Richardson many best wishes as she embarks on the next chapter of her life as a classroom teacher.

I hope everyone has a fantastic holiday break and I look forward to hearing all about it during our “Holiday Highlight” sharing session on the first day back of Term 4!

Report by Mrs Campbell

Mālō e lelei,talofa,kia ora, hello

And just like that we are at the end of another school term and what a great term it has been. There have been lots of fun-filled things going on in and out of our classroom. It's been super busy this week with having a short week. We have finished our rocket and have been working on finishing some other activities around our flight topic. We began our sessions with Constable Plew about keeping ourselves safe and on Wednesday we had an awesome golf session after lunch. It was a little tricky trying to hit the small golf ball compared to the larger balls but we did it. Have a great restful holiday from Hine-Rau-Wharangi.

Here are some of our highlights of the Term

I enjoyed making the rocket (Willow)

The new words bingo is great (Mele)

I have enjoyed handwriting (Stan)

Going in the Goodie box and sticker charts (Rex)

Reading rotations have been fun (Emerson)

Report by Mrs Brewer

What an action packed end of term we have had! This week has been a short one but we have packed in A LOT. We began the week on Tuesday by walking over to the local golf course with Tāne Mahuta to help plant trees along one of the waterways. Mr Fisher has been teaching us about the impacts that planting can have on waterways such as strengthening the banks, stopping the soil from flowing out into our estrays, filtering and cleaning the water and providing good habitats for native wildlife. It was such a wonderful day and everyone was so involved and enthusiastic. Speaking of Mr Fisher, you may have heard that we had a small farewell for him as he moves off onto new adventures in Fairlie.The children created a beautiful card for him and presented this along with a cake which everyone enjoyed during brain break time. Mr Fisher has been a wonderful staff member and a key part of Tāwhirimātea this year and we will miss him immensely. Next term Mr Chris Slabbert will be teaching in Tāwhiri on Thursdays. The children are familiar with him as he has taught several days in Tawhiri and we are all looking forward to having him as part of our team. This week we have also had several sessions with Constable Emily Plew who is running the keeping ourselves safe programme. We have also managed to pack in a golf lesson, some fun games of dodge ball, we have finished reading our class book Matilda and have even watched some of the movie, we have been writing character descriptions about our favourite character from the story, and we are really looking forward to our special treat day on Friday where we will get to cash in our hard earned Tawhiri dollars. In math we have been learning about multiplication and have created an array city to show commutative properties. We have finally finished our electronic quiz boxes! They have been tested on our peers and hope to test them on a couple of other classes before the end of the term. We can’t wait to share them with you as well! Below is a few pictures of all the wonderful things we have been doing.

I hope you all have a fantastic well earned holiday break. Fingers crossed for some lovely weather!

Report by Mrs Swete

Kia Ora for the final week of the term.

It has gone fast and Ranginui has completed a lot of fantastic learning and working together to get the jobs done! It was really nice to share at last week's assembly, under the teaching guidance of Miss Grellett-Hale the children amazed everyone with brilliant facts about the northern lights and showed their colourful artworks. I think we all enjoyed an extra long weekend (we seemed eager and keen to learn on Tuesday) . We began Keeping Ourselves Safe with Constable Phew this week and I am impressed with how many children know their addresses and contact phone numbers. We realise that this is important to know and would like everyone in Ranginui to be able to recall their own. If you have any questions about this unit please contact me.

We had an enjoyable golf lesson this week with a lot of children interested in developing it further. (You can see the ‘Happy Gilmour’ faces in the photos)

We farewelled Captain Fisher on Wednesday and wished him the very best on his next voyage. The children wrote very heartfelt messages and presented him a card and a hand shake. He will be missed.

We also farewell Miss Grellett-Hale. The children have thrived under her watchful eye and kindness. We wish her all the best with her teaching career!

Ka Kite from Ranginui and have a super term break.

Report by Miss Ruzsa

The last week of Term 3! When did we get here?

Hinemoana has still been super busy to finish off the term. We are consolidating all our learning about Transformation by creating our own Siapo design. Siapo is a traditional Samoan cloth that is decorated using natural dyes with motifs that represent things common to the Samoan Culture, such as nets, coconut leaves, shells and flowers. Our designs draw inspiration from these traditional motifs while also showing our mathematical learning by using translation (slide), reflection (flip) and rotation (turning). We are looking forward to our mathematical artwork coming to life then having this displayed in our classroom to start the new term.

We have also been super lucky to have a golf session this week with Melanie. We learnt how to correctly set ourselves up to hit a golf ball off the tee. Hinemoana did a wonderful job and we had some great shots going. There were even a couple of “fores!” being yelled out from our big hits!

Constable Emily has also joined us this week to discuss Keeping Ourselves Safe. We talked about keeping ourselves safe in the ‘real world’ and online. I’m sure your children can fill you in about their learning around this topic and how best they can stay safe off and online.

Lastly, (and sadly!) we say goodbye to Miss Mackay at the end of this week. Miss Mackay has been with us for all of Term 3 and has done an amazing job building relationships and teaching your children. We have LOVED having Miss Mackay here with us and we wish her all the best on her teacher journey. Hopefully, we will see her back at SBS one day!

Report by Miss Laing

We’ve been lucky this week in Tāne Mahuta to be involved in lots of extra activities. One of these, which was a highlight, was tree planting at the golf course! On Tuesday, our class as well as Tāwhirimātea walked to the golf course to help plant new trees and plants. We learned a bit about the importance of this process before we left school, with the help of Mr. Fisher. Did you know that planting new trees near waterways can help clarify the water and reduce pollution in the water? We also learned that these plants can be homes for animals and insects that live near the water and in this case, at the golf course. We paired up and collaborated with the kids from Tāwhirimātea and planted approximately three to four plants each. We worked really hard together and made sure we helped each other with the different steps of the process. This was a fun activity that helped our community, we hope to do something like this again in the future!

Report by Miss Tenci

A big thank you to all of our supporters for making this a very successful fundraiser.
We made the draw yesterday and the results are as follows:

$300 Four Square Voucher
Lewis Stoddart

$100 Four Square Voucher
Caren Van Gastel
Mel Ure
Steve Walker
Emme Haworth
Jeannie Paterson
Mel Phillips
Nicole Sinclair

$50 Megazone Voucher (from the full card prize draw)
Carlos-Torr Family

A member of the PTA will be in touch very soon with your prizes.
Thanks once again!

Celebrate NZ Bookshop Day at Pictura, Port Chalmers' newest children's book shop. Spot prizes, bookmark hunt, sweet treats & more. 8 October 2022, 10am-2pm, 23 George Street, Port Chalmers. Visit www.picturabooks.co.nz and use discount code SAWYERS15 (active from 3 Oct to 9 Oct) for 15% off your order.

Email: office@sawyersbay.school.nz
Website: https://sawyersbay.school.nz/
Location: Sawyers Bay School 99 Stevenson Ave, Sawyers Bay, Dunedin 9023, New Zealand
Phone: 03 472 8981